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P2P and TV
Khuffie writes "According to Wired, Warner Bros. Entertainment recently passed on a pilot of a show called Global Frequency. However, due to a leak on bit-torrent the pilot episode has reached thousands of viewers who are clamouring for more, and has given the show a new lease on life. What's more interesting is what the show creator learned. From the article: "It changes the way I'll do my next project," said Rogers. If he owned the full rights, he said, "I would put my pilot out on the internet in a heartbeat. Want five more? Come buy the boxed set." Frankly, I'm all for this method of distribution, as I barely watch 'regular' TV anymore."
Hoffman added that the pilot's unauthorized distribution is "unacceptable and illegal ... no matter what the underlying motives" and said the company hasn't ruled out taking legal action "when it comes to stopping the illegal distribution of our copyright material."
Quick! Cover it up! People aren't supposed to know we're rejecting the GOOD shows in favor of more idiocy! God forbid that a television network pander to an intelligent clientele. After all, you're all supposed to slurp up the low cost, low profit, low intelligence, but HIGH MARGIN reality shows! Who wants to worry about actually pleasing customers? Just pander to the stupidity! That's the ticket!
Gah. And television networks wonder why no one is tuning in anymore. It must be because there isn't enough stupidity. Bring on Big Brother on Survivor Island where the worst singer is voted into fear factor stunts! In Dolby 5.1 no less! That'll bring in the ratings!
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Viral marketing
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Legal posturing.
This is *precisely* why Copyright law needs an overhaul. The supposed goal of copyright law is "to promote science and the useful arts".
How is allowing a company to stop this from seeing the light of day a promotion?
If you make something, and don't release it, you shouldn't be allowed to stop someone else from distributing it for no charge.
Frankly, I'm all for this method of distribution, as I barely watch 'regular' TV anymore.
Only on slashdot is stealing* encouraged and applauded when it involves Television, music, and movie copyrights, but God forbid anybody violates the GPL.
*Yes i know it's not technically stealing.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I hate it when things accidentally get uploaded onto a computer and then leaked out on bit torrent completely accidentally.
No sireee bob, no humans were involved in this "leak"...it was all accidental
One way to save.
But legal standing?
Really quite grave
Wherein lies SCOTUS, and ol'
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I think guy now "gets it" - he doesn't *need* the studios anymore. Get some funding, put together a pilot and a few episodes, and then do it himself. He could sell DVDs. He could do it via hostageware (until X amount of money or DVDs are sold, we won't make any more). He could make it, get it popular, then have a major network pick it up. Tell people that if he can raise X amount of money he can film a pilot episode (and if they're someone such as the producer/director of "Firefly" or "Battlestar Gallactica", maybe the fans would do it - look how much people raised to try and save "Star Trek").
Makes you wonder if Podcasting might not take this route. I once listened to the "Catholic Insider" (not because I'm Catholic, mind you, but I liked his reporting on the death on the last Pope), and he had a joke Podcast about podcasting in the future - where people all around the world online edit the video, set up production, then distribute it online with the ads built in (or people pay for certain individual content).
It's rather optimistic, and I'm not saying the major networks will "go away", but if gentlemen such as this guy can go "Woah - wait - now I have an option on how to promote my work", then there's a chance that it will bring a new level of pressure onto the networks. Which would mean more competition. And that is always good for the customer (I don't like using the word "consumer" for myself, sorry).
Of course, this is all just my opinion. I could be totally wrong. But I hope not.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
You're watching no ads. I'm not sure you realize how much money advertising brings to the table here.
There's nothing stopping Internet distribution from including ads. Sure, some people will remove them, but the majority wouldn't bother. There are also other models that can be explored, such as BitTorrent-like streaming where the final file is really not accessable to the user.
Want five more? Come buy the boxed set.
This is the "first hit free" model. It's based on the idea that most people aren't going to bother running around trying to find another free hit. They'll just pay for it. There will always be a small group trying to game the system, but they are insignificant.
Reading the article, my gut feeling is that this is nothing more than a grass-roots effort to get a show into production. Just like the fan-base of FireFly was built through BitTorrent, so will the fan-base of this show be build. I don't think it really has anything to do with the P2P aspect other than the fact that P2P technology was used for distribution. Similar things happened prior to the Internet with leaked tapes, whereupon copies upon copies were made.
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It's mind boggling to me that things like this don't put big, green, opaque dollar signs in the eyes of studio execs everywhere.
Even without effective DRM, studios could be raking in the cash RIGHT NOW via any number of online distribution methods. Yes, there would still be piracy, but it would convert at least SOME of it into dollars. RIGHT NOW!! If they want to keep pursuing DRM then fine, but they're losing money right now. What more incentive do they need??
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
Assume just a million people pay 10 bucks a piece for your DVD set of 5 shows (i.e. 1 DVD).
You are looking at a gross of 10 million dollars. You only pay taxes on the profits. So first take off your costs. Actors- Figure 50k per episode for the Stars and 10k per episode for all bit actors. But they might go for a percentage of the gross. Techs- Figure another 100k per episode for editors, etc.
Music- Another 100k per episode. Costumes and Sets- 300k one time setup plus 10k per episode- so say another 60k per episode.
Easily 200k per episode profits after the cost of producing quality dvd's. Take off 50% for the government and you have 500k profits.
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Part of the reason it is expensive now is that you are paying for a HUGE overhead of hollywood, distributers, and local outlets. All of that expense goes away.
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Check out "Star Wreck" or "Star Trek the new Voyages" for an idea of what you can do with merely 15 grand- upscale that by about 500 grand and imagine how much better it would be.
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A lot of junk will be produced- but a lot of good stuff too. Once you build up street cred that you won't rip people off- you produce a "pilot" and put it out. Tell folks "The nut for this is 500,000 viewers at 20 bucks a piece. If we get it- we will produce 5 episodes on DVD for those folks. We'll make another 6 episodes as long as the actors and the audience can agree on a price for more. We'll stop when they can't agree."
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The cost of making things like this is dropping like a stone. You don't need 150 million dollars to do it if you don't go through hollywood.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Assume just a million people pay 10 bucks a piece
Just a million?
Just a million?
I think you vastly overestimate the number of people you could get on board for something done exclusively in the non-advertising, P2P panacea you envision.
Even the article used for this supposedly shining example says:
"Now I have an extra 10,000 hits a week on my website, and I've got to figure out what to do here."
Rogers, who said he had nothing to do with the leak, has already received 350 e-mails from people praising the show. He said he would like to release the pilot as a DVD.
Wow, a whole 350 people emailing praise? Holy smokes! And assuming all those people would pay, only $9,996,500 to go! And 10,000 extra hits a week? How do you quantify all this stuff? More realistically, you've got maybe 10,000 people willing to pay $10/show, lowering your gross by a couple orders of magnitude.
It's easy to lay out a best-case scenario.
What's hard is for someone to actually execute on it. And, P2P aside, if it were that easy, it would already have been done.
I'd love to see it succeed, and I'm sure some will. However, none of this justifies any of the rationalizations used for taking things funded by advertising in the meantime.
Those in charge of distribution of programs need to finally realize that either they distribute their shows and profit, or face the simple fact that they will be shared on P2P nets and distributed outside of their profit channels. The simple fact is that electronic distribution is not going to go away, no matter how many laws are erected to stop it.
That does not mean that I am saying that stealing is right, or that *is* a right, clearly, from a legal, moral and ethical standpoint it is not. However, common people are becoming common electronic thieves simply because that is the only way to satisfy demand. Given the illusory "anonymity" of the internet, it is all too easy to do, and right now, the odds are favoring them as opposed to Hollywood when it comes to facing the consequences of violating the copyright holders' rights.
That all said, it's also my take that people, given the choice, would pay a *reasonable* fee to legally download television shows and do more or less with them what they did or do with videotapes. However, for some reason, Hollywood cannot seem to grasp this, or at the very least, cannot grasp how to do loosen their grasp on their content in such a way to make a subscription based P2P net possible.
My suggestion: allow people to subscribe to virtual channels, as they do with satellite or cable now. Allow them to download the shows, to share them on legal networks and pay a fee that is comparable to what they pay for cable now. That would be a real on-demand system, one where the infrastructure of the network is paid for by the subscribers themselves. Other than a substantial investment in seed servers and a first uplink, Hollywood would have to do little else than pay credit card processors and accountants.
To enable protection, they could sell smartcards similar to what Dish and DirectTV use now. Yes, I know that they have been hacked in the past, but nowadays, they are relatively secure, in as much as the average guy will not bother even trying.
Then, collect cash.
After "Doctor Who" debuted/returned triumphantly back to British television and the SciFi Network here in America continuted to pass on the show, I wrote a personal letter to TiVo CEO Michael Ramsey (a Scotsman) advocating that TiVo make an offer to BBC Worldwide to make the series available as a download to broadband enabled TiVo subscribers that might be interested. I figured that most broadband enabled subscribers would also be viewers with scifi leanings, and it would be a success and would generate buzz.
While it might have been costly short term wise, I asserted that TiVo would be at the forefront of a potentially profitable new television wave. Charging production companies/studios to make available pilot episodes to TiVo subscribers to create buzz for certain properties. It would be a way to circumvent the networks saying "no" to shows that might otherwise be successes.
To this day, I haven't heard one thing back from TiVo about this. I think my idea had merits, and obviously an idea whose time has come.
To this day, no American broadcaster or cable network have picked up the rights to the new "Doctor Who" series, leaving potential American fans to *acquiring* the show through less-than-legal methods until an official DVD release in the States happens...which won't until the series actually is televised in America first.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
There should be NO protection for works that are never published. This pilot is more like a trade secret than some creative work.
This should be true in general. Any work that an "owner" is not interested in exploiting for commercial gain should be strictly PD. None of this nonsense about locking up masterpieces in a vault to rot away.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It was his reaction to the whole thing. Instead of pondering what this sudden influx of a fanbase for a non-existent show means, he jumps straight to the "cover it up through force" method.
I wouldn't go so far as to call it "force". It might be heavy-handed, but it's a viable and not-entirely-unreasonable legal option at his disposal.
In other words, I'm not really talking about copyrights. Then again, neither is Mr. Hoffman.
Fair enough.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
"Now I have an extra 10,000 hits a week on my website, and I've got to figure out what to do here."
hits != unique vistors
Each unique visitor can easily generate 100 hits or more depending on how the website is organized.
10,000 / 100 = 100 visitors, and alot of that may be non-unique vistors (such as return visitors,) or even extra Googlebot, Yahoo, or MSN activity.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that the P2P community can bring life to a show that the corporate world sent to the trash.. power to the people and all that stuff.. but lets not get overly excited. 10,000 hits extra a week is a marginal amount of activity considering the amount of people actually surfing the Internet at a given time.
Valkyrie is about to die! Wizard needs food -- badly!
The leader of Global Frequency is the enigmatic Miranda Zero, played by actress Michelle Forbes. (Forbes is fast building a tech-geek pedigree: She's also the voice of Dr. Judith Mossman in the video game Half Life 2).
Funniest line in the story. Forbes has been a tech-geek actress for a long time. Perhaps some may remember her recurring role playing the compelling Ensign Ro Laren in Star Trek: The Next Generation?
So the WB owns the copyright to something which will never see the light of day ... and why exactly should they get copyright protection for that?
If the objective of copyright is to increase the number of artistic works disseminated to the public and WB decides to not disseminate it, then what (moral and legal) reason do they have to keep the lid on this thing for the next 100 years or so? The government uses copyright to encourage dissemination of works. If you aren't going to disseminate your works, you shouldn't get any protection.
I almost modded this insightful, but then I put a little more thought into it.
What about my journal (think written paper journal), I never intended to exploit it for commercial gain, but I hardly think it should be public domain.. would I even use it if at any moment someone could take it freely and publish it?
Also, what about my music? I may one day want to exploit it for commercial gain, but mostly I do it just because I enjoy making music. For the most part I've been too self conscious to ever publish it (though I may one day release some stuff under the creative commons or what have you). But would I even make music anymore if, because of my lack of desire for commercial gain, it immediately became public domain? What if I never publish my music, but 10 years from now I find the master CD and change my mind about the commcerial gain aspect and want to sell the music rather than let it rot away?
Where do you draw the line? Is my journal protected but my music not? What if my music is a journal of sorts, music made to private events in my life that I don't want anyone else to hear? Does the medium make a difference (i.e. a written journal is protected but a musical journal is not)? Often I start a song and then scrap it because I don't like where it is going, should all of my work be part of the public domain, no matter how bad it sounds? What if I think it sounds horrible, but other people think it's a masterpiece? I'm the creator, shouldn't I have ultimate say in the publication of that work?
I thought someone said there was going to be free beer!
Put ads in the file..provide it via bittorrent. And put a blub somewhere (either in the show) or on the website that by getting the torrent from the show's offical tracker the producers can prove x amount of downloads of the shows to advertizers.
If people want the show to continue, they'll get their copy from the producers. If not, then advertizers will not pay and the show will die.
Without advertising and only found by accidentally running across it on a search. Not many people email with comments after downloading something off of P2P either (it would be admission of guilt). The numbers are much better than you think. 10,000 per week @ $10 is over$500,000 annually just from the additional hits per week he is getting now without advertising. On a side note I have spent $70-100 on box sets like Band of Brothers, Taken, etc even after previously having a downloaded copy.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
Having it be in the public domain doesn't mean that you have to start handing out copies; it just means that you have no copyright.
It's not an unreasonable position, given that copyright is solely intended to help the public by, among other things, providing an economic incentive to authors to create and publish their works. If copyright isn't encouraging you, then it would be wasteful to give a copyright to you.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
And, P2P aside, if it were that easy, it would already have been done.
Web comics, like Sluggy Freelance for example, seem to make their authors a decent living based entirely off of merchandising and compilations of free on-line content. So, the question isn't whether money can be made on this kind of open model, just whether it's enough to support movie production as opposed to say comics.
Basically, this new model requires producers to accept a (possibly) lower gross income per viewer in order to achieve distribution costs of almost nothing.
Of course, as you imply, 10,000 dedicated viewers is nothing for TV and movies. But just because this particular show didn't drum up more interest in this one instance doesn't mean the model is a failure. It just means there aren't enough people willing to both bother finding BitTorrents and cross the infringement boundary to make it worth while. An officially sponsored torrent link and open distribution model would likely do a whole lot better.
Hmm... speaking of merchandise, I think I'm giong to go buy that iSophagus shirt I've been eye-balling right now.
Oh, and one more thing:
"And, P2P aside, if it were that easy, it would already have been done."
Come on! That is such a nonargument! It's what wildly successfull movies/books heard as an excuse not to be made. Douglas Adams got told 'there is no interest in sci-fi comedy'...when he asked how they knew that, he got told 'because otherwise, someone would have done it before already'. Same goes for Star Wars.
Just because someone hasn't done it before only means that someone hasn't done it before. If someone had tried and failed, that would be a different matter...and couyld also mean that the guy who failed just didn't do it very well.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I'm the creator, shouldn't I have ultimate say in the publication of that work?
No.
For example, Kafka wanted his works destroyed when he died. No one respected this, and we're all better off as a result.
Copyright is granted by the public for the public good, not any specific individual's good. Having works created is good. Having works be in the public domain is equally as good.
If copyright is the incentive that it takes to get you to create a work, then it might be worthwhile to grant you one. But if you created that work without regard to a copyright, then it'd be foolish to give you a reward; you did it for free. Since a copyright basically provides a potential economic reward, it's authors that are looking for money that deserve copyrights. Authors doing their work for fame, or for art's sake, or whatever, don't need them in order to produce.
Personally, I think it'd be better to grant a low level of protection to works in progress or not yet published, for a brief period of time, provided that there was a bona fide intent to publish and properly register the work. But most protection should be reserved for works where the author has applied for a copyright, and fulfilled the formalities that go along with that.
This way we could avoid having people pirate manuscripts, but not grant undue protection. The author would have to seek protection, and thus only the ones that actively wanted it, and were willing to take some minor steps (fill out some forms, pay a filing fee) would get it.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
There's nothing stopping Internet distribution from including ads. Sure, some people will remove them, but the majority wouldn't bother.
If someone won't watch adverts on TV, what makes you think he'll watch them on the computer? Bear in mind it's impossible to get viewing figures from bittorrent, not many advertisers would be up for it, especially when skipping them means just pressing a button.
Also your potential audience is vastly shrunk with an Internet distribution model. Not very many people at all want to watch TV on the computer. Compare the people with broadband Internet with TVs. The numbers are vastly different.
Who wants to spend all night downloading a TV show rather than just turning on the box? Who wants to get the family to sit around the computer to watch a programme, rather than in the living room? Not every programme is a geek-fest like Firefly.
Like all potential new things, I'll believe it when I see it, not before.
If someone won't watch adverts on TV, what makes you think he'll watch them on the computer?
Define "don't watch"? If you mean that consumers ignore them, then there are no new challenges in this model.
Bear in mind it's impossible to get viewing figures from bittorrent,
I said "BitTorrent-like". If the studio controlled the tracker, they could indeed know the viewing figures. In any case, the sharing algorithm would have to be more linear in order to provide a real-time data stream.
especially when skipping them means just pressing a button.
Why build a fast-forward into the delivery mechanism? Especially since you still need to stream the data, so the viewer might as well be forced to watch. A "chapters" implementation can be used to allow users to skip or backup between scenes in case they're interrupted. (But not cut out commercials!)
Not very many people at all want to watch TV on the computer. Compare the people with broadband Internet with TVs. The numbers are vastly different.
Well, that's an entirely different problem. The answer is digital convergence, but the question is how to speed up the process? My wife and I already use our computer as a television via a TV Card. For our next computer, I'm considering using a Plasma TV with DVI for the monitor, which would give us a complete TV and computer in one.
I have a few thoughts on how to make an accessable Internet distribution model, but I'm not going to enumerate them here. I have been planning to blog the ideas in the near future, so if you're interested (and ONLY if you're interested) keep an eye on my blog. (Posts are about once a week.) Otherwise, I'm sure that quite a few ideas could pop up if the internet model were pushed hard enough.
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