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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.
No, don't be silly. Not the people watching TV.
I was talking about the various networks around the globe that license Southpark, often first of all having to dub it. That this takes time is a given (it's gotten better in the past years, but it's still about a season difference, give or take).
When I can watch a show online, why bother waiting for our networks to dub it? Yes, I "have to" watch it in English, but then again, usually that's the better version anyway. Anyone who has ever watched The Simpsons in German will agree.
So, any response from the networks? I mean, I don't know about the Daily Show (never heard of it, actually, and possibly not as much an export as SP is), but a show like Southpark which is being licensed widely might cause some negative reaction from the networks licensing it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
i hope they put them on (legal) torrents so they are just as easy to download.
but more likely, they will just make it an embedded player, so we can't FF through the commercials.
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Isn't it great? My girlfriend started downloading documentaries to make up for the lack, and we've learned about a whole host of different things. It's amazing how little you miss the crap they churn out.
Did you hear the one about the crack dealer who went on strike? Where all his clients cleaned themselves up and the market disappeared?
No, me neither. Guess crack dealers are smarter than the Writers Guild.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Apples and oranges. First, South Park isn't a union show, so the WGA has no impact on it. (The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are, because Jon Stewart was in a superior negotiation position a few years ago, and that was one of his demands.)
Second, if there's no advertising, and the episode isn't paid for by the viewer... the WGA's current demands would still mean they get nothing in this case. It would be "promoational," and, unlike what the major networks are doing, truly seems to be.
The problem the WGA has, which is certainly reasonable, is when a network claims a showing is "promotional," but they've sold advertising for it. So the network makes money, but the writers (and -- I believe -- actors, and director) don't get anything for it.
For situations where the user pays (e.g., buying from iTunes), the writers currently do get paid, I believe on the same scale that they do for DVDs.
So if Viamcom is going to put shows on the Internet then it would make sense for them to recommend BitTorrent as a distribution method, even though Viacom is also an ISP, the total bandwidth is the same whether downloaded directly from a Viacom site or using a torrent. But using a torrent is the least expensive and most efficient method for the distributor.
OK, so assuming Viacom, as a content producer and an ISP, prefers BitTorrent, where does that put Comcast? I wonder if this will also encourage competition?
So, they insist on paying millions of dollars to hosting companies instead of using already established technology such as Bittorrent.
They could even make money if they licensed the Vuze (Azureus) engine and put couple of animated gifs/flash while downloading with virtually zero cost to them.
I am sure the hosts, even if they are Akamai will choke and people will end up hitting Pirate bay to download them. See that happened on Radiohead, people downloaded their paid content from P2P.