[mythtv] Web streaming video player module

Daniel Kristjansson danielk at cuymedia.net
Tue Jan 22 03:13:08 UTC 2008


On Mon, 2008-01-21 at 21:41 -0500, Michael T. Dean wrote:
> On 01/21/2008 09:06 PM, brian boyle wrote:
> > I am well aware of how much I hate commercials so I can only imagine 
> > that everyone in the Myth world is the same. But your right we would 
> > be prerolling an ad to monetize the effort. All our current web based 
> > content is in FLV format so we may have to do something special. I 
> > have no idea if VLC can deal with streamed FLV files. I had in my mind 
> > that we could create an XML file once a day that is updated with movie 
> > files and metadata.
> >
> > I should note that all our movies are short movies but we have over 
> > two hundred online and we get a fair amount of web traffic. Just in 
> > case it is important.
> 
> Note also that Myth is designed to allow the user to skip commercials 
> and even if you were to put in code to prevent that for your 
> feeds/recordings from your feeds or to prevent recording from your feed 
> (LiveTV only), any user could disable that code since it is an 
> open-source project.

I think Brian and his bosses are making the calculation that people
won't jump through a lot of hoops to skip a short commercial (all
that is needed to support short movies.) A number of people in
advertising have told me that people will not skip over a funny
or relevant commercial when placed properly in relation to the
content (i.e. at the end of a short, or at strategic points within
longer content, around "natural breaks.") I have no idea whether
this is valid, but my only serious philosophical objection+ to
advertising are when it is when it is directed at children, placed
on public monuments, or when it is deceptive. The rest of the time
I'll leave it to the people who buy, sell, and produce the advertising
to decide when and where they think the advertising will be effective.

+ Serious philosophical objection == will get off my ass and try to
  prevent it. I still reserve the right not to frequent movies theaters
  that have more than three movie preview ads or any non movie preview
  ads. Nor, do I feel guilty about avoiding annoying ads in my own life.

-- Daniel



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