New DirecTV PPV Rules
This isn’t really “new” news, but I just noticed this on my DirecTV DVR:
Effective April 15, 2008, DVR recordings of PPV movies will be available for 24 hours of unlimited viewing after purchase. Major movie studios have required that satellite and cable providers alike may no longer allow their customers to view these recordings for longer than 24 hours. During the 24 hour viewing period, you will continue to enjoy all of your DVR features such as pause and rewind.
What a pile of rubbish. You can find their FAQ at this URL:
“http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/global/contentPage.jsp?assetId=P4540022″
To me, that looks like a URL that will break. So I won’t link to it.
What year is this? Even with old school hand coded Servlets and JSPs, clean public URLs are a piece of cake. Does some programmer really think “contentPage.jsp?assetId=P4540022″ is a good URL? Why not something ending in “ppv/faq/”?
Movies, like music, should be DRM free. And URLs should not expose implementation details.
