Slashdot Mirror
TV Show Piracy Soars After CBS Blackout
TorrentFreak reports that piracy rates of the television show Under the Dome shot up by more than a third last weekend, even though official ratings dropped. What caused the increase? On Friday, three million subscribers to Time Warner's cable TV service lost access to CBS programming, the network on which Under the Dome airs. The article says this provides compelling evidence that the availability of a show is a key factor in the decision to pirate it.
"To find out whether download rates in the affected markets increased, we monitored U.S. BitTorrent downloads of last week's episode as well as the one that aired this Monday following the blackout. The data from these two samples show that in Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit and Pittsburgh, relatively more people downloaded the latest episode, an indication that customers are turning to unauthorized channels to get the show. With hundreds of thousands of downloads Under The Dome is one of the most pirated TV-shows at the moment. Of all sampled downloaders in the U.S. 10.9% came from the blackout regions for last week's episode, and this increased to 14.6% for Monday's episode, a 34% increase. In New York City, one of the largest affected markets, the relative piracy rate more than doubled from 1.3% of all U.S. downloads last week to 3% for the episode that aired after the blackout."
My wife and I watch it at 9:00 PM Atlantic time. I thought it was on Global, but the Global site says it's on at 10:00 PM Eastern time, that's 11 for us. part of the reason I pirate a lot of the shows we watch is because most don't come on until 11 our time and staying up until midnight knowing I have to get up at five the next day to look after our 2 year old or go to work just doesn't work. It sucks paying $150 a month for basic cable and internet and all the stuff you want to see is on after you go to bed. Under the dome is one of the only shows we watch on cable because it's actually on at a decent hour.
Most of these shows can be watched legitimately at cbs.com, but CBS is currently blocking anybody with a TimeWarner Cable IP address.
It's shown on the air for free - so how is this pirating?
This comes off sounding angry at your question, but I'm not, I'm mad at the cable company for making me pay for service and then nickel and diming me in to oblivion.
Mainly because the cable company wants another $15/mo to rent a DVR, which they only rent to you if you get the premium digital channels another $30/mo. I'm already paying $150/mo for internet and cable. Cable that I don't watch because everything I want to see is on after 11. Sometimes we'll stay up to watch something that's on at 10, but that's still pushing the envelope for us. We're both earlier risers and prefer to be in bed and asleep by 9:30.
So I'm not going to pay another $45/mo on top of $150 to get more channels I don't watch just so I can record the stuff I've already paid for that's on too late for me to see when I can download them the next day while I'm at work anyway. I have Sickbeard setup to get the shows I want when they become available. I only went that far because my wife's download list, which includes a lot of shows we don't get at all in Canada, was getting too long so I setup Sickbeard and she can add the stuff she wants to it.
How is it stealing when I already paid for it?
I don't have a magnet link, but I do have an HTTP link. Perhaps someone's HTTPS Everywhere rules have fallen out of sync.
I used to record shows... or try to.
You have to, without question, use the cable company's box. No other box will work. Let's put aside the question of cost, and further, let's assume that it costs me $0 for cable service including the box.
The DVR that my provider game me would start and stop at a few minutes before or after a show. It couldn't be predicted, but about 10% of the time I'd miss the start or the end of the show.
Sometimes I wouldn't get any sound on the recording. That was about once a week. It's tricky at best to watch a show without sound.
Other times the recording would be pixelated. Sometimes it was for a second, sometimes it was for a few minutes. Not really a deal-killer.
About once every couple of months the DVR would erase every recording I'd ever made. So if I hadn't had a chance to watch a show, I could never watch it.
It was pretty bad and the cable company gave me a $100 a month credit for a year to compensate me for their crappy system. Now let's get rid of that cost assumption -- it wasn't $0, it is close to $100 a month to get a box that doesn't record and an encrypted feed that gives up. I'd guess that about 25%-35% of the time the show was unwatchably corrupted or just gone. (There were no problems watching a show "live", just when recording.)
Which meant I had to rent the shows... ooh, wait, there's no rental place that has them.
Okay, I can buy the DVD... oh, it won't be out for a year and I'd have to buy the whole season for $150...
Does the library have a copy to loan me? No.
There is one alternative...
I've never had a problem when renting from the famous Swedish library. Never once have I had a bad video, missing audio, or anything else. What you have is a free system that provides error-free and convenient watching of shows. The other option is expensive, error-ridden, and a pain in the ass.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Pre-1996:
TV Stations: Broadcast all day long... what's that, Cable company?
Cable company (10% of TV viewers): We are going to carry your station in our market, bringing you to some new viewers.
TV Stations: (SHRUG) OK, go for it. More viewers means more ratings! More ratings means more advertising revenue!
1996:
Federal Government: Here you go, Broadcast stations, you can now demand payment for being carried on a cable provider! with The Telecommunications Act of 1996
Cable Companies: WTF?
Federal Government: The free ride is over
TV Stations: Hmmmm... free money, we like that!
Post-1996:
TV Stations: GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME, GIMME!
Cable Companies: It's not worth THAT much for us to caryr you. How about we start whittling down the network affiliates to a single, small local-market station
(time passes)
TV Stations: Our ratings our down, we are losing ratings to cable stations - it's all the cable company's fault! Raise the rates!!
Cable Companies (now 95% of the viewers): Geez, not this again, this is ridiculous, we're outta here. Goodbye, CBS.
(Sometime in the next decade):
TV Stations: Where did all our viewers go? Doesn't anybody have antennas? Why does the FCC want to narrow the broadcast spectrum to "auction valuable unused frequencies"? Hey Cable Company, want to carry us at a slightly discounted rate?
Cable Companies: (Chirp Chirp Chirp)
----------- At least that's the way I see it. Where does CBS think those viewers will come from? Will they magically sprout an ATSC TV antenna out of their collective asses and start receiving OTA signals again? Over 90% of their viewers no longer HAVE antennas and don't care. They can PIRATE your programs and why feel guilty??!? They got the programs for "free" before.
GREED is the ultimate downfall of broadcast networks. Cable providers do OTA broadcasters a SERVICE by providing access to large numbers of viewers, which in turn incereases ratings, which, in turn, increases revenues. There was NEVER a need to double dip by demanding cable companies pay a fee.
Some stuff we can. A lot of the time I get "Content not available in your region" some times I even get it when trying to stream from Canadian sites. There are undoubtly 1001 ways I could aviod pirating, but I've already paid for the show on cable so I should be able to access it however is most convienent for me. I shouldn't have to spend extra time or money just to watch stuff I paid for already.
Originally, cable TV promised no advertisements for a small fee,
I don't know why this canard keeps popping up, but it's simply not true.
Cable TV started as MATV -- master antenna TV, or CATV -- community antenna TV. Communities (or apartment buildings) that had poor reception (or didn't allow antennas in the case of apartments) put up a central antenna and fed the received broadcast signals to the users via cable. That's the "original" cable TV, and there was NEVER a promise of "no ads". It was simply broadcast TV with an antenna better than any one individual had.
Cable companies started popping up to provide this service. Why should an apartment manager deal with this when he can hire someone to do it for him? One big tower with a lot of antennas and one cable distribution plant is more cost effective than every building with one. Early cable companies provided up to 12 channels of service, using the VHF tuners in the customer's own TV. Those channels were what the head end antennas picked up OTA. With ads. For a fee.
The next step was the "pay TV" side of cable, now that you had a system to distribute the signals and control who got them. (A short-lived encrypted-via-broadcast system appeared, but this was expensive and died out.) Those pay services made the promise of "no ads" because they were subscriber supported and could afford it. HBO was a premiere player here. But alongside the pay services were the newly forming cable-only networks, distributed by the same satellite systems that the big pay services were using, and those have (almost) always had ads. (It was so uncommon that I cannot recall which ones were ad-free to start with, but I'm thinking Disney was.)
So no, there was never a promise of "no ads" by cable TV companies. That's just ridiculous. They formed to carry the broadcast signals originally, and those broadcast signals have always had ads. The pay services distributed by cable may promise "no ads" but cable as a whole has never ever ever made that promise. It can't. The promise cable made was diversity by being able to carry more networks than OTA ever coould. The secondary promise, now often forgot, is the ability of cable to carry local origination -- channels specific to each community, at a finer grained level than broadcast has. PEG -- public, education, and government -- access is the result of that.
But over time, advertising crept in.
That 'over time' period was at the beginning of TV itself, which followed the appearance of ads on radio.
Piracy, on the other hand, has no advertising. It has cut away all the bullshit and serves you just what you want to see, and only that. No mandatory trailers. No unskippable advertisements. No FBI warnings. Just the content, nothing more, nothing else, nothing less.
The only DVDs for which this hasn't been true have been the very few cheap crap DVDs from Alpha that aren't rippable. Otherwise, I've yet to be forced to watch trailers or ads. The trailers and ads are different titles from the content on every DVD I've seen.
See, pirated material is currently the only way to get HD material without advertising.
I'm watching Curse of the Pink Panther as I write this, in HD, from a DVD I bought from the local grocery store for $3. No ads. No FBI warnings. They aren't pirated, even though they look very much like it. They're "pre-watched". For a few dollars more I could buy the official DVD and still have no ads. Piracy may be one means of achieving this, but it certainly isn't the only means.
Considering we've had the technology to do this since the mid-80s, that says a lot about the mentality of content providers.
Yes. They want money to pay for providing programming, and instead of charging you by view they're charging advertisers. Now, many of the on-demand programs I watch allow fast forwarding through the ads, and many of them have a lot fewer ads to start with. Some annoying ones do disable the fast forward and even have the same ads as the original distribution, but that's a relatively new thing from what I've seen.
Right now, content providers see you as criminals and can sue you or worse put you in jail
Actually I'm Canadian so no they can't :P, we pay a percentage on all blank media (hard drives, CDs, MP3 players, tapes) which goes to the content industry to compensate them for media sharing so.... awkward.
The Gov't sees you as a reason for needing to make more laws favoring content protection thereby opening a door for all kinds of problems.
1) Speak for your own government
2) the content industry bought those laws, the government didn't just wake up one day and say, "You know what we need less of, people trading music and movies"
it does not ... give you the right to TAKE something that does NOT belong to you
I already paid for the content through my cable subscription and through the tax levied on blank media. So yeah, it kind of does.
simply because you disagree with something you arrogant prick.
Who was being childish again?
I'm a little concerned for your health, maybe you should stay off the interwebs. I can see through my monitor the vain in you head is ready to explode.