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MTV Takes on P2P by Making South Park Free
thefickler writes "MTV Networks, the biggest division of Viacom Inc., has announced plans to make every South Park episode available online for free as part of a plan to make the show available to a larger audience." This is apparently largely because of the success of a similar project where they put every episode of The Daily Show on-line a few months back. This action didn't hurt ratings, and it may have actually helped them.
http://www.southparkzone.com/ been there done that Oo
This is where we are, our rock we stand, among the world, looking forward, eternally.
I think this is less about MTV and more about Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They've already expressed a pro-P2P stance, and considering the nature of their show, this move fits in quite nicely with their "libertarian" attitude.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The episodes are Flash, I didn't see any advertising, and you can randomly access any part of the video. I didn't try, but I suspect that the files can be downloaded.
"It'll be low quality" - No - both sites deliver CD quality audio
"It'll be some crappy indie bands that nobody has heard of" - No both sites have signed deals with most of the major labels - Sony, BMG, Warner, EMI and Universal - this is on top of all the indie labels who sign on
"It'll be only a few free tracks - everythign else witll cost" - nope it's all free with a few exceptions (like the beatles) imeem even played host to the first legal Led Zeppelin video on the internet
"It won't be on demand - you won't be able to control what you listen to" - nope it's entirely on demand, I think the only restriction I see is the slow downloads from spiralfrog that force you to watch advertising
"It'll have tonnes of spyware/DRM/evil" - well no spyware as far as I can tell, imeem.com is streaming only and provides everything via a neat little flash player that works on any flash enabled browser. Spiralfrog however uses and active X control and windows DRM, so that's Windows/IE only
OK so why is this a bolder move than this story? Well TV shows primary channel is still considered to be broadcast, a TV show has to make money on its TV run otherwise it's not considered viable. However, music revenue has primarily been generated through sales of the media, radio broadcast earns the record labels nothing, in fact it may be costing them to get this free advertising.
In my mind the celestial jukebox that's offered by imeem is a hugely radical move by the record business, imeem has become the youtube for music that the tech bloggers keep talking about - except nobody in the tech blogging world has noticed it.
While I'm usually prone to documentary viewing over TV "fiction" as is, I would like to point out that the folks on strike (writers) aren't solely in charge of content, them, character, etc. Network people (producers, PR people, etc) play a huge role in creating and churning out the crap. If they would pay/promote for quality, the writers would produce it. This is about stopping certain folks from not paying royalties for content as the medium shifts from TV to Internet. A closer look shows that the stars involved in a lot of TV/movie production are getting huge cuts that shrink the pie as well. So, while I'm not missing their work much, the Writers Guild has a solid case.
South Park is a non-union, creator owned show. The WGA doesn't factor into it. Consequently MTV could not have done this without Matt & Trey's permission.
Add to that that, unlike engineers, newspaper reporters/editors, script-writers do not have steady work. Even within writing, a reporter (or an editor) knows that the paper keeps coming out, and thus they are still needed. Many times the reporter is paid a salary, or at least not paid some small per-article fee and told they will get more money if that issue of the paper sells well. And they certainly don't wonder 'will this paper be renewed for next season?' or whatever. They have more permanence to their job.
Script-writers have a project to work on, then may go 6 months to a year without another project being available; since they do get paid so little to start with (as the parent post notes), many writers do rely on their residuals to still pay rent and so on. Unlike newspaper reporters and editors, they do not have a guaranteed job.
A better example would be novel writers, I think; if you end up in a 2-3 year dry spell without another novel published, you darn well still want royalty payments on any copies of the last one that are still being sold! If you were a novelist and your publisher somehow decided to sell the book as an eBook and went 'oh, but we're not going to pay you for that,' there would be outcry, dismay and rage. (This is why novel/story rights get laid out pretty clearly in a given contract!)
--Rachel
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
just a note: it's http://www.spiralfrog.com/ and not http://spiralfrog.com/ (which appears to be a ... typosquat?).
The key issue is who owns the material. Usually in the writing world, the author is not an employee of the publisher, but indepently owns his own work, which he licenses to a publisher in return for the right to publish it, usually paid royalties based on sales. TV show writers used to be paid this way, until years ago the producers changed the rules such that they owned the work (instead of the writers), in return for which they paid negotiated license fees. Now (IMO) they want to retain the ownership of the work, and have fixed instead of negotiated rates, but avoid paying the writers for it to a large degree, by changing the distribution channel from DVD's to the internet.
The appropriate comparison in the software world is to an independent developer who writes a game that he licenses to a publisher. The publisher wants to license the game by paying 4 cents/box sold in stores, with downloads free, and the ability to declare an unlimited number of boxes as "promotional" with no payment. Would you agree to those terms?
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