The matrix has you

How much television do you watch? … no really … how much…

We sit there in front of the idot box having our lives spoon fed to us: to live the American dream; to have 2.5 children; to have a Brady Bunch life; to have a functional disfunctional family; to sleep in separate beds; to have great sex all the time; to eat meat; to buy Australian; to go to church; to have happy endings where everyone is always laughing; to drink Coke and not Pepsi; to drink Pepsi and not Coke; to eat at McDonalds; to feed children sugar laden candy with natural colours rather than artificial ones; to to feed children sugar coated cereals because they are fun; that Mars will somehow help us work, rest, and play; that life is too straight unless you have Twisties; to buy cars that drive on empty roads; to buy a home; to spend money you don’t have on your credit card; to go from fat to thin in a week is good; and that to watch other people’s misery, unedited, unscripted, is entertaining.

This is world of the media magnates and commercial television. Sit there and we will tell you what you should watch. When you should watch it. Who you should be. What you should be. They’ve made you into a slave. Like everyone else you were born into this bondage - into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.  

It’s about money - their money, and taking yours.

It’s about control. Social control.

…the Matrix has you…

So what would make a television giant like the Nine Network in Australia hot under the collar? What would make them secretly cringe in terror, yet shake their fist and play the role of the school yard bully?

The end of commercial television.

For many years now, the USA and the UK have enjoyed Tivo and Sky+ - digitally scheduled and recorded television - and that magic button that skips those 30 seconds of advertising. It is the way of the future and spells the end of commercial television.

I read a blog entry recently - a father whose children no longer ask for ‘that toy’ or ‘this food’ because their lives are free of commercial television and traditional advertising. They are no longer jacked in. They are free to watch the programs they like when they want to all because of a little thing called the EPG - electronic programming guide.

The EPG tells the digital recorders when things are on. It can record whole series or individual shows, when ever they appear on the electronic guide. When the show is not on when ratings season stops it drops off the EPG and the recorder doesn’t record it. When ratings period starts up again, and the show magically reappears in a different time slot, the recorder knows it needs to start recording and adjusts the time and date accordingly. Even when the network applies it’s ’strategic scheduling’ and starts shows late, just set the recorder to add 15 minutes onto the end of a show and you” never miss the end. Don’t worry about having tapes handy - there’s a hard drive inside these things with around 300+ hours recording capacity. The EPG is automatically downloaded from the internet on a daily basis. It is automatically added to the recorder and the recorder automatically adjusts everything.

These digital recorders, armed with EPGs, will free your mind and your life. It’s liberating.

You watch the shows you want to watch, when you want to watch them. The digital format allows you skip the ads and reclaim your life back in 30 second chunks. Watch House when you want and you can reclaim 15 minutes of your life back. Watch Battlestar Galactica at 7pm, when you get home from work, rather than at 11pm. Skip the ads. Reclaim 15 precious minutes of life. The EPG makes it all possible.

Many people in Australia have digital set-top boxes and media PCs that can record digital television, but we’ve been without this magical EPG because the networks have declared that their programming lists are their intellectual property. As a result we have to manually schedule our programs and still are, as a result, subject to the control of the networks and their scheduling whims. They change shows time slots. They consistently run over time. No one has challenged them, until now.

Ice TV is the only Australian company with an EPG subscription service for Australia. It has an EPG for every region in Australia and an EPG for just about every digital recorder - from media PCs to set-top boxes.

So when  Ice TV began delivering their EPG service, the Nine Network began to shake in fear and reacted the only way they knew how - with a law suit. 

Nine claims that by providing its schedule (the same one Nine supplies to many outlets, including the Sydney Morning Herald who reported on this issue) to subscribers, IceTV is breaching copyright. IceTV claims it merely compiles information already in the public domain (and it’s reviews and commentaries of programs are so much more entertaining than Nine’s schedule) [1].

In the movie, the Matrix, Trinity said to Neo, “The Matrix cannot tell you who you are”. I’d like to tell you not to let the networks dictate what you should watch and when. Don’t let commercial television tell you what to do, how to do it, how to live, who you should be. 

To the television networks I’d like to say that I know that you’re afraid… afraid of change. I know that I like my life without commercial television advertising. I’ve lived the unjacked life with my media PC for about 4 years now. I took the red pill. I’ve seen the truth of the world, and I’ve not turned back. I don’t know the future. I’m not blogging this to tell you how this is going to end. I wrote this to tell you how it’s going to begin.

The people will take back control.

Let them take the red pill.

M

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[1] Hassall, G. 2006. Sydney Morning Herald.  Nine takes on IceTV over electronic program guide. 9 Oct. Online at: http://www.smh.com.au/news…9/1160246043440.html, accessed on 7 Feb, 2007.