[mythtv-users] Zap2it Labs Shutting Down?

Cole Brodine cbrodine at gmail.com
Wed Jun 20 14:28:52 UTC 2007


On 6/20/07, Brian J. Murrell <brian at interlinx.bc.ca> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2007-06-20 at 10:00 -0400, Michael Jones wrote:
> > At $500/month, or $6000 a year it would require 1200 subscribers
> > paying $5 year to break even...
>
> Hrm.  Something tells me that it's really not this simple.  Surely the
> TMS bean counters have come to the conclusion that the number of users
> the data satisfies is relative to it's worth.
>
> Surely they have not missed the boat on the fact that a national
> newspaper like USA Today or The NY Times satisfies a much bigger
> subscriber base than a small 500 subscriber newspaper.
>
> Surely they have not ignored the "per seat" model than almost everyone
> selling a single reproducible copy of something is using.
>
> Maybe I'm wrong, but the basic greedy nature of mankind and corporation
> makes me think I am right.
>
> But let's suppose somebody does set up an amicable (to both TMS and
> subscriber base) agreement to collect subscriber fees and pay TMS.
> What's to stop the same abuse that is going on currently from
> continuing?  How is this "somebody" going to curb it any better than
> Zap2It could?  Surely license (from TMS) to the data does not include
> the right for the licencee to allow re-distribution by it's customers.
>
> So now not only will this "somebody" need to collect enough to pay for
> it's license to TMS, they will have to collect enough to build up a
> legal fund to prosecute the abusers.
>
> One can see why Zap2It wants to stop dealing with consumers.
>
> b.
>
> --
> My other computer is your Microsoft Windows server.
>
> Brian J. Murrell
>
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>
>
> I think their biggest problem comes from multiple people downloading from
one account.  I'm sure if you charged a modest fee for each account, per
month you could limit your exposure quite a bit.  Allow one download per IP
per day per account or something like that.  It would allow the people
building and selling custom made MythTV's to continue about their merry way,
but it would also ensure that all their customers would be paying in also.
As long as each customer contributes a proper amount and the amount of
bandwidth is limited, I'm sure you could come up with a profitable model.

What's keeping somebody from buying an account and redistributing the data?
Nothing, except they would only be able to download once a day, and then
they would be using their own storage and bandwidth to redistribute.

I'm sure TMS has looked into it.  Maybe they can't make it profitable or
maybe they just aren't interested in our demographic.  Maybe the just don't
want the upfront expense of designing a pay per seat download system?  Just
because they can't make it profitable doesn't mean somebody else can't.

Cole Brodine

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