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.
Sorry, I don't buy this crap. I used to work in Win Television (Australia's largest regional television station, 7million viewers) and I can say that privacy was not even a minor concern.
The major concern executives are having, is trying to ensure video tape operations do not put in commercials into the wrong aspect ratio, The shows airing on TV do not mean crap to the executive, it's the commercials paying his wage.
I was trained to make sure, in the worst case situation. That the commercials go to air, even if that meant the TV show itself was just one nice black screen.
The reason movies caught on before TV is because generally the two work differently. A movie you have to make a conscious choice that you want to watch it, you have to take steps to watch a specific film. TV is something you might flick on to see if there is anything interesting on.
Also 90% of TV is very low quality crap, so why would anyone waste their bandwidth downloading it. Films caught on before TV because they are much more 'worthy' of the bandwidth. Most of TV, with the exclusion of the occasional good documentary or high quality series (think 24, Friends, Simpsons, etc) is 'throw away' stuff that you watch mindlessly and forget about, and none of that stuff is something you'd ever download voluntarily (or randomly).
movies _didn't_ catch on before TV.. you can find a torrent for almost any tv show (but mostly fiction and reality crap) every week. 4 years ago it used to be mostly people from europe who didn't get the shows on their tv, downloading from IRC (or southamerican, in my case).. Now, with the widescreen episodes captured from HDTV on nice fast torrents, who knows?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Hmph...."next big craze in illegal file-sharing", eh?
What the hell? How is trading copies of broadcast television shows illegal? Since when is it piracy to copy and share copies of tv shows THAT ARE ON TV? I pay my dues in cable bills, so how the hell is it illegal? Recording shows to VHS has been done plenty of times - and you'd think they'd want you to watch the shows again and again....I don't see the logic or the losses involved here. Either way you end up seeing the show (commercial free or not)...
TFA states that people will have "no need to spring for satellite feeds or specialty channels" Hell, some specialty channels are a waste anyway...I mean, who needs 6 ESPNs, or 5 Discovery channels, or 10 friggin HBOs? I think some people would still hang on to their channels anyway...Its still a hell of a lot easier (for most) to watch tv at 6 than download and play clips offline. They make it sound like everyone's going to drop their cable services and rely on the downloading and recording of one lone pirate with an eye patch and a rouge TiVO....
TFA also states a line about "In his forum speech, Chernin said: "Consumers need to understand that stealing is wrong, and there are consequences." "
When the fuck did free use become a dirty word? Stealing? Bah!
What a good way to start Thanksgiving leftovers...
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
No way I could otherwise watch unsynchronized TV shows (I live in Austria), there isn't even the option of e.g. watching the Simpsons in English here (except waiting a few years for the DVD release). So much subtle nuance is lost and so many glaring errors are made in translation it's not even funny. Very frustrating. My thanks to all Americans making their TV shows available via Bittorrent.
Yes.
The industry SHOULD and COULD adapt to this by offering their own high quality copies of TV episodes via BitTorrent.
The TV companies would be in control of their content again and would be free to include advertising. This is a whole new distribution medium for them with virtually no operating costs (due to the highly distributed nature of BitTorrent). Any revenue generated by advertising in this channel would be total profit!
I would be happy to download "official" torrents that included ads rather than take my chances with dodgy video and lipsync etc.
Unfortunately, the TV companies will probably try to wrap it up in some evil DRM to prevent other people cutting the ads out and seeding the high-quality ad-free versions.
G4 Hackintosh
What we need is an industry supported downloadable TV service. Adverts are a non issue for me and I don't even care if they're inserted into my downloaded shows. Downloading TV is the only way that I can get english language content here in Italy. It also provides access to shows that haven't been released on DVD yet.
Seriously, I bought season 1 of Twin Peaks on DVD the day it was released. After watching it with my girlfriend she wanted to see season 2, but there's no DVD. So I downloaded it, quickly and painlessly. When it comes out on DVD I'll be buying that too.
It *potentially* hurting advertising sales for the TV networks. BUT, the TV networks don't play anything worthy over here anyway... so for me to download Farscape - ripped from an already free to air broadcast - will be hurting the sales of nobody.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
There is a problem with TV timeshifting that we never saw with music swapping. The devices used to do it are usually controlled through a service and much easier for companies to cockblock through firmware and hardware restrictions. That's the thing to look out for.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
Heck, I can beat that.
SKY is running the new Battlestar Galactica seried already - which won't start airing in the US until January 15th.
Meanwhile, I'm *cough*told*cough* you can get up to episode 6 online.
Not really.
The advert revenue on cable allows the cable company to reduces the cost to the subscriber*, effectively the cable subscriber is paying for their subscription in two ways: money and viewing time.
With cable internet it's a different kettle of fish: the subsciber's $49 goes to the cable company, but the revenue from the advertisement doesn't go anywhere near the cable company, it is used by the site maintainer to pay for bandwidth costs. In this case the cable internet subscriber is paying their subscription and the costs of a third party.
The two cases aren't really equivalent: the former is a simple trade of one cost for another, the latter is two costs - one from the cable company and one from the website owner.
* as long as you assume that the cost of the subscription really is > $49. Which it probably isn't, but such is the way of business.
You're right. This is nothing new. I don't watch TV, so only got into Buffy when a friend asked me to download some episodes for him, as I had adsl. This was a few of years ago when broadband was quite rare. I ended up watching them with him and was hooked. Since then, I've bought six boxed sets of Buffy and Angel DVDs and am planning on buying more. Another case of piracy leading to sales that they wouldn't otherwise have had.
I would not download anything with commercials in it! But i would pay a "small" amount
to be able to download episodes of my favorite shows "without" any commercials and drm.
I figure about 2-5 dollars for a 45minute tv episode
in a 350Mb xvid/ogg file i could downloaded at full speed sounds ok.
*A friend of mine* has been enjoying http://tvtorrents.net/ for a while now. And, yes it is the best thing - No TiVo, no ads, HDTV quality and usually 350MB per hour of DivX encoded video. Plus you can search.
;-)
Just check the site the day after airing, and pull down the torrent. The HDTV-LOL versions are some of the best for Galactica, Lost, all the hot shows.
According to my friend, that is.
JP
Stiny! Get me a danish!
Nice idea except given the global nature of BitTorent how are they gonna target the advertising on a geographic basis ?
A $100 voucher against my next whitegoods purchase at Wal-Mart isn't much use to me in the UK....
Speaking of which, it'd hurt their partners overseas too. Our only English language entertainment channels on satellite in the UK are run by Sky TV. Personally I ditched my subscription to their service a couple of years ago and now I get shows like 24 and Alias months ahead of their customers. I don't imagine I'm the only one to have cancelled subscriptions coz of the beauty of BitTorrent.
As TV over p2p gets more popular these companies will feel the financial pain, and while that may give me some personal satisfaction it's also the time when the really big guns get rolled out of the courts and installed into my ISPs switch room...
I have crappy reception, a larger monitor than my TV, and I have the option of downloading Enterprise in HD, 6 months before the episode airs in Australia. I don't have to wait until 10:30pm to watch it either.
Channel 9, what do you seriously expect me to do?
There was a big fracas in the 19th century about player piano rolls.
But what if I had recorded every epsode that was BRODCAST for FREE over the air?
The difference is only in mechanism, not result. I have a friend who managed to tape every episode of st:tng, now if he were to transfer those to computer and clean all the comercials out watch them off the hard-drive, how is his result any different than someone who downloaded those episodes?
How is one copyright infringement (for him), where the other is leagaly allowed time-shifting which the supreme court upheld as fair use. Or rather how does it make sense to have the distinction.
The tv show's producers made thier money by selling advertising when it was originally broadcast. Unlike movies (well recently they've added blantant comercials, and they've had 'product placement' for some time) which derive thier revenue from theatrical release and sales of individual copies.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
I've downloaded Batman: animated series episodes and when the dvd was released, I bought it.
I've downloaded The Critic episodes and when the dvd was released, I bought it.
I'm downloading Justice League episodes and if/when the dvds are released, I will buy them.
Hail to the king, baby!
Something I've always wanted to see (and for awhile, thought Wal-Mart[1]) was television episodes available for purchase either the next week or the next day after it's aired on a DVD-1 or DVD-2 sized DVD (these are like those semi-cool mini-CD's you see, DVD-1 can hold 1.36 GB and DVD-2 can hold 2.47 GB). And I don't mean a crappy 4:3 non-anamorphic release, but a release based on the HDTV airing of the show with the fully Dolby Digital treatment.
Sell this for $1-3 (dumping the price in half after, say, a month or so) and I'd probably buy television episodes that way (even if I did watch it). There's something like 24 episodes per season, that works the cost out to (to buy a full season)--
24 x $3 = $72
24 x $2 = $48
24 x $1 = $24
And in these smaller formats (especially DVD-1) they can get away with using a lower bitrate, reserving the higher bitrate for their season packages at the end of the year.
I'd be willing to bet if they sold television shows like this that you'd see piracy curbed. Especially if there wasn't any advertising during the shows, but there was advertising (that you couldn't skip past) at the beginning of the show (say, two or three 30 second commercials).
[1] Wal-Mart had a little display off to the side of their new DVD section that had TV episodes on a single DVD-5 disc (which was shrinkwrapped in a cardboard holder, no plastic case and no frills). They had first episodes for a couple of relatively recent TV series such as E.R. and others. The display said to check back every week for new episodes (which at the time I took to mean "current"). Unfortunately it's just been old episodes as far as I can tell.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
When the BBC finally caught up, they cut the last few episodes to ribbons, meaning that we didn't see Willow cutting anyone to ribbons... but I already had my high-quality, ad-free, uncut and unbranded pirate copies in which that naughty, naughty girl ties up, tortures, skins and burns that lucky, lucky guy...
... I'm sorry, I drifted off a little there.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
FOX, if you don't want people to download Malcolm in the Middle why have the last two episodes had the first HALF preempted by a bunch of washed up jockos jawboning over great tackles of the day?
Much the same could be said about breaking Scott Peterson alerts, car chases, and 5-minute elaborations in detail about severe thunderstorms 150 miles away.
Broadcasters don't respect the value of their own product.
none of these shows are available in the uk
In addition to geographic unavailability, another good reason that people download shows is that they don't own a television at all.
I offer myself as an example. About a year and a half ago, I realized that the only show I enjoyed was The Simpsons. The rest was a regrettable waste of time.
So I freed up space in my house by getting rid of the box itself, freed up personal time to do interesting things, and thanks to robotolabs' Simpsons torrents, I still get to watch this Sunday's episode of The Simpsons without having to wait the decade or so before it comes out on DVD.
> Since then, I've bought six boxed sets of Buffy and Angel DVDs and am planning
> on buying more. Another case of piracy leading to sales that they wouldn't
> otherwise have had.
Why buy them when you could download them? Did you choose to support the show, or are you rich enough that it didn't make any difference whether you downloaded them or bought them? Or are you one of those odd `physical media fetishists`, like the ones that prefer inferiour vinyl over CD because `it smells better` or has `bigger cover art` or whatever? Just interested.
Admiral: "What do we want most?" Homer: "Peas!" Admiral: "Exactly. Peace! And how do we get peace?" Homer: (trying to reach the peas with a knife) "With a knife!"
It just doesn't work in German, especially since they translated it literally.
Care for another one? (Movie, this time):
"He jammed the radar!" ... Do anything, but don't translate it as "Er hat das Radar mit Marmelade verschmiert" (he dirtened the radar with jam).
Ok, there are always counter examples: the only movie where I'd prefer the dubbed version over the original is Ghostbusters. Not to mention "The Persuaders" (Die Zwei).
There's an interesting article on engadget on using a combination of bittorrent and RSS to get a tivo-like system on your pc that will download shows automatically for you.
Pot Noodle ran an ad campaign where they were calling themselves the "slag of all snacks." People complained to the ASA and Pot Noodle had to pull the advert, despite arguing that it wasn't offensive because they were slagging themselves off.
If its EVER publicly broadcasted in the receivers market, how can you call it piracy if they download a copy of the SAME show from the SAME source..
I consider that time-shifting.. Just because you didn't record it that particular night, shouldn't mean you cant get it later.
Same goes for music too. If it was on the radio, and you download a radio copy later.. it still should be legal.
I guess until they can mandate pay-per-view rules on all broadcast audio/video. They we are all screwed anyway.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
one thing that people dont tend to share or "pirate" are sports games. you never see any nba games in any of the suprnova.org or tvtorrents.net websites. wonder why that is though. Occationally you see some old classic games like the 1990 nba all-star game, or contraveral ones like the pistons-pacers game last week - but almost never current regular season games. they dont show phoenix suns games in east coast canada :(
my blog
Just recently I've found myself watching program A, then the adverts start. Rather than watch them I channel-flick and start watching program B.
Lately, I've found that many stations have begun syncing their commercials with each other so that you can't do that anymore. When there's a commercial on...YOU MUST WATCH IT...
"Spare me the anti-capitalist bullshit."
Spare me the cultural-imperialistic, greedy bastard nonsense please.
- When I can buy a DVD at the same bloody time you can, you will beright. Now you are not.
- When Terminator 5 is brought out over the world, AT THE SAME DATE, you are right. Now you are not.
- When iTunes offers service globally, you are right. Now you are not.
THAT is what anti-globalists see. There is nothing anti-kapitalist about it. There is a -difference- in globalization for -people- and globalization for corps, and if you do not reckognize that, you are blind.
"/Dread"
Advertising is only the surface of the mind-control. The main body of the messages which drill into your brain while you are being hypnotically opened by the fine-tuned strobing of the CRT are built into the fine shows themselves.
How can you tell it's working. . ?
Look at the Ukraine: As of two days ago, they ALSO had a fraudulent election split almost exactly down the middle. And when the criminal element there tried to say, "We won. Now go back to your homes," the citizens there had the balls to gather 300,000 people strong in front of the parliament buildings in freezing rain and demand that the criminal leadership step down immediately and that the guy they actually voted for be put in. The country is on the edge of un-civil war, (or they were yesterday; I've not reviewed the situation yet this morning.)
In any case, Ukrainians have many, many more balls than the fine people in the U.S.
Now how could this be so?
I'll tell you. It's a hundred things really, but a brief sampling of the list include. .
Flu shots filled with brain-damaging extra goodies like Mercury making people slow, tired and STUPID.
An education system pushing the deliberately broken 'food pyramid' at kids, which makes people fat, over-starched, slow, tired and STUPID.
Cell phones which addle the brain, making people slow, tired and STUPID.
Hyper-promotion of electronic entertainment, not the least of which is television with it's moronic messages and distractions making people slow, tired and STUPID.
How do you steal an election? Diebold will get you the fake numbers, but if you want to stop the people from storming the halls of government to tar and feather a criminal psychopathic 'leader', you need to make sure that they HAVE NO BALLS.
Free television is great. Only the chumps in marketing give a hoot. As long as people are watching the flicker-box, the Powers That Be are laughing. At you.
Because you are slow, tired and STUPID.
-FL
The American TV industry is missing a major reason to download their shows: Some people just CANNOT buy the programming. At any cost.
Overseas TV fans who speak English download the shows because they want to watch their favourite stuff
a) In English (no dubbing crap)
b) At the same time it airs, not a few years latter
I would be more than happy to pay for the same contents that a regular DirectTV subscriber. But I just can't, so I either download the shows or I'm stuck with whatever the TV station airs. I believe they are premiering Buffy season 6 in a few weeks.
I would buy karma from ebay but I'm not sure I can trust the seller.
There was a big fracas in the 19th century about player piano rolls.
h tm
from
www.lespagesauxfolles.ca/Academic/chap04.
The Software Act began the erosion of a basic distinction between copyright and patent by suggesting that useful objects were eligible for copyright. In judicial cases such as Diamond v Diehr (1981), the court held that 'when a claim containing a mathematical formula implements or applies that formula in a structure or process which, when considered as a whole, is performing a function which the patent laws were designed to protect (for example, transforming or reducing an article to a different state of things), then the claim satisfies the requirements of [the copyright law].'
This finding ran against the grain of the long-standing White-Smith Music Publishing Co v Apollo Co decision of 1908 where the Supreme Court ruled that a player piano roll was ineligible for the copyright protection accorded to the sheet music it duplicated. The roll was considered part of a machine rather than the expression of an idea. The distinction was formulated according to the code of the visible: a copyrightable text must be visually perceptible to the human eye and must 'give to every person seeing it the idea created by the original. (ibid)
The analogy of a computer program to a player piano seems apt, since both are basically sets of instructions for a machine. The 1981 court decision uses some torturous logic in order to essentially overturn the previous court's decision.
Hell, invent a system that allows you to download and share TV WITHOUT the ads legally where the actual creators of the show get a bigger cut instead of the middleman (the ones making the boxes), and I'd jump on it.
I bought (starting jan 2004), 12 boxes of series, somewhere between 30 and 40 movies, and then I'm not even counting the cheap ones (the ones you pick up in some store between 3 and 10 €). I bought a single season of farscape, until I noticed that they had put ADVERTISEMENT on the DVDs. You know, if you add them as trailers, I won't nag, but if they FORCE you to watch ads on stuff you actually pay for I don't buy that crap anymore.
Hell, everyone reading slashdot knows how bittorrent works, and 99% of us have used it for Evil. Except for perhaps students, most of us would be willing to pay for quality shows if we got DVD quality at good prices. Boxes are usually priced pretty well, unless it's a money hungry franchise drawing it's dying breath (*cough* Star Trek *cough*), and make up the largest part (counting discs, not packages) of my collection.
Will I ever buy the 23 seasons of Friends? Nope. Will I/Have I downloaded them? Nope, not even "for a friend". Yes, leeching this stuff is stealing, but if I hadn't downloaded it first, I most likely wouldn't have seen it anyway.
The movie industry is so keen on stopping piracy that they've actually hindered themselves more in this direction than they have helped their cause. DVD Zones stand in the way of promoting their shows across continents. So now we buy DVD players that can be put in region free modes. Copyright protection schemes like CSS have failed miserably and hindered a free and open adoption of DVD movies in free operating systems.
Agreed... it's ridiculously difficult to get hold of specific world content on local lowest-common-denominator tv and cable networks. It's all about niche programming, and the tv model simply isn't built that way. It's built for mass appeal and maximum eyeballs. It's fine if you're a member of the mass, but if you're on the fringe, you get nothing.
My current tv annoyance is sport (hmmmm... posting on Slashdot about sport, uh... try the Wikipedia entry?). I'm from Australia, and I'm currently in Canada. I want to watch every international rugby union test I can stand (well, maybe not Bolivia vs Romania, but all the big ones). The problem is that Canadians only ever want to watch curling and ice hockey*, which leaves me out in the cold without any pants.
Here in Canada I've bought cable, and then digital cable, and then the specific international sports channels, and they still don't carry the rugby games. I'm seriously considering cutting my cable off and sending the equivalent cash to friends in other countries so they can vidcap the games and send them to me, either over the net or on posted DVD-Rs. My timeframe is shorter than new episodes of Stargate SG-1 too, since it's inevitable that I'll end up accidentally seeing the scores on a news site or when my dad emails me next, and then I'm screwed.
The kicker is that I have money for this. I will pay. No-one seems to want my cash, though.
* Don't get me wrong, I think ice hockey is awesome. It's just that I like rugby more. Curling, on the other hand, does nothing for me.
I've lost track of the number of Anime series/movies that I've downloaded, watched, and ended up eventually buying the DVD of.
Heck, Anime companies have made statements that amount to "Sue the pirates? Heck, no, they're our best customers!"
Most of them don't even pay macrovision to turn that bit on for the "copy protection" because "We don't believe in paying money for something that doesn't help the business." It doesn't stop piracy, it doesn't increase sales (actually decreases them!), and it annoys the legitimate customers.
I don't read AC A human right
"Globalisation is an inevitable consequence of a levelling of the playing field (Indian programmers can now compete with US ones; good for them) due to falling costs of transporting goods and information."
yes and thats how it should be. people shouldnt make more in america then people in nigeria. the problem is that thats not how the US thinks. you see the US has these things called tariffs. now when you are able to produce somethign cheaper and easier in a poor country, as an american can produce, america will slap a tax on it. this is so americans can afford Rx drugs, reality tv shows, SUV's and other sorts of soma.
if it was really a "globalized" world, south american farmers would make 5cents an hour BUT SO WOULD AMERICAN FARMERS. and the cost of living world wide would equal out to somewhere way under the poverty line, with corporations being our feudal lords.
im sure if you actually read any of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's books, you might have a better understanding of other cultures in which to base these sorts of observations on.
-