Devoted to show business and the entertainment industry

With another new technology to deal with, Hollywood is again rattling their sabers to intimidate the companies offering them.

With the relatively new, and little-known upstart called Sling Media, they are threatening to sue them out of existence.

Here is what Sling Media is:

"Sling Media's “Slingbox” grabs the TV signal at the home and slings it out over a broadband connection to a laptop, cell phone or any other connected device. Where the Tivo allows viewers to “time shift” their programming, Sling allows them to “place shift” it.

"While Sling is still a young company and the quality of "slung" media is poor given bandwidth constraints, some members of the content and broadcasting communities have already expressed concern over the device. Krikorian points out, however, that the skepticism is unfounded because Sling neither records content nor distributes it to more than one end point at a time."

While claiming to be fighting copyright infringment, evidently the real issue is that studios have been making deals with mobile broadcasters and now wanting viewers to pay for shows that they've missed through broadband downloads, they are being circumvented by Sling Media and other players entering the market.

In other words Hollywood is again attempting to control new technology through using the copyright smoke screen because they finally found a way to make some money that is already being thrwarted. They are continually behind the fast-paced innovation that is always happening.

Here's what one MPAA spokesman said:

John Feehery of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) said the large studios want to work directly with makers of new technologies on digital rights management issues. “We have to have the protections in place so that it doesn’t get out of hand and lead to massive piracy,” Feehery explained.

What he's really saying is that they want to control innovation. 'Work directly with makers' in the context of this issue, means that they want to control even the fair-use aspect of the market.

Hollywood risks further alienation if they continually attack products that consumers want. There is nobody that will be able to control this. They need to come up with their own technologies and compete in the market place rather than trying to intimidate and control that which they'll never be able to do.

Even if they were able to control all the techology coming out, they have to deal with the backlash. It's one of those things that even if they were to win; they'd lose.