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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."
"Hey! There is this really good show that just came out! You should download it off bittorrent too!"
I watched every episode off of bittorrent. Friday nights at 10 is quite possibly the worst time ever for me to try and see a show. I downloaded the shows and watched them when convenient. I pay for cable and get sci-fi so I don't see how anyone could reasonably consider it stealing.
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.
Of course, now that they're rich, they call doing this 'being a criminal' and that it destoys the chance of new talent (or by extension, shows) being recognized and being able to survive, when the opposite is clearly true.
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
I work at the leading worldwide online retail store in the world (Amazon.com) and checking the stats for keyword Battlestar galactica in customer search shows a increase of about 750 % monthtly since the torrent incident was reported in the press.
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 often read stories about this kind of thing; where a {piece of software, band, CD, Movie, TV Show, etc} gains popularity and a 'legitamate' user base as a result of piracy.
The most commonly used example of this is Photoshop (followed closely by windows). Through a very high piracy rate, and a very low litagation rate, photoshop gained so much market share that it is now the dominant application in its field (bitmap editing).
Adobe didn't condone the piracy of their software, but they also didn't actively pursue minor cases. That is, if some high school kid pirated photoshop, and used to create images for personal use, no biggie. If a company pirated photoshop, and used it for commercial purposes (and got caught), send in the lawyers.
So many people used the software illegally at home that when it came time to make a purchase in the work place, the choice was obvious. People already knew how to use photoshop, and kept hearing the name of the application over, and over again.
By allowing piracy (or in this case, downloading of tv shows) to happen amongst a demographic that 'doesn't matter' (home users that cannot afford the software anyways, or a small number of people that would have downloaded BSG regardless) but have influence over a demographic that does (companies that can afford photoshop, or friends and family that have never heard of BSG), companies can gaing huge market share. It's a grey area, but it has proven positive effects.
The people who download are *series* viewers. These are very different from spontaneous viewers.
Series viewers are those who will pay to watch their favorite shows each week, and rarely (but sometimes) watch something at random. Usually anything they've watched at 'random' is actually something they've heard about beforehand, through advertising, friends, or downloading.
Here's the thing. While the TV model accomodates spontaneous viewing very well, it's very difficult for series viewers to catch each episode, especially since many of them don't show more than once a week. The Survivor community online (www.realiiity.com, etc) is a great example of this type of viewer. A friend and I exchanged video-cassettes to catch up on shows that we would miss but for which could schedule recordings.
The problem is, the series viewer is the one that suits the current format of show production. Unless you see each episode, the show isn't nearly as entertaining. Missing Week 5 of a 13 week program is simply *bad*.
There needs to be an alternative distribution system. Bit-Torrent farms provided this. In large majority, these are fans who will buy the DVDs for the commentary and bonus features *anyway*. Downloading isn't bad for series TV. It's good.
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?
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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."
I'm really amazed by how many people have said here that they think downloading stuff off the Internet is okay, that it's just like setting the VCR, that it's not stealing. That really blows my mind.
I don't see much point in making a moral argument. I get the impression that talking about karma here would get me laughed out of the room.
How about a pragmatic argument, then? You want to be able to download high-quality TV shows and movies over the Internet, right? You want somebody to set up a store, like the iTunes Music Store, where you can legally get high-quality TV shows and movies. Well, guess what? Every time somebody says "Bit Torrent is just like a VCR" or "it's not stealing" or "I'm not doing anything wrong when I download," you make it just that much harder for Apple or anybody else to open such a store.
Every time you say something like that, you push the date of our opening back by a month.
If you won't buy a moral argument, will you at least buy that one?
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
...is that it is mindnumbingly irrational.
"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). But if copying the first can is ok, why shouldn't the second, third or 100th be? Why should any of those you market it to bother to buy it instead of pirate it? You end up with a market with all marketeers and no customers.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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
Profit is the goal and motive, control of the masses is just something they do in order to reach that goal.
But they act in a way that sacrifices short-term profit in order to reach that goal. So it leads some people to think that profit isn't what they really care about.
I think what they really want is power, and profit is one way of obtaining power.
You can't take the sky from me...
Unless the torrent you're downloading contains commercials, including those from your local market, you are paying for fuck-all. You actually believe the $0.20 per month SCIFI gets from you entitles you to their entire lineup, commercial-free?
On my computer, I get Sci-Fi's entire lineup, commercial free, by pressing a "skip" button whenever a commercial starts and jumping immediately to the resumed show. I know that function's either hidden or nonexistant on commercial PVRs, but it's really only an incremental improvement on "mute" and "fast forward" anyway. Even permanently cutting out commercials on programs I want to archive is something that's always been possible for anyone with two VCRs and too much time on their hands.
So is what I'm doing unethical? Morally wrong but allowed via legal loophole? Illegal?
I hope not. If TV channel owners are expecting me to watch those commercials, they probably ought to have me sign something to that effect. On the other hand, if the Sci-Fi channel gets 20% of my viewing time but 0.4% of my cable bill, perhaps I'm not the one with whom they should be renegotiating a contract.
"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...
I think they DID find a cure. Didn't Picard win the Sexiest Man Alive contest in People Magazine one year? The "cure" for male pattern baldness in the 23rd Century is apparently what it has always been: power, fame, or fortune.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
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
Talk about making up bullshit.
The GPL exists so as to subvert copyright. By creating the GPL, RMS intended to turn copyright against itself. The GPL itself is an act of disrespect to copyright.
The only hypocrisy is in your mind.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
There was an interview with the article's author on the media report last week. You can listen to the audio or read the transcript here
And to think, about 20+ years ago, Metallica credited their rise to success mainly in part to the bootleggers who copied their shows and albums, and distributed them. Then, come the Napster era, Metallica turned right around on the very same thing that brought them to fame to begin with. I wonder how long it's going to take before the exact same thing happens in this case?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.