One note to self that I'd like to come back to later is the way TiVo and other DVRs seem to be not making television more accessible but less so in many ways. How can you tell? If you see copies of VCR'd tv shows on YouTube, they're usually copies of the tape. If you see something that's DVR'd, it's very often a copy of what someone got from camcorder. That is, people are hooking their VCRs to their computers and uploading taped content. DVR owners are re-recording with DV cameras and then connecting them.

So the DVR'd zeroes and ones are more difficult to put online than it is to take your analog recordings and digitize them. If fact, it's easier to take the DVR'd 0s and 1s, turn them to analog, and then digitize your own digitization than to use the "originals". We're Xeroxing TV. There are many alternative explanations -- VCRs have been around quite a bit longer and DVRs will be commonly jailbroken soon enough, perhaps -- but I'm still guessing this camcorded-TV on YouTube is a sign that the content stream is becoming functionally closed and more and more user-appropriated content is going through the analog hole.

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