Hard-Core FansSome Super Bowl viewers had their football interrupted by porn. It could happen to you, too!
Posted Wednesday, Feb. 4, 2009, at 10:22 AM ET
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StumbleUponHere's a taste of what on-demand subscribers in my neighborhood watched during two recent one-hour sampling periods: an old episode of Scooby-Doo, several episodes of The Office, a Cinemax women-in-prison movie that was hard to follow plotwise thanks to the fast-forwarding, The Da Vinci Code, another soft-core movie (frequently fast-forwarded to the dirty parts) that focused on the salutary effects of bubble baths, an exercise show ("let's circle the rib cage up to the right"), a scare-movie channel called FEARnet, the Wilco documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart, Something's Gotta Give, Just Like Heaven, The Break-Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Children of Men, Borat, The Wicker Man (Nicolas Cage version), The Queen, The Good Shepherd, Deja Vu, Derailed, ATL, and episodes of the HBO series Big Love, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Real Time With Bill Maher, and Da Ali G Show.
Comcast insists that it scrambles all pay-per-view adult movies—that encompasses hard-core titles like Exxxtasy Island and Co-Ed Nymphos 31 (both cost $11.99 to order). According to a Comcast spokesperson, the company has "begun to scramble VOD channels and is working toward scrambling all of our content on VOD in the future." The company's spokespeople also want me to tell you that its customers' privacy is not under siege—that it's impossible for QAM users to identify who requested the VOD content they're watching. (I should make it clear that I don't mean to single out Comcast. They just happen to be my cable provider. An acquaintance of mine who gets Time Warner Cable filches on-demand movies, too. According to Internet forums, most cable companies occasionally provide unencrypted content that QAM users can grab.)
Why doesn't Comcast encrypt all of its VOD streams? Again according to a spokesperson, it's not that it's more technically challenging than encrypting a regular channel. Rather, it's an issue of volume: Comcast has 9,000 programs in its VOD system each month, and that's a lot of stuff to scramble. Encryption also can't be implemented by fiat from corporate headquarters—it has to be done market–by-market at each local cable facility.
Perhaps the main reason cable companies haven't bothered to close the QAM loophole is that so few people know or care about it. Ken Holsgrove, an audio/video consultant and the lead moderator of the HDTV sections on AVS Forum, says there are three barriers to entry for the wannabe on-demand swiper. First, you have to know what a QAM tuner is. (That eliminates roughly 100 percent of the U.S. population.) Second, you have to buy either a standalone QAM tuner (mine cost $170) or a TV with built-in QAM. Third, as cable companies add channels to their lineups, they tend to change QAM channel designations—the on-demand stream that appears on 86-4 today could be on a different channel tomorrow. In order to keep up with this movement, QAM users must rescan their channel lineup frequently. How many people have the patience to do that?
Besides, Holsgrove argues, it isn't that satisfying to watch secondhand on-demand. "The odds of you actually seeing a movie from beginning to end are virtually impossible to predict," he says. "That's stabbing an avid TV viewer right through the eyeball."
Other downsides: You can't control what's on. Not much of the content is in HD, which is unfortunate for those of us with HDTV setups. The show you're watching also might suddenly stop or fast-forward, like you've wandered inside someone else's TiVo. If your neighbor pauses Entourage to go to the bathroom, you'll just have to wait until he finishes. If he wants to skip the exposition and go right to the sex scenes, then you're going to the sex scenes, too. And if he stops watching Stranger Than Fiction with five minutes to go—well, you're just screwed.
But you can't beat the price (free), and sometimes it's fun to cede control. My friend who grabs on-demand stuff from Time Warner calls it "mystery cable"—it's fun to flip around the channels and hope you get lucky.
There is a science to watching other people's on-demand. If you want to catch the latest Sopranos or Entourage, start looking on Monday night—some of your neighbors will be catching up because they missed their shows on Sunday. Browsing during prime time will yield more programs than snooping in the middle of the day. If you start looking around 9 o'clock on a weeknight and 11 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays, you'll generally find a well-stocked buffet of recent movies.
On-demand voyeurism works the best for guilty pleasures or movies that you've already seen. If you're dying to see The Queen, get the DVD. If you're in the mood for popcorn fare like Deja Vu or Derailed, you probably won't mind if the movie starts in the middle or if the action pauses for a few minutes. And don't worry: In my experience, only the porn viewers really lean on the fast-forward button. If you sit back on a Friday night to watch someone else's movie, there's a great chance you'll see it all the way through.
My magical box will eventually stop working. Comcast plans to scramble the VOD content from premium networks (HBO, Showtime, Cinemax) first and move on from there. In the meantime, I encourage the people of Washington, D.C., to continue to order on-demand movies. For one thing, I still haven't seen the beginning of Deja Vu. If someone could queue that up for me tonight, I'd appreciate it.
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