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Comment by blueblob | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps this is why Pandora has the annoying "I'm still listening" button, so they don't have to pay out royalties on things their users aren't listening to.

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Somewhat related: It's also probably why services like Netflix have the same thing built in ("I'm still watching" button after watching like 3 episodes of a show without clicking buttons), so some bot computer doesn't just stream and record everything.

I always figured that button was for people who fell asleep or had to leave their computers. It would be trivial to automate that prompt away for a malicious user.

Good point, that is probably true. Or possible so Netflix doesn't waste bandwidth on users that are not even there watching/listening.

not as easy but still, doable by someone with determination and a simple knowledge of computer vision and UI simulation.

It is really trivial, there are several programs that automate UIs, I remember them from trying my hand at automating trading for a game which didn't provide an API :) .

Automate 7 was really impressive, and they're at version 9 now

http://www.networkautomation.com/automate/automate/

I remember a Netflix engineer posting somewhere that Netflix needed to implement this for legal reasons.

If they don't require you to keep clicking a button to "request content", it doesn't count as an on-demand service.

Hulu has it too, IIRC.

Also - if you are a real human but fell asleep or walked out of the house/room.

Youtube's playlists also have it. It's annoying when I'm listening to a playlist at work and it suddenly stops, although if I'm deep enough in the zone I don't notice it until some minutes later.

But bots can click on that too, so soon there will be captchas but then bots will do captcha solving or they will outsource it.

Yep. This won't last for long.

It'll be a similar reason for Spotify's [former?] monthly limits.

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