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How Battlestar Galactica Killed TV
Don Melanson writes "Following up on the MPAA going after torrent sites, you may be interested in Mindjack's latest feature - Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV by Mark Pesce. It includes a post-script written in reponse to the recent Torrent site shutdowns." From the article: "While you might assume the SciFi Channel saw a significant drop-off in viewership as a result of this piracy, it appears to have had the reverse effect: the series is so good that the few tens of thousands of people who watched downloaded versions told their friends to tune in on January 14th, and see for themselves. From its premiere, Battlestar Galactica has been the most popular program ever to air on the SciFi Channel, and its audiences have only grown throughout the first series. Piracy made it possible for 'word-of-mouth' to spread about Battlestar Galactica."
What would have happened if people had downloaded the show, watched it, hated it, and told their friends not to tune in? Viewing figures would be down, and piracy could be held accountable. This sort of result works both ways, folks
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
Another example of this is effect is anime fansubs. It's the free fansubs that create a market for a show; if there's enough of a market, the anime will hopefully get licensed, and will be profitable. If an anime is licensed, but hasn't been fansubbed, chances are it will have a much smaller market & not be as profitable.
Join moola.com, play games to earn money.
1). Too much money is involved in advertising and programs
2). There will always be a readily available audience for TV
3). People are "lazy" when it comes to viewing, it's easier to flip through channels and see right away what's on than start a download, wait, watch, decide it sucks and try to find something else.
R(k)
This is how I was introduced to Doom and Windows, if I recall correctly.
Piracy is as beneficial as it is "damaging". If not moreso. Example: I download all my PC games to try them out before buying. I never want to get screwed, and a lot of games are lemons that you can't return.
Unfortunately that doesn't work for everyone since it's kind of a self-enforced honor system, but I call bullshit whenever I hear such major loss of profit due to filesharing followed by a record quarterly earnings from the same companies.
I completely missed the miniseries. But when the new season was getting ready to start, a friend said I should check it out. I was rather skeptical because of the 'backlash' that a lot of the sci-fi crowd had against a lot of the changes from the original.
The first thing I did was find a torrent of the miniseries, and I was hooked, absolutlely. I then made sure to watch every single episode of the new series because it really was that good. But I never really would have gotten intereted unless I had that torrent.
Sci-Fi just got so much *right* with BG. The free downloads on their site, the official commentary podcast, and the show itself is just outstanding. I'm waiting eagerly for next season.
--- witty signature
Well NRA, you see, by paying your cable bills but not watching the show, you're not stealing at all.
Wait -- oh shit.
I mean....um....You ARE stealing...because...you...paid...for...
it?
I've got nothing. I don't watch the ads regardless of where I watch it, so that's a bullshit claim. I pay extra to get the premium channels all my favourite TV shows are on(and I'm guessing sci-fi is a premium channel as well), so realistically the mpaa are just assholes.
It's been a long time.
By the same argument, if you have a radio, it should be legal to download the music that is played on the radio. This argument becomes even stronger if you have XM radio or the like.
These people want to be in control over everybody. This is why they increasingly want to create laws limiting the rights of people to information. When their goal is reached, there will be no such thing as movies, music, books, software, etc. All people will be brainwashed from childhood into a state of near unconsciousness. Only the few elite will be learned and have access to information. They will control the masses to obtain their own goals. And we will all be slaves, in eternal bondage of the mind.
That, not profits, is the goal of the RIAA, MPAA, and Microsoft. Otherwise, they would wake up to the obviousness of piracy's advantages to their business. (For example, some businesses spend a ton of money for publicity. Piracy provides this for free.) That is why we must fight these evil organizations.
I have much respect for the "as far as I'm concerned" point of view. However, in this case, you're just plain wrong. There is a qualitative difference between recording a show when it's broadcast (via VCR or Tivo or whatever) and getting somebody else who recorded it to make a copy for you after the fact.
This different is not subtle, nor is it something you can dismiss with a wave of the hand. It doesn't go away when concealed behind an "as far as I'm concerned."
This different is not subtle. . .
Indeed, it means that the person who uploaded the show has done something wrong.
KFG
I usually don't reply to blatant flamebait like this, but it's not an excuse for piracy. BSG is on TV at an awkward time. Downloading the torrent has made this TV show accessible, and has increased the popularity of the show.
Without BT it might not be as popular. Why is that a bad thing?
Truth is, we pay for TV. If we miss a show that we like, and download it, isn't that akin to recording it on a PVR? Commercials or not?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
No... I'm going to give you the same answer to this type of statement that I alway's have:
READ your TOS - as far as I can tell, and that some laywer friends of mine can tell, You are NOT liable for 'skipping advertising of any kind' when you sign your agreement with your local broadcasting company.
The advert's are nothing more than a nuisance to most people, and do absolutely nothing except provide for 'snack/bathroom break' time during the show. As far as 'advertisers/distributors
Sometimes people just have to learn and adapt to change, it is one of the requirements of being a living thing.
The problem with that argument is that it doesn't actually prove anything.
And the problem with your argument is that it's not analogous to the situation at hand.
I rob a convenience store
RIght there - your analogy is broken right from the very beginning, because robbing a convenience store is *IN NO WAY* similar to downloading something from the internet (regardless of how the MPAA/RIAA apologists try to spin it.)
The problem with your analogy is that software can be copied without affecting the source. Your analogy would be more like this:
"I go to a convenience store and use my Star Trek Replication Device to copy a can of Diet Coke, without taking away the existing Diet Coke. I like it so much that the next day, I go out and buy a case. I tell my friend that I like Diet Coke, and he buys a case."
Control, control, you must learn control...
1) -- You did not watch the ads. in so doing you have taken revenue away from me, my family and our porche...
2) you did not watch the show in the manner which I THE LORD MPAA have deemed the only one worthy
3) You are thinking... STOP IT!! I will tell you how to think and what to watch...
now go... and download no more.
Good. We consumers have made it quite clear we're not interested in doing business with you; we've chosen our own method of distribution, and we don't need to pay you to do it for us.
P2P apologists continue to be the most overt example of /. hyprocracy. Like it or not, this is purely a question of the copyright owners wanting to control the means by which their product is distributed (the "license", shall we say). In fact, it doesn't make a whit of difference whether /. readers believe that torrents have a positive effect on the popularity of tv shows because it is the perogative of the copyright owners to decide how their product is marketed. This story is nothing but a single piece of anecdotal evidence. And there isn't even the spectre of poor, exploited artists to elicit sympathy.
/.ers... instead of persecuting GPL violators, you should be thanking them.
I would like to see the same arguments applied to GPL violators. After all, unauthorized use of GPL software can't decrease the legitimate use of that software. It's not "stealing" because no one is being deprived of property, and the companies that choose to violate the GPL weren't the ones that were going to contribute in the first place. But now consider all the programmers who are being exposed to GPL via their employers' unscrupulous practices. The same guy who today is writing proprietary Linux extensions may someday cash in his stock options and spend his "retirement" writing the next generation networking code. And think about the benefit to the up & coming programmers in the 3rd world, who are benefiting from working on outsourced Linux-based code instead of outsourced Windows-based code. 10 years from now, that pool of programmers will make Linux even stronger. So come on
Now go ahead readers & nitpick my analogy. But you know it to be true in essence.
-a
Tiered pricing.
Charge less for people who can not pay as much or people less inclined to pay at all. It's the same idea behind the senior citizens discount, or kids eat free, or midnight or matinee movie showings.
In this case, it's give away the programming (well, let people watch it stripped of the advertising) if the viewer is someone willing to pay to go through the trouble of downloading it instead of just turning on the TV.
The problem with this model for TV (or movies for that matter, the article attempts to differentiate between the two but on the internet there is no difference) is that what happens when the cost of getting the program on the internet goes away? What happens when most people find it just as easy to get a program on their computer as they do to get it on TV?
What happens when you can get bittorrent on AOL?
The problem with the "little bit of piracy for a lot of real viewers" is that it only works when piracy is inconvenient. If the costs of pirating the program become less than the costs of getting the program legitimately for most viewers, then the model doesn't work anymore.
As things like bittorrent become more and more user friendly, MPAA et. al. are going to have to issue more and more lawsuits to keep the costs of piracy high and preserve the model, otherwise more and more regular viewers will become pirate viewers and the model won't work anymore.
paintball
"I go to a convenience store and use my Star Trek Replication Device to copy a can of Diet Coke, without taking away the existing Diet Coke. I like it so much that the next day, I replicate a case. I tell my friend that I like Diet Coke, and he replicates his own case. Now none of us buy Diet Coke, and they go bankrupt. Noone will bother inventing new soft drinks anymore, since there's no profit to be made."
The whole "this is profitable" argument relies that a chain of events leading up to more sales (or other money-generating events like ad impressions).
If you have Star Trek Replication Technology. You also have the Star Trek Socialist Techno-Eutopia that goes with it, in which there is no money, and no RIAA.
Q. E. D.
You can't take the sky from me...
You need to read the article and think through the implications of facts it discusses. The most pertinent is that viewership evidently increased, possibly by orders of magnitude because of the "piracy." Now think about this, most people who subscribe to cable don't just subscribe to one channel. So, they exercise a choice about what they are going to watch. Therefore, from the SciFi channel's management's view point, "piracy" had an effect upon the decisions of paying viewers. In effect, "piracy" increased their revenue stream, possibly by orders of magnitude. Where is the loss that the use of "theft" implies?
This same effect has been shown in the case of music CDs as well. The real issue of the RIAA is not "piracy," since it is easily shown that there IS NO FINANCIAL LOSS to any of their members. The issue lies in the fact that the RIAA represents middle-men, not artists. The potential ability of the artists - who are in effect the RIAA's cash cows - to go independent and cut out the middlemen entirely by using the internet as the artist's primary distribution channel scares the "pigs" out of the RIAA's membership.
Also, the use of the terms "piracy" and "stealing" and "theft" are confusing and erroneous language. Nothing has been stolen. What has happened can best be described - if you insist trying to think in terms of a crime - as "dilution" of the nominal value of the "property." On a per-copy basis, the "legitimate owner" has to sell more copies, less expensively to clear the same amount they would if market forces permitted them to continue to peddle legal copies at the inflated prices they would prefer. The very fact that "piracy" occurs indicates that their product is both over-priced and demonstrably less available than it should be for the best sales. The RIAA could easily end their own priacy worries by reducing prices and increasing production.
If the article's author is correct, BBC may well have quietly encouraged the "piracy" of the new Doctor Who to take advantage of the same effects that SciFi observed. Nearly 17% of the population of Great Britain tuned in to the first official broadcast of the new show. If that number was weighted to reflect that actual probable segment of the British population from which viewers are likely drawn for a show such as Doctor Who, that fraction has to be nearly 100% of the probable potential viewers, maybe even more than that. They can't have anticipated anywhere near that kind initial response to a new show, not even a new Doctor Who. Once more, you have ask where is the loss that the use of words like "stealing" and "theft" implies?
Lastly, the article's author argues that the behaviour we observe is nothing more than what generations of broadcast radio and TV have lead the public to expect and how to behave. Payment is made indicrectly through the purcahse of products that have been advertised on the show, or over the radio between songs. This behaviour has been modified by the enabling technologies of computers and the internet. Never the less, it is what the industry has lead their consumers to expect.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
"a female Starbuck is heresy"
But she's hot, and therefore all is forgiven.
+++ATH0
How is it not like setting the VCR?
You haven't actually made an argument yet.
No. You haven't actually made an argument, you've just said "it's wrong".
Explain to me exactly how downloading something off BT is different from setting my VCR timer. Then I'll buy your argument, maybe. So far, you've just made a couple vague hand-wavings and said "fire baaaaaaaad".
If TV producers had brains, what they'd do is supply free downloads of their own, with ads, requiring only that you fill out a survey. If they were to do that, they could do really spiffy ad-targetting that is impossible with network TV.
The thing about good ad targetting is that people are more likely to watch the ad and more likely to buy the advertised product. In other words, if the people making these shows stopped fighting the internet and started using the internet, they could actually make more money on ads.
But they're too wrapped up in old models that are hard to maintain in modern times. But someone will do it, make a mint, and put them out of business.
The cake is a pie
You've taken the StarTrek replicator argument a little too far, and you're missing a key point of real-world economics. No matter how easy it is to download a show it still costs you something. As the article points out, as long as the cost of getting everything free is just high enough, revenues still increase. To wit:
Someone gives me a can of Diet Coke (or a TV show), and I really like it. I like it so much, in fact that I decide I want to drink (watch) it all the time. I look into getting it for free, by making my own at home (downloading all the episodes), but I decide that it is easier in the long run to buy it at the store (watch it when it comes on), and I do so. Diet Coke sales (show viewership) increase, and everyone is happy.
There are two key points in that story. The first is that if you expose a large number of people to a new thing, you are likely to increase consumption by finding those people who didn't know about your product, but like it. In fact, companies do this all the time. Everytime there is a new cola variety or gum brand, marketers flood big events and college campuses, giving away free samples with the hope that people will like what they've tried, go buy it, and tell their friends. Premium cable channels do it as well, by offering "Free Weekends" packed with programming that will encourage viewers to subscribe to that channel.
The second point is the Someone. In the case of new colas, etc., that someone is the company (or marketing company), enticing you to try something new, but only giving away a set amount of the free stuff. With TV shows via bittorrent, that someone is giving away as much as they can, but despite that, word of mouth has driven people to watch the shows via cable, which increases their revenue, because the cost of getting it for free is just a little too high for most.
The fact of the matter is that downloading shows and software takes time, effort, computer hardware, and some technical know-how, making the cost of getting the shows greater than just watching it when it comes on. While I don't agree with the sue-happy tactics of the MPAA/RIAA, their lawsuits are ensuring that the cost of obtaining the shows/music is still just a little higher than buying it at the store. Sure it would be easier (and, I believe, more effective) to lower the cost of the cable TV or music CDs, but that affects their bottom-line directly, and they really don't like that.
Because of the nature of electricity travelling through a wire broadcast to thousands or millions of households, it is not realistically possible to determine Television ratings by trying to discover if all the televisions are tuned into a certain channel(and the fact that there are a wide variety of cable recievers makes this task virtually impossible -- if they were all the same, one could concievably take the Zth at frequency wc to determine the number of band-pass filters being used to extract the particular channel from the cable connection, but the circuits are different on old Sony TVs from the 1970s, younger sets from the 80s, and modern sets from the 90's and today, making such an approach useless). Because of this, not watching a TV show on the comedy network won't get them a penny more than me watching it there. Your arguement falls apart immediately because nobody knows if my TV is set to channel 2 or 200. If someone calls and asks? Oh fuck, yeah, I'm watching the daily show on the comedy network! Right now! Yep! Sure! They won't though.
Your argument also is a bit weak. Cable companies, like ISPs, provide access not content. The fact that you pay the cable company and could watch the show means nothing to the cable channel producing the content.
Not my problem. I'm paying to watch the show. That makes me a paying customer, not a pirate. I modded my x-box too which I'm positive Microsoft is pissed off about, that doesn't make my x-box illegal(especially since I don't use it to run illegally pirated software, just good old fashioned Xebian).
Should cable channels have other ways of paying for their content? I believe they would love to hear any ideas you have about alternatives to ratings that could be used to pay their production costs and produce a profit. If you figure that one out, you'd be this generation's equivalent of Ted Turner.
Again, you mistake me for someone who cares. When I pay to get into a concert, it's not my problem that they only make money on t-shirts. When I walk into a store and buy only the item that is on sale, it's not my problem that they're playing a loss-leader game and won't make any money unless I buy something else. When I buy a monthly bus pass and use it fifty times a day, again it's not my problem that they only break even if I only use it 3-4 times a day. When I watch a movie with product placement, and I don't even consider their product once, that's not my problem either.
Making the studios money *ISN'T* my job. That's theirs. If I'm paying for something -- and I am, in fact I'm paying a premium for the channels with my favourite shows, my end of the bargin is done with. The fact that they can't make any money the way I consume simply isn't my problem.
It's been a long time.
However, you should understand that there is a causal relationship between not watching it on TV and the show not lasting.
Actually, it doesn't matter at all if I watch it or not. The only ones that really matter are the people in the sample set for ACNielsen watch it. AC Nielsen makes their money by alleging that their sample set is representative of the entire tv-viewing population.
It's not my job to make sure I conform to that sample set. It's their job to figure out what I'm watching - if they want to be in the business of reporting on what people are watching.