The Washington Post article regarding TiVo asking the FCC for permission to add new content sharing functionality has been getting a lot of coverage lately. Most the criticism is levied at the sad notion that a company needs to ask permission in order to innovate. While this is true, I think there’s a far scarier element of the article that needs equal attention. Almost glossed over in the end, we have Fritz Attaway (MPAA executive vice president for government relations) saying the following regarding the presence of analog outputs on devices with HDTV modulators:

“We’ll probably have to go to Congress to enact legislation to deal with that”

People, I don’t think it get’s much more certain than that. I don’t read this as they “probably” want to do it, but rather they know the FCC won’t approve, so they’ll have to go to Congress.

I’m certainly glad I’m out of school. I can’t remember how many meaningful projects I had in different classes throughout my education that involved content taken from the television, but it sure was significant. But really, who should care about collateral damage anyway?

Former FX network exec charged with illegal wiretapping. And I thought Fox was the only network ripping off ideas?

Remember from a week or so ago, when ABC Primetime President Stephen McPherson accused Fox networks of taking on the role of programming imitator, saying “They will steal it, plain and simple”?

I just saw an ad for the upcoming ABC reality series titled “The Benefactor”. Immediately, I thought it seemed an awful lot like the NBC show “The Apprentice”. Checking the ABC official write up of the show, you can find the following :

What would you do for a million dollars? Billionaire businessman and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban is about to find out because he is “The Benefactor,” and he’s set to give away a million bucks to a complete stranger.

Nice. Billionaire businessman. Nope, it’s not an apprentice clone. Entertainment critics from sources like The Denver Post and USA Today have not dubbed the show an apprentice clone.

These network folk truly must not see how thinly veiled their hypocrisy is.

By way of photomatt I came across the blog of Good Eats guru Alton Brown. This might prove interesting.

I was scrolling through the yahoo news headline feeds today and ran across the headline “Shyamalan’s ‘Secret’ Hoax”. The article comes from an E! news feed, and details the fact that the so-called “unauthorized documentary” of filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan which will run on the SciFi channel was a hoax. If you’ve seen the ads and have half a brain, you’ve already figured out that the “documentary” is really just a marketing ploy in the style of Blair Witch.

What’s surprising to me is the notion that people didn’t catch on to the setup. Did people really buy into the ad and start thinking Mr. Shyamalan is a closet monster or something?

Fox announced it will launch a reality TV cable channel in 2005. Can I get a discount for not getting the channel, please?