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.

Comments

DVD Sales

[Paralizer]

As far as I know the Daily Show is not available on DVD, whereas South Park is. So if you wanted to watch the Daily Show and you didn't have Comedy Central, your only option was to pirate the episodes; making them available for free online made sense. But with South Park you can buy the DVDs, so making them available for free online would only hurt their DVD sales (unless of course the downloads are of very poor quality).

Incidentally...

[lpangelrob]

...if you were wondering why the Writers Guild of America are still on strike, this is why.

No advertising, no residual payments... not fair?

Re:Incidentally...

[krazytekn0]

Well, isn't the issue that the companies ARE making advertising revenue from this, and that's what they tell their stock holders, but they are telling the writers that they aren't making anything so they don't need to be paid for online shows...I'm probably wrong but that's how I understand it

Re:Incidentally...

[SydShamino]

I'm an engineer. It takes a lot of skill and creativity to make products work on first revision. Guess what? I don't get residuals for work I did last year, last month, or any time before my last paycheck. I don't need residuals to retire because I, you know, save money.

Both of my parents were writers and editors at one point, for the newspaper industry. Neither of them got any residuals, either. I don't suppose you continue to write residual checks to the artists that designed your car, or your sofa, or you house, either?

No advertising, no residual payments... not fair?

Go on strike and get a better contract. The law allows you to do that. But in no way do most of the working world consider this "unfair" to the special subset of people who feel that they need to be paid for the rest of their life for one momentary spark years ago. And when the time comes around that we can finally change copyright back to 50 years, thereby cutting off residuals for thousands of older writers or their descendants, you won't find me or most other people on Slashdot complaining.

Re:Incidentally...

[langelgjm]

But in no way do most of the working world consider this "unfair" to the special subset of people who feel that they need to be paid for the rest of their life for one momentary spark years ago.

I think the issue is that, unlike you, writers aren't paid up front what the distributors believe their work to be worth. To avoid the risk of paying for scripts and shows that bomb, they pay only a small amount, then pay for further showings. That way, if a show does extremely well, the writer is rewarded, and if a show bombs, the distributor didn't waste a lot of money.

A better analogy to your situation: imagine if you developed a product, but were only paid a small amount, and told that you would be paid well later on if the product sells well. Then, you find out that the distributor is selling your product but not holding up their end of the bargain by giving you payments. I dare say you wouldn't be as sanguine as you are now about the whole thing.

Daily Show

[RonnyJ]

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.

Two weeks after all the past episodes were put online, The Daily Show had to shut down production due to the writers strike. I doubt those two weeks are really enough to make any solid conclusions from. It's strange though, I'd have expected ratings to drop considerably after that, considering there weren't any new episodes to air (or are the ratings referencing only those two weeks?)

I'm sure that putting them online wouldn't noticably hurt ratings (or perhaps could even increase them), but I don't think that you can evidence much from those two weeks.

Of course it would help them. Did TV hurt them?

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Networks have been giving away their shows for free for years on TV. You just had to sit through the commercials. For years people could record the TV shows and do whatever they wanted with them... did this hurt the networks then? No.

The only thing different now is they sell TV shows on DVD more than they ever sold TV series on VHS. This is mainly because of the storage capacity increases and size factor of the storage... but people watch those shows for free... and even go to the lengths of buying them on DVD. Thats a pretty dam good base of consumers to treat fairly, because they like your shows, and have already seen them for free for which they could easily record themselves... AND they still want to buy them.

Giving away the shows for free online is not going to hurt them one bit. In a day with so many online distractions, so may cable tv stations... It is better to capture a wider audience anyway possible, rather than try to clamp down on consumers that would rather just go to youtube, or find something else to do. There are just too many options out there... and options have always been a good thing.

Re:if it's not available off-line

[Anonymous Coward]

> Added bonus, you get to also view every other streaming available, including NBC shows on their site, youtube and whatnot. *AND*, it saves some plastic trees :)

I'm not the original AC, but I think you missed his point.

He doesn't want to stream it, he wants to download it so that he can watch it offline, that is, without TCP/IP connectivity.

Streamed video is not merely inelegantly wasteful of bandwidth (why re-download something just to watch it next week?), it's highly vulnerable to factors outside of your control, such as the performance of the network between your PC (or your friend's PC when you want to show him something).

Worst of all - and this is the dealbreaker - it's entirely dependent on the whim of the content provider to keep hosting it. That's an implicit form of DRM: When MTV decides it's not making enough money, the content disappears forever, or worse -- when MTV decides that it doesn't want to risk being sued by the Cult of $cientology for Season 9, Episode 12 (The OT III story) or bombed for Season 10, Episode 4 ("Remember the time I got a salmon helmet from Mohammed while wearing a toga?"), the episodes get censored server-side, and you never get to know that the originals existed.

Ever watch Warner Bros. cartoons on broadcast TV these days, as opposed to the remastered and uncensored originals being released on the annual 4-disc DVD collections?

In the case of Looney Toons, I've "downloaded" (by containershipnet, trucknet, and sneakernet) that content, and I can archive that content to a RAID array should the DVDs eventually fall victim to scratches) and enjoy it forever. The "streamed video" equivalent was called "network TV", and it had been censored to the point of unwatchability as far back as the 1980s.

different market segments, tradeoffs.

[Vellmont]

But with South Park you can buy the DVDs, so making them available for free online would only hurt their DVD sales


I doubt it, or at best it would affect them only a little. People don't buy the DVDs because they haven't seen the show, those people will just rent it. The people who buy the DVD want to watch it over and over.

The other thing is, the episodes are still going to contain ads. Ads which you can't easily skip over. Comedy Central is going to make direct profits from those ads. The people who buy DVDs buy them partially because they don't contain ads. Even if it does make a small dent in DVD sales, the profits from selling ads will likely make up for that.