That’s how the 7th season of American Idol ended for a handful of viewers who watched the finale recorded on their DVRs. The live broadcast, which extended a couple minutes beyond the scheduled end time, was cut off right as host Ryan Seacrest went to announce which David (Cook or Archuleta) had won this year’s competition. Brilliant.
When limited by a scarcity of storage resources, what parameters dictate what will and won’t be recorded? An assumption as to the temporal certainty of an event’s occurrence lead those who hadn’t accounted for any margin of error to miss the mark. And seeing how it was the television network, the thing being recorded, that supplied the erroneous information, we’re reminded yet again that distributing misinformation is an extremely effective means of resisting surveillance.
Which begs a few questions: First, in a future of truly pervasive and distributed computing, is it useful to extend the notion sousveillance to include all surveillance facilitated by information supplied by the entity being observed? And more importantly, did Fox intentionally let the broadcast run long to teach time-shifting freeloaders a lesson?
dessalles
23,325 words of total nonsense by Omar Elsayed
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I totally got hosed by this so many times. I remember this starting years ago (when TiVo first came around) with NBC staggering their Thursday night lineup by 5 mins so that people watching via dvr would get hosed – another classic example of old world media not knowing what to do when a new technology disrupts their coop.
Oddly enough, years later it was NBC’s Thursday night offerings that were the first to embrace iTunes (later to leave) as well as integrating online content with the on air show really cleverly (i.e. from the practical to the impractical – like publishing the PDF of the Dunder Mifflin org chart that Dwight drew up in a recent episode.)
Short answer is I think they’re just fucking with us.
This was hilarious. I remember hearing from my Brother who lives in New York and was more than pissed about that cut off recording. ha ha. I ended up watching some of the songs later and the finalists were pretty good.