I had a dream last night (and I'm not making this up) that I went to the CBS.com website and was annoyed by a whole lot of pop-up windows
containing hash-key signatures for the Bittorrents of all their TV shows.
In my dream I thought “Gee, it's strange that a TV channel is offering Bittorrents of its shows”, but then I remembered reading about
how the TV channels were seeding Bittorrent with their own shows – including the advertisements – to combat people who were seeding the shows
without ads – or worse – with the advertisements replaced with other companies ads. Apparently a whole marketplace had sprung up around
remixing TV shows to with paid advertisements.
It wasn't until ten minutes ago that I remembered the dream and realized that it hadn't really happened.
Random thoughts coming from that dream:
- I live in Australia (so I don't get CBS). However, over the last few months my wife and I been watching more TV (mostly The Amazing Race and
The Apprentice – and Survivor, hence CBS, I guess) via Bittorrent than via our stupid TV channels here, since it takes them 6 months to show
things that have been on in the US. - What happened in my dream actually makes sense. I suspect CBS does okay from licencing fees for Survivor, but it might actually make economic sense for NBC
to lose the licence fees for The Apprentice (which tends to show at random, late night timeslots here) and pick up the extra (Bittorrent) viewers for their ads. - What will the first Bittorrent TV channel start? The economics of it probably make more sense than a normal TV channel – production costs would be similar,
but the capital investment would be much less. - Despite the fact I've been using Firefox for a year I still have an irrational fear of pop-up browser windows.
- I can recognize a SHA-1 hash in my sleep.