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

too late

[Azeroth48]

http://www.southparkzone.com/ been there done that Oo

Re:too late

[rHBa]

Or here:

http://www.mrtwig.net/

Who the fuck cares?

[Anonymous Coward]

About the fucking blog reporting the story? Link to the free episodes please. For fuck sakes editors.

Did they consult their customers?

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Did they consult their customers?

[garett_spencley]

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.

Surely there are Germans who can't speak English that wouldn't agree ?

I know that I get completely lost when I watch a show in say, Japanese, and I have no idea what the dialogue is saying. While bi/multi-lingual people who also understand English undoubtedly feel the same way as you, there has to be a market for dubs, still, comprised of people who don't speak English.

Re:Did they consult their customers?

[krazytekn0]

But see, as an American run enterprise MTV does not know this will happen since in America it is rare for someone to have a grasp on more than one language.

Re:Did they consult their customers?

[EvanED]

There are also subtitles, which very well may be being made anyway, for the deaf. Then you "just" need to translate them.

A lot of people say original language + subtitles is better than dubbing, though I'm not sure I agree.

Re:Did they consult their customers?

[Scrameustache]

There are also subtitles, which very well may be being made anyway, for the deaf. Then you "just" need to translate them.

A lot of people say original language + subtitles is better than dubbing, though I'm not sure I agree. That depends on the quality of the dubbing and on whether or not you mind reading your TV shows.
Some people don't like to read, they would rather watch TV. Some people can't read fast enough to follow the rhythm of the spoken word, and some people can't read at all.

Personally: "Original language (if understood)" > "original + subtitles in a language I understand" > "dubbed well" > "on mute" > "dubbed badly";

Re:Did they consult their customers?

[meringuoid]

A lot of people say original language + subtitles is better than dubbing, though I'm not sure I agree.

Dubbing of foreign language shows is definitely the best! Believe it!

(That... actually did hurt to write.)

Re:Did they consult their customers?

[Joe Tie.]

Because God forbid anyone actually be aware of a world outside their own town. That entire concept is just sad and a little scary. Of needing a third party to protect you from learning things.

Re:Did they consult their customers?

[Opportunist]

But say what you want, "Backstroke of the West" certainly improved the movie experience!

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).

Re:DVD Sales

[Opportunist]

Yeah, because the artistic quality of Southpark is a definite selling point. Watching that in YouTube quality would certainly hurt the show.

torrents

[overcaffein8d]

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.

Re:torrents

[Secrity]

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.

Re:I wouldn't watch the shit even if I were paid

[Alphager]

South Park is the worst fucking piece of shit out there. The only ones who watch it are the fucktarded sheeple who should be eliminated from the gene pool. Interestingly enough, that could have been a quote fromS outhpark.

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...

[ShieldW0lf]

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.

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...

[kithrup]

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.

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.

Re:Incidentally...

[ockfener]

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.

Re:Incidentally...

[Sparks23]

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!)

Re:Incidentally...

[antiMStroll]

You hit on what so many miss by not thinking past the limited context maintained by media cartels to the larger principles involved. At its base artists and writers feel entitled to a portion of any income that makes use of their works. Sounds reasonable but it begs the question, why just the arts? Truly important works, works which literally changed the face of society beyond recognition, have been created by scientists and engineers for generations. They are infinitely more important to society's health and yet most, Shockley for example, never see returns greater than the most forgettable and transitory media darling. Songwriters would scream blue murder if forced to pay back a percentage of their earnings to Intel, Logitech and Samsung for use of the engineering IP in creating their works yet see no conflict in chasing taxi companies and restaurants for playing a radio. Until they demand to reimburse society for taking from the common weal of sentence structures, forms of literature, words and phrases to lock into their 'IP', it's hypocritical opportunism and an unquestionable corruption of copyright's intent.

Re:Incidentally...

[laird]

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?

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.

Credit where credit is due

[billcopc]

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.

Re:I wouldn't watch the shit even if I were paid

[meringuoid]

South Park is the worst fucking piece of shit out there. The only ones who watch it are the fucktarded sheeple who should be eliminated from the gene pool.

You forgot to say 'Screw you guys, I'm going home'.

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.

It's never too late to advertise.

[twitter]

Fresh news generates fresh interest and that's what this is about. Traditional broadcasters are having a hard time building new audiences because we've all gone to the greener pastures of the internet. Cable subscription rates will plummet if they don't keep the interest of young audiences. Somehow they have to convince you to pay $60/month for the advertisement saturated shows someone else chooses to broadcast.

I'm not going to cry for them when they are gone. The businesses involved have been given considerable public resources, exclusive franchises and other unfair advantages. Instead of building out their networks they done everything possible to hold back the future.

someone @ riaa..

[surfi]

oh my god! they'r killing the recording industry! You BASTARDS!

Idea is Comcastic

[troll -1]

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?

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.

A bold move, but not as bold as The Music Business

[illectro]

So MTV networks appear to get it, but if you're interested in the whole 'free content to beat p2p story' you need to look at imeem.com and spiralfrog - both are allowing users free access to music. now I can hear the imagined caveats now

"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.

Re:How does the WGA strike factor in?

[dq5 studios]

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.

Re:I wouldn't watch the shit even if I were paid

[fermion]

Absolutely.

1. create a the worst fucking show on the planet based on cock sucking uncle fuckers that fuck their own uncles all day instead of boring show based on mowing the lawn or driving to work
2. ?
3. Profit

Re:I wouldn't watch the shit even if I were paid

[AsnFkr]

South Park is the worst fucking piece of shit out there. The only ones who watch it are the fucktarded sheeple who should be eliminated from the gene pool. Oh, I see where you are confused. This conversation isn't about Family Guy.

Re:Yeah, both of them

[Ash-Fox]

Everybody in Germany speaks English.

A vast large amount of people in Berlin do not speak English. I know this from personal experience of repeated visits there. I also know English isn't very prevalent elsewhere in Germany.

Last time I was there, I travelled a month through the country and I ran into one older woman running a B&B who couldn't speak english.

I used to live smack dead next to Germany.

It is funny in fact

[Ilgaz]

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.