Disney to trial free offerings of popular shows online

They're freakin' free ANYWAY the day after they've aired. Download them from Usenet or Bittorrent. They'll not only allow you to do whatever you want with them but they'll also be COMMERCIAL FREE. As they should be. To Disney: Excuse me bozos but once you've broadcast it open air, it's free. That's the nature of the medium, it's been the case since videotape was invented and it's not going to change. You lost that battle 30 years ago - get over it.

I guess what will piss people off is that they can only fast forward or rewind in "chapters". translation-betwixt commercials. In other words, you can fast forward only until a commercial spot hits, then you have to wade thru 3 minutes of ads to get to the next section of the show. I think this is gonna flop big time. The only way I can watch television at the moment is with a TiVo. Because I can FF by the commercials. Otherwise televison is unbearable in the US due to the mind numbing ads. There are simply just too many. I think there is 3 minutes worth about every 7.5 minutes or something like that. This is like reverse TiVo- it's insane. :r
[edited by Crabbyappleton on 10.04.2006 22:57]

if its going to work this way, it'll probably require its own software or something. I like watching shows with XBMC on my xbox, just stream 'em off my computer's hard drive. I guess it not that common a method to do it, befure i used media centre classic and used the 2nd monitor output to send it over to the tv. I thikn its a step forward. I think cablevision companies are obscelete. Why do we pay for content just loaded with commercials. We pay to watch commercials. With the internet, I think it will be new ways of distributing the content, but you would need the commercials, or they would have a hard time raising the revenue to make the shows. good move though.

it's not a weird way of doing it I really thing XBMC is the best most compatible media player I've ever seen especially with a high def / 5.1 mod on the xbox. My PC now has 2TB of HDD - all accessible through streaming on the xbox. awesome.