[mythtv-users] Data Direct Subscription Expires?

[Bruce Markey]

Brad Templeton wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 02:02:16PM -0800, Bruce Markey wrote:
...
>>TV will change over time and these are all good points but none
>>of this in any way proves that TMS is about to start charging
>>for DataDirect.
> 
> 
> Of course.  As you may recall, I simply was interested in discussing
> how long they would continue doing it for free.   When something useful

I was not ;-). Periodically, people less insightful than yourself
think they can show how smart they are by stating for a fact
that DD is a scam to force us to pay for DD any day now. The best
was a recent incoherent rant that apparently assumed as a premise
that Isaac was secretly working for a TMS skunkworks project and
that MythTV was really sucking the brains of open source contributers
to create a proprietary product that would steal market share then
force people to pay TMS (rambling sentence in his honor). Pretty
funny of you happen to find it. Tinfoil hat should match many of
the replies in the thread.

> comes for free, it is naturally curious to wonder why, and if it will
> stay free in the long term.   I'm not sure we can judge either way, but

Ponder NTP for a while. I'd be willing to pay for accurate time
and why should Greenwich give away information to us when others
pay? Why shouldn't they protect their claim to their system for
measuring the intervals between astronomical events?

> because we are all investing lots of effort in building our boxes,

Fear. TV listings will always be available because TV station
must let potential viewers know when their shows are on...

> it's something to wonder about.   The 3 month subscription time also
> raises curiousity.  I don't think it's there just because they want
> frequently updated answers to their survey.  Trying to put on their

Uncertainty. I've worked at a high profile site with free
registration and the majority are tests and jokes and many
people try things once or for a few days. This sort of thing
verifies active accounts. I doubt that is the main reason though.
They want to have a captive audience ready to go for any survey
questions that might interest them at any time.

> hat, I beleive the prime reason for a 3 month period would be to allow
> flexibility to change their offering, and/or charge for it.

[I hope their hats aren't tinfoil ;-]

Doubt. While you can try to think of reasons why DD should not
be offered, there are valid reason why they would want to do
this. The proof is in the pudding. They did it.

I posted to their forums and got this replay:

http://bb.labs.zap2it.com/viewtopic.php?t=331

tmstom (forum manager) wrote:
...
> I think it's important to understand that we've learned a ton from you,
> the Zap2it Labs users, and that this is mutually beneficial relationship
> Furthermore, DataDirect has taken a monumental strain off Zap2it.com,
> our commercial, consumer-facing website that generates ad-revenue. You
> probably aren't aware of just how much strain XMLTV was putting on us.

He also pointed out this posting from last May:

tmsjay (VP of Technology) wrote:
...
>cwingert wrote:
>> Reduce bandwidth use for data scraping?
>
> You've hit our motivations on the head: The goal here is to provide
> a better way than scraping for the open-source community (and other
> miscellaneous freeware types) to get television listings data for
> North America, while gaining a better understanding of this rabid
> group of technologically sophisticated television viewers.

Though I hadn't seen these messages before, they hit on the same
points I'd mentioned earlier. "Learned a ton from you" and "gaining
a better understanding" are delicate ways of saying that they've
tapped into a gold mine of demographic data. The number of hits,
bytes transferred and connect time (equates to simultaneous
connections) must be reduced on the order of 10 to 100 fold
per user.

>>Take movie listing as another example. It is the movie theaters
>>that want their show times to appear in the paper. Say, papers
>>are delivered to prisons. The prisoners can't go to the theater
>>and buy over-priced popcorn. Do the theater owners insist that
>>papers cannot be delivered to the prison? Will the paper charge
>>a higher price for newspapers that they know are going to people
>>that cannot or will not go to movies? Will they press a special
>>run that doesn't have show times or deliberately wrong show times
>>for no apparent reason? Of course not.
> 
> 
> Indeed, for no other reason than this is hard to do.

And it presumes that it would be advantageous to so but that's
absurd. You print newspapers and deliver them. The vast majority
of ads are never seen and if seen are irrelevant to the majority
of readers. There's a limit to the concept of targeted impressions.
You cast the net wide. A prisoner may mention a movie to a pen pal
who goes to see it or they may be released next week and may
want to see a movie as part of their new found freedom. It
makes no sense to make an exception to prevent your message
from being seen.

>   Do the movie
> houses pay to get in the plain listings, rather than the ads that
> are sold around them?   I don't believe so.  But again, my main

The prisoners won't see the movies in the ads sold around them
either ;-).

> point is not that I expect them to go out of their way to punish
> PVR users, not for some time to come.
> 
> What I have wondered is, will they stop going out of their way to
> _help_ us?  I think that's entirely possible.  If they are doing so
> now (which is the assumption which has been put forward.)

And shot down over and over again =). TMS is helping themselves.
Those selfish bastards aren't letting me anonymously hit their
website hundreds of times every morning anymore ;-).

> I know how it works today, how the system starts out simple, send
> out data, distribute data.  Though in fact the "distribute data" part
> is highly customized, in that for each PVR user they know not only
> who you are and what PVR you have but your channel lineup and which channels
> you have asked not for data on.

Pretty cool, hey. And they don't even have to pay us of this info...

> Because of this level of customization, the question of "what data do
> we want to give the PVR users" is a trivial one for them to change their
> minds on, unlike the question of paper news in a prison.

Pretty much the same question. You seem to continue to assume that
someone is advantaged by not delivering promotional info. The
advertisers want you to see the shows they sponsor recorded or
not. The stations want you to watch their shows rather than the
other stations recorded or not. The listings services want to show
that they reach more viewers than their competitors with or without
recorders.

Restaurant don't charge you to see the menu. If there was a profitable
steakhouse that was impacted by news of a mad cow disease outbreak,
they would need to make some changes. They would likely have more
chicken and salads but would they start charging customers a fee
to see the new menu? They still need to profit from the food. They
would continue to place ads with their menu, send out fliers, etc.

Since DVRs reduce (but not eliminate) viewing of commercials, ad
rates will be lower and the stations will need to reduce costs
with cheaper programming and/or gain revenue. The obvious response
is subscription such as extended cable, premium channels or pay
per view models. With a pay to watch model, it is even more
important to let the general public know what they have to offer
and to get accurate info out to their paying customers.

> I actually still remain skeptical that the stations are paying to
> get in the database but they might be.   Frankly, if the newspaper said
> "We don't have listings for CBS because they refuse to pay to be in the
> listings" some people would be angry at CBS and some would be angry
> at the paper -- I'm not sure which way it would swing.
> 
> However, what remains true are the following:
> 
>     They can easily configure what sort of data goes out to every
>     different type of user, tunable based on what PVR they have, where
>     they live, what chanels they watch etc.

That is valuable information that they can sell to Nielsen. They
won't give up the ability to collect that info without a fight.

>     If the stations are paying, the listing distributors will, to some
>     extent, do what the stations ask them to do.

And they ask them to please let everyone, everyone know that
there is a special guest start on CSI this week so we can turn
big ratings for those Charmin ads.

>     If the stations are not paying, the listings distributors will
>     probably not pay much attention to them, but on the other hand they
>     will have no particular incentive to give us free services if they
>     think they could get us to pay.

Few of us would. In return they would lose this new source of
very specific user data, return to the semi-DOS attacks on their
sponsored website, and lose access to users that go to Gemstar
sites and are counted by them instead. Additionally, if they
charged a fee that'd have to get involved with billing and
would be obligated to a level of support and customer service.


>>CBS is selling air time. It is a matter of negotiations between
> 
> 
> Again, strictly, what the advertiser wants is not air time, she wants
> effective exposure of her ads.  (Go back a level and they just want
> more sales, but that's too far up the abstraction chain.)

Haven't we been around this before? The statement that "CBS is
selling air time" is true and "It is a matter of negotiations"
is true. The advertisers need to determine how much their ads
will effect sales and what they are willing to pay for air time.

> Today, all they know about is ratings and airtime.

They know a helluva lot more than that... (see the last
post rather than going around again ;-).

> So what they are doing today is interesting, but the long term debate
> hinges on what they plan for the future, and what we can know about it.

Stated another way, TMS has chosen a course and will stay on
that course for the foreseeable future.

> But you know all this, so I don't understand the reluctance to consider
> how that might change, and how it might affect whether we have to
> pay for listings in the future or not.

Consider? Of course I've considered and therefore see that
it makes sense that the stations need to promote their schedules.
Initial assumptions that we want listings therefore they must
be suckering us into paying for them eventually may, in fact,
be invalid. I'm still concerned about FTP though because they
don't need me to know the correct time but I really want it.

Whether or not CBS charges for subscriptions mixed with ads and
product placement, nothing happens unless I know what is on
CBS (I won't find them by channel surfing, I never channel surf
anymore). If the current listings services won't tell me what's
on, CBS will need to find someone else who will tell me.

If they have a set of revenue streams that account for DVRs,
they need to make sure that DVR users are serviced as well or
better than they are by NBC.

> Nothing is proof of anything until they tell us what they want to do,
> of course.  But it is worth understanding why they give it for
> free right now.   Is it simply and wholly as a stopgap against
> inefficient scraping?   Could be.   But why the 3 month time period?

See above. Only four opportunities per year is pretty sparse
for a staff of statisticians. However, I imagine they can vary
the survey at any interval and four times per year per user
keeps the sample size up.

> But this is not FUD (I have no motive for FUD anyway).  This is
> a serious question, as we all put a lot of effort into our systems,
> which depend on good listings -- will we keep getting it free?

FUD is an acronym for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Fear that
will have to pay, uncertainty about the future of of the TV
business doubts about the motives of the related businesses
and so on. The fact is that TMS did initiate DD in their own
best interests and will continue to act in their best interests.

TV listings will always be free because no matter what the
station's revenue model is, you have to know what is on that
you'd like to watch before they can make any profit. It is
the programming that is the product. Listings are promotional
material for that product.

--  bjm