Futile watersheds

By Ashok Argent-Katwala

Television has long lived in a world where viewers watch television just as it is transmitted, just where they live.

That's a fantasy world, and becomes less and less realistic every day. Technology for time- and place-shifting content around has got pretty good in the last thirty-odd years.

Watersheds on television are thoroughly hooked on the idea that the people who can watch something that was broadcast in the evening are responsible & mature. Anyone who is technically savvy, and thus most likely any enterprising kid with access to the internet, can fetch practically any programme, from anywhere in the world.

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I've not yet seen the anti-BitTorrent folk try the "won't anyone think of the children" argument, but I expect they'll get there eventually.

Trying to declare the tide will be held back by force of will, like Canute's advisers, is thoroughly futile. You don't ban the technology, just as we don't ban HTTP because the Web is used to publish some unpleasant stuff; nor do we ban or cripple strong crypto (any longer) because that only hurts the legitimate users.

Now some will argue that only a minority of viewers are doing this right now – but you have to look at the distribution. If this is about protecting kids, then who do you expect, in a random household, is able to figure out how to use BitTorrent, Usenet or something to watch the shows they want?

I'm not suggesting that we start airing adult drama over breakfast, and there's some element of what you might accidentally bump into while channel surfing. I think it's just about taste, and the context it is presented in, rather than a clear cut-off line. The appropriate code of conduct in the UK makes clear it isn't a sharp line, and broadcasters are supposed to ease things in after 9pm.

However, the edge cases are all very clumsy:

• Channels that span multiple timezones have to essentially pick one of them.
• Watching content from a different place means you need to figure out what to do. Kit like the slingbox is going to make this more common.
• E4+1 is the same as E4, but an hour later. Thus, when Four remove the <gasp> swearing from a programme to air it at 8, it goes out after the watershed on E4+1. I don't mind so much, because I'll just get a recording of the post-watershed version. What's ugly is that there's no nice place people tell you when it has been hacked about, and you can guess from the times, and have extra logic for the +1 channels.
• As soon as you record things, you end up needing clumsy extra code (or do it yourself in your head) to cater for whether you want the hacked-up version of a show, or the real thing.

We can keep the watershed, but we shouldn't expect it to stop many kids from finding content they hear about, and sounds interesting. Keeping it is then about having daytime broadcasts be decorous, which is a pretty good thing. But for all the adults in the room, we should:

• air content as created, at a suitable time
• or, failing that, make damn clear in the listings, and announce it before the programme, and preferably in some structured, machine-friendly way as metadata, that the following programme has been edited.

If parents want to protect their children, they'll need to make the kids part of the conversation, and find ways to monitor the things they watch – from broadcast tv, the internet and recordings passed between friends – and discuss that content with them. That is bound to be a technological arms race, but not a totally futile one, and it's the social portion that's most vital.