Slashdot Mirror
TV Piracy is Next
Blackfire writes "Why is a TV executive so agitated about online pirates? Because he, like most media
honchos, has seen the scary numbers indicating that the next big craze in illegal file-sharing is
not music, not movies, but television." Frankly I'm amazed that movies caught on before TV since there's so much more TV, and they tend to be smaller files than movies.
Major TV series are usually broadcast in the US well ahead of their UK and european dates. When "Enterprise" first aired in the states, months ahead of its arrival in the UK, there was considerable traffic in DivX copies of the episodes. The same thing didn't happen with the latest series of Stargate because of the lack of reasonably small copies.
The "protection" that DVD producers have to stop the US discs playing outside the US didn't stop online sharing. Now the same thing is happening with regionally transmitted TV.
The TV producers are also worried because so much content goes on on subscription channels, so free access costs them profits.
It interesting that the BBC, who provide programs free here in the UK are worried by transatlantic access . They are about to provide free access to their program archives but have two problems..
1) The UK taxpayer pays for the programs to be made and expects that non-UK viewers should pay for access.
2) the BBC is very good about paying appearance money to actors appearing in old programs reshown on TV. They want to find a way of compensating actors for online distribution.
Paul
www.opencouncil.org
Open
That's funny... I used to grab copies of SG-1 from the UK since they were (for a while) broadcasting them there 1 week before they were broadcast in the US. (This was back when I had Showtime specifically for SG-1, too!)
However, I do have to agree that there are many shows that, if you want to stay current, you have to download. I am always watching the UK/EU download sites and grabbing the first few episodes of their TV series. There have been several shows that I got that way that I would never have found otherwise.
As for the creators getting paid? Amazon.co.uk has seen me buy several box sets. It looks to me that my "piracy" has generated them more revenue than they would have had otherwise.
I think that while loss of revenue from commercials may hurt things in the short run, sales of box sets will more than make up for it in the long run. In the meantime, the losses are small (while a large % of movie-goers are the correct demographics for downloading, on TV the % is much smaller) and will not have a large impact on ad revenue. This will worsen over time as more people figure out the technology (and that Tivo can skip the commercials), but this is a good thing: It will force the industry to quit being so stagnant and actually figure out their new business model, but affect them slowly enough to give them time to do it.
http://www.suprnova.org/
Scroll down to "TV Shows" .. And this is just for today ..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Yeah i have been downloading tv for years too, but its often my only way to watch tv and keep up with shows. I travel around a bit and live in different countries. When i lived in germany i downloaded tv as i could not understand german dubbing. Im in sweden at the moment and down have a tv, just a laptop and a high speed internet connection. Also the release schedule is different depending on where you are in the world, so even if the tv is in english i often find they arnt at the same point in a series as the last place i was.
I'm wondering what the BBC makes of this. A while ago i read they were planning to put parts of their archive online for [free] download for UK viewers only (Although i presume foreigners would be able to obtain copies eventually). We pay the licence fee, they show the programs ad-free. If we want to watch again, we either have to have recorded it or buy it on DVD/Video. Well, i'd rather download a decent quality copy and treat it as recording. It's just easier to find shows online and i can try out new series', see things i missed (and won't be on DVD, like one-off documentaries) and it is much easier to store.
Currently i watch the News online through the BBC website, and often their documentaries and other shows that they put online (Panorama, Question Time). These are very poor quality, although with these shows i'm interested in the content and not the picture.
Like the music industry is finding out, if they provide the content themselves, most people would rather pay a small fee and avoid legal complications - but right now there is no alternative. I'd be interested in buying the latest episode of my favorite programs for a buck or two if I miss it's broadcast premier. I'll buy the DVD's of a lot of stuff (babylon 5, stargate, trek, farscape, buffy etc), and I'll video record other stuff for viewing later, but I want copies of all the programs on my favorite TV station's website, pay a small fee and just grab it permanently and legally. Right now the only way to get these things (without poxy adverts!) before the DVD release is illegally. Please can we have an alternative Mr. Studio executive? Oh, and might mention it would be another way to make money from us...
Suprnova without the ads: http://project-2501.net/php-scripts/suprnova-lite/
This could be the reason why it is suddenly making headlines. The article has been doing the rounds recently and I guess getting some peoples attention.
It is a bit annoying because I have been using this exact method for quite some time, but now that everyone else has a step by step guide to it, they are having a 'slashdot effect' on my favourite rss feeds, and it is drawing attention to the tv episode download scene, which can only mean lawsuits are just around the corner.
For me I feel I am justified in downloading some of these shows as they are never going to make it onto tv over here (the UK), for example Survivor, which is in its 9th season and not one episode has aired here, so it is highly doubtful they ever will. Maybe though if the UK companies use bitorrent file popularity for research, they might see which new US shows are popular with UK downloaders, and will buy them to air here.
http://btefnet.net/ is a similar site. Thanks to it (and tvtorrents) I haven't watched Australian free to air TV for many, many months
Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
I even asked a retailer when I was in London if it was possible to be a subscriber when I lived in Sweden and he said no.
My sister (UK resident) obtained a Sky subscription for my Aunt and Uncle (French residents), then took the Sky box out to France for them. Likewise, on holiday in Spain over the Summer the hotel I was staying in had Sky. I suspect the trick is not to tell Sky where you live ;)
Good luck!
This is where the serious fun begins.
22min x 13 = 286 minutes = 4.8 hours.
Assuming a $40 monthly cable bill and the low estimate of 40 hours of TV watched per month, you get $1 per hour.
A 90-minute movie costs $10 or so in the theatre and $3 or so to rent - rates that are double or higher the (elevated estimate of) per hour cost of watching TV.
Combine this with the fact that movies are more entertaining than TV and that TV shows are more easily recorded for personal usethan movies, and I'm not that surprised that movie-sharing is more popular than TV-sharing online.
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
BBC did it (or are in the process of doing it). It should be interesting to see how it plays out for them, and to see if anyone else follows suit.
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