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TV Delays Driving AU Viewers To Piracy
Astat1ne writes in with a story in The Register about the delays Australian TV viewers are experiencing getting overseas-produced series and how this is driving many of them to download the shows via BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks. The problem is compounded by the fact that Australian viewers are unable to download legal copies of the episodes from the US iTunes website. Quoting: "According to a survey based on a sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series, Australian viewers are waiting an average of almost 17 months for the first-run series first seen overseas. Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.9 to 16.7 months."
Seriously, 17 months?
Why the delay? What exactly is it that could possibly take so long? You could almost put the DVDs in a hot air balloon and get them there quicker.
Especially considering that this is sales. Who waits that long to make money? Especially in that industry?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
If you can create a cloned copy of my Ferrari without damaging mine, then I'd have no problem with you doing so. Make two.
I find it humorous that the article talks about how the Australian TV networks are "unable or unwilling to change their programming policies", yet makes no mention about the actual core problem here--the licensing of the content. Yes, if a TV show is produced and owned by an American TV network, then the Australian TV network needs to license it from the American company. They can't just decide to air it whenever they feel like it (which is what this article seems to suggest). Whether the problem is the American company not offering up the content for licensing, or whether the Australian companies don't want to pay the fee until it's lowered needs to be mentioned in order for this article to be more than an uninformed gripe. Then again, it is the Register, so it comes as no surprise to me that it's actually missing the point...
This guy's the limit!
I know that as a Doctor Who fan in the states I'm not going to wait to see new episodes of Who. When I can download them and watch them less than 12 hours after they have been on in BBC, there really isn't any reason to wait until SciFi channel or whoever decides to air it. More and more it seems as if my favorite shows aren't aired on channels in the USA or if they are, they are shown months later.
Sure it may be copyright infringement to download them, but since there's no legal way for me to see a lot of these shows in the first place, I don't have a problem with it. I can't pay for them if I wanted to, I do pay for cable, and I'm not a Nielson Rating's house, so the arguments against downloading these shows seem pretty weak.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Who said it's about justifying piracy? It's not. It's still wrong, but it shows that there IS a market that is willing to pay for it ... if it was provided.
Piracy isn't justified, but if the consumers want to see a TV show, they will. The question now is, are you going to sell it to them, or are they going to have no choice but to steal it?
While piracy is bad, I think most people would agree, this study shows an interesting phenomenon of our shrinking world. With the increased availability of digital content the barriers to acquiring a product available in a region of the world that is not your own are almost non-existent. In the past you would have to fly to the region that had the product you sought out, buy it and fly back or have it imported via some other means. Now there is no technological reason you shouldn't be able to do the same, just some legal hurdles imposed by countries out to make a buck anywhere they can and media companies out to do the same. I don't know what the solution to the former is but in regards to the latter I would think this would be enough to show that there is a demand for the content and for them to find a way to distribute it.
Is the that the toilets in Australia flush counter-clockwise. This really messes with Ted Steven's tubes and prevents licensed content from quickly reaching the country.
You heard it here first folks...
You can't afford a Ferrari. That doesn't mean it's not available to you, just that you don't have the means to get it. The issue here is that Australians don't have the means of legally acquiring this material. They can't even log on to the US iTunes and pay for it. That's the problem.
I love how Slashdot has become the only place to come for incorrect car analogies.
TV in Australia sucks because of the constant barrage of overly loud advertisements for 3 minutes after every 5 minutes of TV show.
Cinema in Australia sucks because of long queue lines, high prices and poor quality movies, as well as the 20 mins of lead-up-to-the-main-feature advertisements.
DVD release in Australia suck because we have to wait and wait and wait for a DVD that gets superseded 1 month after arrival by the Gold Edition, then the Extra Gold Edition, then the SuperMegaHypeUltraBlaster edition shortly after.
The whole experience of entertainment via TV/DVD or cinema is completely wrong. It lacks that all important component - ENTERTAINMENT.
Why bother? I can buy a bootleg copy of just about anything, download it if I can be bothered or borrow someone else's copy of whatever it may be. Either way, these three elements of access to entertainment guarantee I get my entertainment fix.
Yes - I am an Aussie.
I guess a bunch of execs are sitting around the board room table, still thinking it is 1970 and they have exclusive control over video distribution of their content. It will probably take an entire generation worth of executives to die off before some of these industries can reform. It really takes serious denial to think that consumers would prefer to wait for them to broadcast the content over their channels, when it can be obtained immediately, on-demand, in HD without commercials for free.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
Woot, a troll.
Okay, so listen up. If you can't afford a Ferrari, that is understandable. Ferraris are spendy little cars. But DVDs? They're perfectly affordable. So is basic cable. The problem here is not cost, not at any level -- Australia is an English-speaking country with similar obscenity laws and a excellent grasp of American culture. There should not be any costs associated with "preparing" episodes for export to Australia, neither for broadcast nor for DVD.
People are pirating it because there is no other way to get it. For some inexplicable reason, the industry seems to think that there is little to no demand for importing these shows, and so they've neglected to do so. It's sort of sad, really; the industry hasn't always been this way. For example, Cartoon Network started airing late-night anime precisely because polls showed that the biggest demographic of anime fansubbers and traders was also the demographic most likely to sit up late at night and watch cartoons. While this may not seem like a big deal to you, it was an amazingly awesome thing for anime lovers, and I think that Cartoon Network got it right.
Your "wait for it" method assumes that the show in question will in fact be aired and released in Australia regardless of consumer input. This is not true. There are many shows in markets which simply never arrive in places due to a lack of demand. For every anime imported, dubbed, edited, NTSCed, and aired or released in America and Canada, there are dozens that they predict just won't sell no matter how snazzy the packaging is. The only way to show that there is a serious demand is to pirate the shows.
The TV business is usually not as receptive to input as the Adult Swim guys. They don't understand much besides money and ratings. The only way to force them to speed up their importing schedules is to create economic impetus -- to pirate the shows that are being demanded. Anything else is futile.
~ C.
Not only do we get most movies much later (if at all). We also get TV series MUCH later (if at all), and to add insult to injury, it's all in some crappy translation (you just can't translate puns, nor can you really adequately translate interesting dialog), spoken by speakers with totally different voices than the original ones, and so forth...
As a result, I don't even own a TV anymore (just not worth it, especially since the government makes us pay >$15/month), only watch DVDs once in a while, and otherwise watch downloaded stuff from overseas.
It's like the war on drugs: wake up, nobody cares if it's illegal. When people want something, there are two choices: sell it to them in an open, competitive market, or prohibit it and live with the results (mafia gangs, illegal distribution). But you can't change people.
Except they can make money by directly selling it to the people and cut out the networks altogether. I suspect that since the media companies are really married to the advertising model however, they don't consider the potential for direct sales. Now, I don't condone piracy when the piracy might interfere with the content producer's ability to earn money, but by the same token, I've become quite accustomed to having commercial free entertainment on DVD or through iTunes. I'm in the US so it is easy for me to get things by legal means and so I do. If I was AU, I wouldn't feel guilty about downloading because nobody wants to sell it to me anyway. Right or wrong, this is the future market media companies have to deal with and what they ought to do, is figure out how to deal with it profitably.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
You sir are brainwashed.
The people who began calling the process of copying files from the network w/o the permission of the "IP owner" "piracy" and "stealing" are the **AA parasites, and they add little to no value while conspiring to hold us all back technologically and for what? To keep milking a clearly obsolete business model.
Data wants to be free; we can only restrict distribution and charge $$ for it by making some artificial arrangement (which is always going to be defeatable). Even so if they would price their "IP" at a level the market is willing to bear and provide it in a format people find useful (vs restictive) most people would rather just buy it, it's easier.
These are some *reasons* piracy happens.
So the real excuse makers and criminals here are the **AA .
All this is not big news --- do try to keep up old man!
The post about copying the ferarri is spot on and should be modded up.
Caveat Utilitor
Well, we wanted all this "globalization", didn't we? And we have worldwide communication now, don't we? So why do they act surprised when people start pirating titles when they delay release dates across different continents by months?
I mean, geez, who's running the television industry, the Dutch East India Pictures Association? Why is their incompetence the fault of the market? Why do we have laws to protect incompetence?
The MAJOR point should also be that australia has more ads per show than ANY country on the planet.. HEROES was almost 2 hours long for the first ep when it aired here (seriously 1min view for 1 min ad) We are, on average, at 20 minutes of ads per hour. (its sweden or norway next on the list at 17min) Also for all of us SCIFI watches - BSG, Stargate, Trek, DrWho etc, we want to watch it as it is released as well read the forums etc. Also in the 90's - did you know that they SPED UP the shows so that a 44minute show ran for 43minutes? Yeap - another minute of ads there. (channel 9 was the main user of this)And that was when they didn't choose to edit Star Trek:Next Gen to fit more ads in..(yeap that's right they cut whole scenes out!) Another example was with the Muscial Buffy Episode - they sped it up slightly (shown on channel 7) so it was a bit out of key - My Wife was soooo pissed, but loved me for my DVD copy i had got earlier (was first getting tapes sent from the states then dvds - love my mates) and all this quickly from memory while at work........
You *can* download from US iTunes. You just need an American address, an email account which is not the same as the one linked to your AussieTunes account, and a US payment method. For the American address, you can use the White House for all I care (or, if this scares you for some reason, use Google maps to pick out a city/state at random and use "1234 Maple Street" with the appropriate zipcode). The email can be whatever the heck you want. The payment method is the only tricky part, and its a lot less tricky thanks to eBay. You see, lots of people who get gift certificates but really wanted cash put them up on eBay and some other sites. Buy some gift certificates from eBay (at a discount to face value), get the codes mailed to you, use them to buy from iTunes. Since you aren't inputting a credit card they won't have the computer verify your address because there is nothing to verify it against.
I keep two iTunes accounts around, one for Japan and one for the US. Thankfully they don't do geotracking or anything, and they'll both happily integrate into the same iPod/iTunes/etc.
(Incidentally, the White House address:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.