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.

Comments

All those Startrek, Stargate and Galactica Geeks

[Open Council]

All those Startrek, Stargate and Galactica Geeks probably have PCs (even Macs maybe) and are into P2P filesharing.

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.

Re:TV piracy is next?

[1u3hr]

, a season of most shows is usually 13 episodes. At around 22 minutes each, you're buying 260 HOURS of programming..

22min x 13 = 286 minutes = 4.8 hours.