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TV Industry Using Piracy As A Measure Of Success
mrspin writes "Last100 has an interesting post from Guinevere Orvis, a web producer who works in the broadcast industry, who describes the way in which 'unofficial' but sanctioned BitTorrent leaks are being used as a measurement of a TV show's likely success. Orvis writes: 'Broadcasters aren't posting their shows directly on PirateBay yet, but they are talking informally and giving copies of shows to a friend of a friend who is unaffiliated with the company to make a torrent ... it's partially an experiment, but the hope is that distribution of content this way will lead to new viewers that wouldn't have been reached through traditional marketing means.'"
Since piracy statistics are being used to help with marketing and increase profits, is this a measureable reduction to the actual cost piracy has on the industry?
What they call 'Piracy' will continue to rise - there is no point at which it will retract. I wonder if they have added into their estimations the accelerating growth of this piracy they are measuring.
Which brings me to something that I've been wondering about for a while; how would the entertainment industry survive if there was theoretically no way to protect their intellectual property from open and free distribution. How would they handle a world where there was no legal route to enforcing a royalty-style or licensed payment system?
Because it is my thoughts that as our world further connects itself together that this is exactly what will happen in the (no so distant?) future.
At least in the technological sense, the legal sense is difficult to gauge, though I hope the legal system will suffer a major overhaul in the coming decades.
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Many television networks are putting many of their popular shows online now, for free. All the major networks: CBS, ABC, NBC, Fox -- are all putting full episode content on their websites now. Even Sci-Fi is starting to do it, although they don't have too many shows with full episodes up (but a. they're owned by NBC, who is getting into the online distribution format quite rapidly and b. they're probably realizing that a good number of their shows are popular with geeks that know how to share their shows via bittorrent quite readily). I wouldn't be surprised if a few more networks, like Comedy Central, get into the action. I think what's happening is that the corporations that run the networks have seen how a site like Youtube has practically sprouted up overnight, and they're seeing this as a way to reach out to more people (and thereby increase their advertising streams and revenue).
If possession of pre-release material is a felony, then why would a TV exec condone this? So downloading is ok if it helps make the companies money? Am I the only one that sees something fundamentally wrong with this?
Personally, I never saw the problem with the piracy of TV shows: a large proportion of those who watch them, assuming they like them, will probably watch the original broadcast or the next episode when it's aired anyway. It's a different matter for large-scale, large-budget Hollywood films, but in instances like these, I think that this is a move in the right direction.
Ok, so what if I, Joe Pirate, go and download the latest episode of Lost from the pirate bay and subsequently get sued for copyright infringement. What if this episode was something that was leaked "unofficially" by the studio. Since it is done under the radar, the mafiaa officials won't know the difference. They're basically baiting you.
It's like putting a diamond ring on a park bench, hiding in the bushes, and then calling the police when someone picks it up.
I got nothin'
This is why the record labels decided to go after Napster to begin with. If the songs are available for free download all the "albums" containing one hit and 9 filler songs got split into pieces. Everyone got the hit and ignored the ballast.
The P2P sharing shows immediately what people want, and allowing that would force the record labels to produce high-quality music rather than mediocre one that can be forced down the customer's throats (ears ?). And high-quality music is a lot harder to come by than the turn-of-the-crank filler that we have been blessed with in recent years. No wonder the CD sales are decreasing.
You'd then be in the same boat as commercial radio - they've made a product so crappy that not only will people not use it for free, they'll pay 10-15 bucks a month to use something else.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Commercial Radio and Commercial TV suffer from the same things: crap scheduling, a lot of crap content with few gems buried among said crap (e.g. the occasional song that plays during "The Morning Zo0!!!11!111" on the radio, or conversely, television jammed to the gills with lame sitcoms and reality shows with the occasional "oh shit that was cool!" show wedged in there)... things like that.
They both suffer from being packed to the rafters with commercials.
Now, not all of either industry is like that - for instance, 94.7 FM (in Portland, OR) doesn't do morning "shows" at all - they play music all morning, with a couple of blurbs for "The Jon Stewart Minute" and a short 5-minute episode detailing how an alternative-type band or singer's career came and went. The closest they come to any kind of thing is what they call "The 8 at 8", where they play 8 songs in a row with a common theme... sometimes lame, but sometimes pretty inventive. They keep the commercials to a minimum (less than most, anyway), and even in the evenings on weekdays, the most you see that isn't straight-up music playing is a two-hour-long program of techno/alternative/industrial mixes by local DJ's (most of which aren't half bad).
Rattled on too long there... sorry. Now by contrast, broadcast commercial TV networks suck as a rule, but occasionally something decent shows on it. Their problem isn't the media format or technical means of delivery - it's the way the medium is being strangled for every last drop of revenue it has, and to the detriment of the folks watching it. I'm not even really talking show content here, which also suffers greatly from this. As a producer, if you've only got 36 minutes to tell a story (or at least some of it) in a full 60-minute slot --not counting time spent on intro and credits-- you tend to drop subtleties and intricacies in a hurry - as a result the show quickly becomes crap unless carefully constructed).
Little wonder that people are drifting away from television in general, truth be told...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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No commercials, good music, streaming over the internet if you don't live in Seattle.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
If we start buying CDs then the terrorists have already won.
Your opinion is based on a perverted perspective - you're getting the stuff for free by doing something illegal and immoral. Not everybody can take the route of downloading TV from bittorrent because then nobody would be paying for the shows to be made so no shows would be made. If you want a real taste of an advertising-free world then buy the DVDs. OK, DVD is only a not-very-heavily-advertised-on medium, but it's the closest we've got.
Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven' - BBC News
"Your opinion is based on a perverted perspective - you're getting the stuff for free by doing something illegal and immoral. "
I have to take exception to that assertion, because, like everybody else in Canada, I'm paying for this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#Canada
And, according to the Competition Board (sort of the Canadian equivalent of the FTC) private non-commercial downloading is perfectly legal in Canada.
And whether or not it's immoral is a matter of opinion, not a matter of fact. Given that I could just as easily record most of those shows from over-the-air TV signals on my VCR or DVR, I fail to see how it's immoral. Unless you're making the assertion that by not watching ads on a TV show is immoral?
That aside, I'd be perfectly OK with renting or buying the DVD's of the above shows, were downloading not available somehow.
On top of which, I don't think it's my distorted perspective that brings me to wonder if we'd be better off without TV advertising, because I lived without TV entirely from about 1999 to 2001, and did exactly zero downloading then. And I still felt the same way then on the subject of the effects of TV advertising.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".