Slashdot Mirror
UK Leads in TV Show Downloading
dirutz writes "Britain has emerged as the world's biggest market for downloading pirated TV, with Australia being the second and the U.S. sitting at third. Among the top pirated TV shows, '24' ranks the first. 'The Simpsons,' 'Enterprise,' 'Stargate SG-1' and 'Battlestar Galactica' are also among the top hitters." 'Pirated' seems a strong word, at least for watching those programs which have been beamed (unencrypted) through my body. Where can I pay a quarter per show for moderate-quality, sanctioned torrent files?
...that this show is a repeat.
Lousy cheap networks.
You're doing it wrong.
OK, I'm just going to start submitting whatever story I see on the front page. A delay of a couple of hours for a duplicate story seems to be the going rate.
Damn those pesky terrorists
Can't I record an episode of the simpson with my vcr?
Yup. Delayed viewing. Explicitely permitted by law.
If yes, can my friends borrow the tape from me? Can I do that
Possibly. IANAL but it probably comes under fair use.
If yes, what if I have 1000 friends? is it still legal?
Then you're pushing your luck. Fair use takes into account various factors, including impact on the market. Letting a few friends see a copy is unlikely to have a huge effect on the market. It may result in a lost 'sale' (or rather fewer viewers resulting in lower revenue)for the broadcasters, but the effect will be small. Sharing with 1000 people is a lot more likely to have an effect. But you are limited here. It will take a long time to lend it to 1000 people. At the minimum, if only one person watches it at a time, it will be difficult for all of them to see it within a month.
If yes, can I use bitorrent to share the video??
No.
Isnt it odd how almost the entire top-list is sci-fi which lacks distribution in a lot of places, while there is pretty much no downloading of reality soaps?
Maybe the programming execs should get repeatedly fired for so completely and utterly failing to satisfy demand...
How about making comments down here with the rest of us, where we can reply to them properly and even moderate them?
For that matter, how about checking for dupes before posting a story?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Because Battlestar Galactica was aired on Sky 1, a satellite channel. The minimum subscription, last I checked, was £13.50 a month ($25) for the most basic package which includes it.
In addition, there's plenty of places that can't install a satellite dish (or install cable), such as rental properties or blocks of flats under tenancy agreements.
Even of the small percentage of the population (about 15% I think) who can watch Sky, some people may not have been around when it was broadcast, and downloading it is better than using tape, and simpler than ripping the ads yourself.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
I have the whole of Buffy, B5, Farscape, West Wing, and a bunch of other shows, all on (legal) DVD. I had seen every single episode on terrestrial TV or (more recently) on BitTorrent before buying them. Part of the reason I still buy the DVDs is the special features and part is just the accessibility of it.
In fact, with some shows, I've bought twice. The West Wing is almost a year behind on DVD in the States but has better features. So, I buy the Region 2 first, then the Region 1 a year later. In this respect, I've been suckered by studios playing dumb marketing games.
The only reason I download things is when I can't get them somewhere else (release date, stupid channels, etc). However, I can't think of a single thing I've downloaded that I haven't gone and bought the DVD for afterwards. I downloaded all of BSG (not having Sky One), and hit the "Pre Order" button on Amazon.co.uk the same evening.
I would far prefer it if this was made legal in some way, as you suggest. For example, I could buy from Amazon a combination of a download code and the DVD to be delivered later. If that mechanism existed for the content I want, I'd stop downloading TV shows in a heartbeat.
I know the downloading of such content is technically a crime and that authors have the moral right to control their creation, even if that means preventing it being distributed at all. (Incidentally, are the dumb TV execs morally the authors by virtue of being the copyright holders?) However, nowadays these TV shows are being withheld from sale for dumb reasons like scheduling, "synergy" and ratings wars. Screw them. Just let me buy the damn things. In the meantime, I'd prefer not to be called a pirate when I'm making a fair monetary offer for the content in question. It seems that as far as the studios are concerned a loyal viewer is either their bitch, or a criminal.
It would be far easier if "they" just released the damn show on DVD in good time. Then I wouldn't have to rob and plunder on the high seas just to have what I'm prepared to pay full price for. Arrr.
Well, lets think about it this way. If it costs $52 for me to buy a season box set of Stargate, and there are 22 episodes per set, lets call it $2.40 per episode. Then hack off a conservative amount for the old manufacturing and distribution costs and guesstimate that with the new lower costs they could sell them for $1 or $1.50 an episode and maintain their profit margin. Would we pay that?
If we're asking them to reduce their profit, that's probably not realistic.
I believe thats why being able to legally download a tv-show for a $1 an episode won't kill the dvd industry because a video clip on your computer, is a whole lot different to having a brand spanking new dvd in your hand to watch in your personal home theatre with 5.1 sound and amazing picture quality.
That's the entertainment equivalent of Bill Gates apocryphal, "640K should be more than enough for everybody."
Today anyone can download MPEG4(XviD) AVI's of current shows like Lost, 24, Joan of Arcadia, Smallville, Enterprise, Veronica Mars, Joey, Carnivale, etc that are higher resolution than DVD and with multi-channel audio - they have been sourced from the HDTV broadcasts and transcoded to MPEG4. Somet maintain the original HDTV resolution, some have been stepped down to something like 960x576p which is still better than DVD. These AVI files are also 2-4 times smaller than the equivalent MPEG2 files for standard DVD.
There are already multi-function stand-alone DVD players that can play DVDs of these high resolution AVI files and their number will only increase as the year progresses.
So, while for the majority of people today downloads don't directly compete with TV on DVD releases, it is only a matter of time, probably a rather short time, until they do.
Given that, let's take that $1 and skip the network middlemen. Don't give it to NBC/CBS/ABC/FOX/ETC with all their overhead. Give it directly to the production house. Follow along with me here:
The average half-hour sitcom costs $2M per episode to produce. The average hour-long drama costs about $4M per episode. These numbers are probably on the high side.
So an hour-long show would break even if it had an audience of 4 million who were willing to put up $1 each. If the paying audience was 5 million, that's a 25% profit. If the audience is willing to pay the money for each episode far enough ahead of time (say a "season pass" of $25 up front) that means the profit could be locked in before production even starts.
That lock-in is a HUGE risk reduction - most shows today are money losers until they make it into syndication, which requires about 4 seasons worth of shows. Yet more than 80% of shows are cancelled before their 4th season. Thus making a profit up front is BIG deal for the tv production industry.
So what should this hypothetical paying audience expect in return for this guaranteed profit they are handing the production company? How about, ownership of the results? A typical work-for-hire situation where the "employer" is the public at large. In other words, the production company gets paid with a nice return on their investment and ownership of the result passes immediately into the public domain upon payment.
Then anyone could share copies of the show with anyone else and not have to worry about "stealing from the artists" or being persecuted for commiting copyright infringement. The creators get paid and the audience gets the content, which they can burn to DVD themselves, or just delete off their hard disk once they are done with it knowing that somewhere out on the net there is an archive of the show if they need a copy again.
Since the end result is in the public domain, the local broadcasters could still broadcast it with their own commercials for the audience that isn't motivated enough to download it. Which means that local tv stations would have an interest in footing part of the bill themselves, kind of like syndication fees, the end result being that you don't need all 5 million people to still hit that $5M per episode mark - just 100 local stations across the world, each putting in $10k per episode would cut the paying audience number down to 4 million.
A lot of these numbers are pessimistic - for example, in its first year, Star Trek the Next Generation was carried in syndication on over 200 stations. In its first syndication run (i.e. second broadcast), Cheers was on 450 stations at an average of $3.6K per station per episod
When information is power, privacy is freedom.