Posts: 54
Joined: Dec 2011
Reputation:
0
it's not going to be legal unless it's directly from the station's site or via hulu/netflix.
with that said, free cable plugin works great for a free legal, tv like environment.
i just miss a lot of the shows i watched that are not available on free cable.
Posts: 658
Joined: Jul 2011
Reputation:
1
Another plus to the Free Cable and Hulu addons is they allow you to watch the programs commercial free by blocking the advertisements from being loaded in xbmc. I believe you can set Hulu to show the advertisements but I don't know why you would want to do that.
Posts: 29
Joined: Nov 2011
You should use the following services if you want something legal...
TV Shows - Hulu and Hulu +
Movies - Crackle
Music - Spotify
If you want something to replace IceFilms, it would probably be Navi-X unless IceFilms site gets new sources and cleans that up.
Almost every file hosting site is conducting illegal activities by hosting copyrighted content on their website. If there was something legal and better to use, we wouldn't be discussing IceFilms... if anything, the answer is Netflix and that seems to bother you greatly OP.
iRoNBiLL
Posts: 29
Joined: Nov 2011
canadave Wrote:How would Hulu know whether XBMC viewers are viewing their ads or not?
Because you can count the number of times an episode played as opposed to how many advertisements aired... servers keep track of all this. If they do the math, they already know what's up.
iRoNBiLL
Posts: 29
Joined: Nov 2011
Mighty_Diamond Wrote:[quote=mikeplow1961]
Actually the ad revenue is based upon how many people view the content (programme) itself, not the advertisements. So watching in this method does not affect ad-revenue... currently. Hope this helps. The advertisers of course will prefer you to view their commercials and of course use lots of little ways for you to clikc-and-play to take you to their sites. The viewing figures of said advert, coupled with the viewing figures of the content AND how man click-and-play are waht determines the price of advertising slots on demand.
Hope I helped explain a little further.
Actually... the ad revenue is based on how many people view the advertisement... plain and simple.
Advertisers have been complaining to Hulu for a while now that people are getting around ads, which means the money they give broadcasters to host and display these ads are nothing but free money to the broadcasters, with no way's of re-assuring it's ad customers that each viewer is getting delivered the ad as contracted with the content provider.
This is why ad counts increased this year, to make up for losses on missed advertisements AND typical corporate greed in revenue dollars.
Anyone who signed a contract contrary to ad views per viewer is getting shafted and is probably getting what they deserve for not making intelligent choices. Yes they exist and are a dying breed of suckers in the advertisement industry.
iRoNBiLL
Posts: 175
Joined: May 2011
Reputation:
0
2012-04-20, 10:56
(This post was last modified: 2012-04-20, 19:50 by bladeds.)
You won't get hbo and showtime content without icefilms
Posts: 793
Joined: Oct 2010
Reputation:
17
Dude, chill out. Everyone on the internet has an opinion, and there are stupid people on the internet, it's a fact of life. I'm not even sure who you're talking to lol
The fact is, legal vs. illegal is a lot more complicated than people here are making it out to be.
Here are some things to consider.
Nothing about Megaupload's business model is illegal (to narrow the focus of discussion, we'll stay within the US court system). It is not illegal to host a copy of a copyrighted work. It IS illegal to continue hosting that copy once you have been properly notified that the hosted media was created illegally.
It is NOT illegal to stream an illegal copy of a piece of content (keep reading). It IS illegal to make a copy of a copyrighted work IF THAT COPY IS NOT FOR PERSONAL USE, ie it is intended to be shared online. Now, most of us know that from a technical standpoint, downloading and streaming are the same thing, you're just not keeping the parts of the file around after you've watched them. There is a court precedent that indicates that DOWNLOADING (specifically) constitutes making a copy of something, making it illegal. In the United States you are (supposed to be) innocent until it can be proven that you have violated a specific law. Since there is not law or precedent that says streaming a file constitutes making a copy (which is the only thing that makes it illegal), streaming a file breaks no laws.
Further more, you have to consider incomplete, non-working copies. There is no law against making partial copies. In fact, these partial copies (or excerpts) are legally protected and specifically exempt from copyright law. Let's play out an extreme, but applicable example.
If I draw a circle on a piece of paper and write Avatar in it, have I made a copy of a cd? You're probably thinking "of course not!" (unless you work for the MAFIAA). But why, legally, does this not constitute making a copy? Because it's incomplete and unusable? What if I write out all the 1's and 0's on the disc, on the paper, by hand? If I then use optical character recognition software to turn my writing into digital 1's and 0's, so I can now play it back with media software, is that a copy of the original media, or a copy of my (legal) drawing? Does my pencil count as a tool for committing copyright infringement?
Writing all those 1's and 0's out by hand is a lot of work. I'm going to have my friend help me out and we'll each write half of the bits down on paper. Did one of us break make a copy? Which one? If my friend takes a picture of my half of the drawing, then reassembles the drawing and creates a copy of the movie, did I break the law? At what percentage of writing 1's and 0's does it become illegal?
Let's now extend this example to it's purely digital equivalent, bittorrent. I never possess the original content in digital form. Instead, I ask my anonymous friend for 6,000 bytes of a file who's hash is XXXXX. Then I ask another friend for 8,000 bytes of a file who's hash is also XXXXX. I continue this process until I have all of the pieces of the file who's hash is XXXX. For this to be illegal, it has to be proven that I have made a whole copy of a copyrighted work, that is intended for something other than personal use.
Now, bittorrent is a two-way protocol, so while I'm downloading, I'm also uploading, which means I'm potentially providing copies of my personal copy. The problem with that is the same as above. At what percentage of my drawing is a law broken? Does that percentage have to go to one person? What if I write each 1 or 0 on a separate scrap of paper and toss them off the empire state building (note: littering is bad kids). Did I break a copyright law? None of those scraps of paper are illegal, and neither is using bittorrent.
I hope that illustrates some of the sticky situation this is. These media groups make more money (almost twice as much last year) suing people than producing content. They don't want to fix this.