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."

Comments

Re:Exactly

[Beolach]

The only thing that suffers in Mainstream music. But that market could only go down anyways. It was already fully inflated.

That's the big thing. Not only is it fully inflated, I would say it's over-inflated, and due to pop. Everyone has there own opinions, and I'm sure a lot of people actually do like "mainstream" music, but IMO "mainstream" music owes its popularity more to the record labels strangleholds on distribution than to consumers honest opinions on the quality of the music.

The thing is, I think the RIAA is scared way more than they should be of P2P. They were just as scared of radio, and audio cassette tapes. Neither one killed their market. I don't think P2P will either, in the long run. Affect it, yes, but record labels will probably still be signing contracts with musicians 50, 100 years from now. Probably even longer.

Re:OT - Re:Lisp's problem

[GCP]

Again, good questions.

In a meeting I attended a few months ago, Guido said that one of his regrets was including too much "functional language" stuff in Python initially. Things like map, fold, etc. This was in the context of future directions of Python. He was also unenthusiastic about the idea of introducing macros into Python. The overall impression I got was that, despite the claims of Lispers that everything is getting more Lisplike, his intention was to make Python less Lisplike over time. I was quite frustrated by that as were a few others in the audience, but most attendees thought that was a splendid idea. I got the sense that he places a higher priority on ease of use for the masses than on what Lispers consider power for the elite.

Still, despite frustrating warts, I DO find Python easier to remember after a month of working in some OTHER language than something like Perl, so Python has replaced Perl in my toolbox as my Swiss Army Knife for on-the-spot, one-off applications. For those, lots of clever abstractions aren't necessary.

As for Ruby...I prefer the syntax to Python's, but it has three strikes against it from my perspective. One, Matz's attitude toward internationalization is the Japanese equivalent of the ASCII-only mentality of many English speaking developers. He has stated that internationalization (the ability to work smoothly in any combination of languages) is a lower priority to him than enabling him to work with the LEGACY Japanese text data that he personally works with frequently. This is HIS language, optimized for HIS needs, and to the extent that it turns out to be useful to others, they are welcome to use it, too. For someone like me, who needs to make applications work smoothly in all major languages, his provincial approach makes Ruby completely unsuitable for serious, professional applications, so I don't want to put too much time into it.

Two, Ruby's performance is far worse than even Python, and Python is pretty bad.

Three, Ruby's user community is not appreciably bigger than Scheme's, though it's growing faster. That means fewer and less mature libraries, tools, reusable source, etc.

And as far as macros, Matz has already stated that Lisp macros are "too powerful" in his opinion and are intentionally absent in order to make Ruby better for "ordinary users". If you love Lisp, the lets-keep-it-simple-for-the-masses comments from both Guido and Matz are not encouraging.

As for placing Ruby on the "power continuum", I wouldn't try to quantify it, but my sense is that it is above Python, but below more interesting languages like CL, Scheme, Haskell, OCaml, etc. I can't be more specific, because Matz's provincial attitudes about internationalization make it useless for me. It's not much more popular than Scheme, though -- not yet popular enough to have the mature tools, libs, and programmers needed for most commercial work.

So, if you are willing to suffer the costs of using a non-mainstream language, why not go with a more interesting language?