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."

Comments

What's funny about Under the Dome

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that you can get that night's episode hours before it airs on CBS, without commercials. I'm not sure where else it's airing (maybe Canada) that shows it early.

Re:What's funny about Under the Dome

[Vanderhoth]

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.

Re:What's funny about Under the Dome

[Vanderhoth]

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.

Re:What's funny about Under the Dome

[robot256]

Because all the consumer A/V equipment can only record in SD even if it gets HD input. 99% of people would rather download an HD rip than own an illegal HDMI decoder. Plus popular torrents can be completed in minutes or seconds on any computer, while setting up a recording system takes effort and maintenance and equipment they might not own.

Re:What's funny about Under the Dome

[Vanderhoth]

How is it stealing when I already paid for it?

Re:What's funny about Under the Dome

[Beardo the Bearded]

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.

Re: What's funny about Under the Dome

[Vanderhoth]

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.

Re:What's funny about Under the Dome

[dgatwood]

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.

You know, the funny part of this whole story will be when CBS removes their blockade and people continue to pirate it because the user experience is better. My prediction is that CBS's current execs will be looking for work in a few months, canned by a furious board of directors after delivering a catastrophic loss in advertising revenue in their desperate attempt to squeeze blood out of a turnip.

My parents watch one of CBS's daytime soaps. Watching it on TV is a pain because they're not always home, and they don't have any sort of DVR, so they watch it online. Problem is, CBS's web player is the worst piece of dingo turd I've ever seen. After about 50% of the commercial breaks, it fails to come back to the show, and just hangs there with a black screen. Sometimes a few minutes later, if you leave it sitting there, the audio comes back with no video. Either way, it lobotomizes itself. If you reload the page, you get to sit through the same set of commercials all over again. And they usually show just three or four ads over and over, often showing a single ad more than once during a single commercial break. It is by far the worst TV viewing experience I've ever had—even worse than watching it on cable.

And because CBS doesn't make their shows available through real digital delivery channels like Hulu or iTunes, there's no way to watch their shows that isn't horribly painful and clogged with tedious commercials. Frankly, I can't imagine what's going through the heads of the people at CBS. I really can't. I don't see how it is possible for anyone to be so utterly clueless about the needs and desires of their audience, and I can't imagine them retaining that audience for much longer if they continue to be so bad at digital delivery.

Re:What's funny about Under the Dome

[Eunuchswear]

Fast, unlimited cap internet access -- especially if you work from home -- is easily worth $125/mo.

Fuck that. 100Mbps internet + telephone + basic cable costs me 35EUR a month.

Re:What's funny about Under the Dome

[Vanderhoth]

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.

Q.E.D.

[jxander]

This means that those "new" pirates had the capacity to pirate all along, but chose not to.

People are quite willing to pay for services such as television, but given the absence of legal means to do so, they will turn to illegal means.

Increase the legal avenues to access media and piracy will decrease accordingly.

Re:Q.E.D.

[penix1]

Although you may be correct, the real telling will be how many return to cable after getting the shows illegally without the advertising. Once the forbidden fruit is bitten, they may like it and never return...

Re:Q.E.D.

[roc97007]

Although you may be correct, the real telling will be how many return to cable after getting the shows illegally without the advertising. Once the forbidden fruit is bitten, they may like it and never return...

Yet another reason to provide a good enough service at a reasonable price from the very beginning, so that people never have a reason to explore illegal avenues.

Re:Q.E.D.

[Opportunist]

That's why DRM created more copyright infringements than anything else.

People buy something, they notice that it doesn't work the way they're used to (like, say, that you're able to time and medium shift the content), get upset, get told that there are "other ways" to get said content, notice that those "other ways" are not only more convenient but also free and a new "pirate" is born.

Re:Q.E.D.

[wierd_w]

This goes well with an assertion I have held about piracy for years.

It goes something like this:

Producers control supply, and have a "target" price they wish to meet. This could be perfectly sensible, or it could be inflated in a fashion that would make even the debiers diamond cartel blush. Does not matter. They control the supply, and have a target price.

Because they control supply, they restrict the supply until demand for the product permits them to reach that target.

Piracy happens when:

The hidden and intrinsic costs of piracy are less than the inflationary costs induced by restricting supply, via puncturing the producer's stranglehold over the supply.

Thus, piracy rate is a fundemental feature of the modern information economy. It shows, without bias, how artificially stacked the target price is against what the natural market price is. It is every bit as useful as tracking wages, tracking unemployment, or tracking free time.

The problem, is that you whave whole sections of the economy that are propped up by the wholesale control over supply. Without being propped up above the true market ideal price, and enforced via artificial scarcity, the product is simply not profitable to produce. (At least in some circumstances.) The market really does not fucking care about that. The price is inflated, and piracy rate consistently indicates that fact.

Piracy, being a fundemental feature of the information economy, (owing to the nearly free cost of duplication and distribution that can be employed), should not be seen as "the boogey man" of content producers. They would be much better served to simply accept piracy to be as inevitable as a rainy day is, and instead focus on how their business can cope with the presense of piracy in the market.

Again, piracy occurs when the implicit and explicit costs of piracy are less than the costs of legal purchase. Those costs are NOT all monetary.

1) downloading a bulk pack of episodes takes time.
2) the download saturates the download pipe, preventing the downloader from doing other things, like playing games online.
3) the download could be broken, encoded poorly, be in the wrong language, have hardcooked subtitles in chinese, etc.
4) the download could contain malicious software
5) you could be sued for many millions of dollars per file downloaded.

People are willing to put up with a pretty significant amount of crap, if the inconvenience cost of the legal distribution method is less inconvenient than the illegal method.

This is why there was a HUGE reduction in "illegal MP3 activity" when iTunes hit the stage, and went DRM-free. While iTunes is FAAR from perfect, and clearly does not nor is meant to, service everyone-- it does present a significantly "easier" and "cheaper" alternative to the illegal alternatives, that is usually much safer as well. (Some argument can be made about the quality and nature of the iTunes client software that are noteworthy in that dept, but this is slashdot, and I am sure you already know.)

Likewise, when Netflix came on the scene, there was a HUGE reduction in illegal movie activity.

The reason, in both instances: the cost of the legal offering came down significantly, both in terms of monetary value, and in terms of inconvenience. They both presented an option that was "simply better."

The inconvenience costs of the pirate distribution system are endemic, and can't easily or sensibly be removed. Some pirate distribution systems have tried to deal with that problem through exclusivity, like demonoid, but that only compartmentalizes the problem, and imposes another inconvenience to the pirate distribution model-- namely, now you also have to be invited to pirate, rather than simply participate. (If you can become a member to the sanitized secret pirate social club, the benefits become obvious, but the initial obstacle cannot be less than the trouble associated with the consequences of working with the rabble they keep out. Virus whores, porn re

Re:Q.E.D.

[fractoid]

Good post.

If there were a Netflix-style online streaming/viewing service that offered legitimate downloads, full HD, no ads, allowing you to sign up for individual cable TV channels, that was actually available outside the U.S. ... hell, I'd buy it.

The problem as I see it is that the cable TV industry is still working on the same premise that the recording industry was working on 20 years ago. Take a couple of hits, bundle a whole lot of useless crap in with it, then make people pay for the crap they don't want in order to get to the good stuff. I don't think they quite understand how much bigger the market has become in those 20 years. They can afford to drop the sale price by 50-80%, cut out the bundling, cut out the advertising. If that will get them a significant market share, the sheer volume will make up for it.

Re:Q.E.D.

[Obfuscant]

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.

Re:Q.E.D.

[roc97007]

Yep, I don't get that mentality. Personally, I've become addicted to watching a whole season, or whole show history in a row. It sucks me in more than watching one episode every week, then missing some episode because I was out that night. Or forgetting all the details of the cliffhanger from a year ago.

I know, right? Watching a single series coherently you pick up nuances that the writers and director meant you to get but are lost due to the week-long (or more) gap between episodes and the months-long gap between season finale and season premiere. Well written shows (especially more recently) are meant to be experienced as a stream, not haphazardly.

Re:Q.E.D.

[Bert64]

That "right to profit from it" started as an agreement with the people, media producers receive a short term monopoly in exchange for the content entering the public domain afterwards. This system has now become so distorted by greed on the part of the media producers that it's extremely harmful to society as a whole.

As to the other points:

1) Pure greed, not to mention the fact that lower prices would translate to more sales and potentially more profit overall.

2) Or just contracting to third parties who already have the infrastructure.

3) Have you never considered that obtrusive advertisements offend people and discourage them from making purchases? Quite a lot of people consider "i am sick of seeing adverts for X, so i'm going to try their competitor Y instead", personally i have taken this decision many times.

4) Users already have this power, and are already abusing it. Those who want to do so are already doing so, making it easier for everyone else means nothing as most people won't do anything with it. And to put it another way, if you treat us like criminals then we will act like criminals.

Noone has any "right" to profit... Provide something useful and you can earn profit from it. But many in the content industry are extremely arrogant and greedy, they treat their paying customers with the utmost contempt and expect then to just bend over and take it.

And your talk about "reasonable terms" is extremely arrogant...

What exactly is reasonable about copyright terms that mean anyone who was alive when a work was first published will be dead before it enters the public domain?
What is reasonable about regional discrimination? Why should someone be charged twice as much, 6 months later, and actively be prevented from importing their own legally purchased copy from another country?
Why should i not be allowed to buy something *AT ALL* because i happen to live in a different country? Even if we're willing to pay the costs of shipping the media here? (and this is even more stupid for online purchases)... What do you have against other countries?
What is reasonable about drm schemes, which are aimed at extracting more money from paying customers and do nothing to discourage piracy?
What is reasonable about expecting users to pay again to watch the exact same content on a different device?

Copyright started out reasonable, 20 years in the days of mechanical printing presses and distribution by horse drawn carts and sailing ships was a reasonable length of time for content to be published and widely distributed. Today those terms should be much shorter, not longer.

Reasonable is about give and take, your desire to take take take is completely unreasonable.
Your demand to punish those who won't put up with unreasonable behavior into submission is exactly what many dictators throughout history have done. Instead of finding a happy medium which keeps citizens content, you treat them like dirt and use the threat of force to keep them in line. Comrade Stalin salutes you.

CBS screwed themaselves even more

[dirk]

Another reason the torrent numbers probably wen up is that CBS also blocked TW customers from accessing their shows from the CBS website. If a TW customer went to the CBS website to try and watch a show, they weren't able to. So any money they could have made from that was gone as well. So really, CBS actually pushed people who would go through the next legitimate channel further down the line. Sure, they could possibly buy it from Amazon or iTunes, but at a dollar per show, that is a pretty hefty price for a show you will watch once and then delete.

Yarrr!

[Greyfox]

Avast ye buccaneers! They've cut ourrr access! Batten down the hatches and farrrrr up the bittorrent! We be settin' sail for the commercial-free waters of internet piracy, global warmin' be damned! Yarrr!

Re:What's with...

[Guppy06]

Most of these shows can be watched legitimately at cbs.com, but CBS is currently blocking anybody with a TimeWarner Cable IP address.

Re:Fascinating!

[Opportunist]

Still no news on whether or not large mammals defecate in forested areas?

Well, DUH!

[Opportunist]

What do you expect?

Let's face it, for most people simply turning on the TV is more convenient than downloading a show and then figuring out a way how to watch it sensibly on their computer equipment. They easily and willingly accept ads as the price for that convenience. Remember that they're not technical people like most on here, they want something that "just works", and they don't consider watching shows on their computer or connecting it to a TV very convenient.

But if they have a favorite show, especially if it's a show that spans a longer story arc and doesn't just consist of self contained episodes, they will go that extra mile to compensate if their cable provider drops the ball. And no, you may rest assured that they're not happy about it, far from it. It was most likely a hassle for them to get that show, they had quite a bit of "expense" (in terms of time and 'nerves') to get their show back.

It's actually even likely that they will not continue this policy despite the ads. It's simply more convenient for them to just switch on the TV, grab a box of chips and sprawl out on the couch rather than tinkering and toying with the computer to get that.

Barely worth pirating

[markdavis]

The sad part is that "Under the Dome" really does SUCK. I am hooked and want to know what is happening, but the whole "drama" part is so horrible, I am fast forwarding through at least half of each show now.

And no, I don't pirate the video, it is on Cox.

Obligatory Oatmeal

[tepples]

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.

Remember my.mp3.com?

[tepples]

It's pirating because current law requires you to make your own copy from the signal received over the air (Sony v. Universal), not through an unauthorized Internet transmission (UMG v. MP3.com). The resulting copies are indistinguishable other than that making one is an infringement and making the other is not.

History of nonsense

[BenJeremy]

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.

Been years since I've watched TV...

[SternisheFan]

I haven't watched tv in years, sounds like I'm not missing anything that special. CBS isn't on an overly expensive cable subscription? This makes no difference to my life whatsoever. Cable was commercial free, now they have got people used to paying for commercial tv, and I never saw the sense to that. My library has lots of DVDs of good (and bad) movies and tv shows, for when I need a fix of boob-tube viewing, which is rarer and rarer lately. Real life beckons, and I'll be damned if I'll be spending (wasting) my remaining years on this planet sitting zombie-like in front of a screen, bitching about how my cable company doesn't carry a channel that has little to offer. Breaking the tv habit is quite freeing, and I doubt I'll ever go back to that world. There's too much other great things to actually 'do' in life.

Re:Been years since I've watched TV...

[Subm]

> I'll be damned if I'll be spending (wasting) my remaining years on this planet sitting zombie-like in front of a screen

... written on Slashdot