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Despite Global Release, Breaking Bad Heavily Pirated
tlhIngan writes "One reason that many people pirate TV shows is 'it's not available in my country until months after it airs.' Which is why the second episode of Breaking Bad's final season was aired globally within a few hours of each other yesterday evening. Despite this, many users still decided to download it than watch it when it aired locally. Australia users we the top, perhaps because it was on FoxTel. This was followed by U.S. and Canada (who obviously got to see it when it aired), and the UK where Netflix had it within hours of the U.S. premier. Fifth on the list was the Netherlands, where it had aired hours before the U.S. premier on a public channel. It's obvious that despite the global release, the show was headed to top its previous highs in number of downloads. Could this spell the doom to future global releases, since the evidence is people just pirate them anyways?"
There would be no need to pirate it if everyone knew that it would be on TV. How many knew that this was the case?
Do they still broadcast TV shows?
maybe people are sick and tired of stupid commercials interrupting their viewing pleasure.
No commercials. here it shows on amc. Who pops in every 8 minutes to tell us about the breaking bad premier. other channels i don't watch. other crap i'll never want to see. useless products. and more ads for breaking bad!
I started to watch and the above annoyed the fuck out of me... Shut the set off and did something else. And pirated that shit an hour later.
So much better experience.
I paid for cable, they got their money. But they want more! Fuck them and their ads.
I'm so sick of ads. Everywhere.
They also doubled their viewership. It's obvious piracy is not a problem.
Could it have anything to do with the growing number of people that don't want to spend $200/mo on a cable subscription, fees, taxes, surcharges, digital tuners, HD subscrpitions/tuners, and DVRs?
Perhaps there are too many adverts during movies and shows aired on television.
I've become increasingly annoyed at how many adverts are shown while watching a movie or a show. Personally I think they're unwatchable.
If streaming services (e.g. I'm subscribed to Netflix) were to get content sooner rather than waiting months for a popular show to be available on their service then that may make a difference.
You tread.. very lightly..
This makes it on Slashdot now?
The language in the summary is so bad it isn't even clear what's being said. There was no "second episode" aired.
Just the first episode of the second half of the season.
This plus all the other bits of misinformation and bad grammar and one wonders who was friends with who to get this /.'d.
We all know that people submit perfectly legit articles all the time only to have them rejected then posted later by someone else who happened to be friends with the editors on this site.
This is horseshit.
Can someone explain to me the scope of GLOBAL RELEASE? Portugal and Spain have nothing...
You know, the ones that shows how many people actually watched it?
Many people are simply in the habit of torrenting shows, and often have rss feeds or similar automation set up to grab them automatically. I personally wasn't aware that breaking bad was airing here, nor did i know when the rest of the season was due to start. I only found out about it when it popped up in the RSS feed, by which time it had already been downloaded via torrent.
If i had known it was on tv i may well have watched it there (or recorded it for later viewing), but i certainly wouldn't watch it via a drm encumbered streaming service.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
1. I can see it exactly when I want, not have to wait for when it's being broadcast;
2. I don't have to pay subscription or licence fees;
3. I don't increase the wealth of people who are doing just fine already;
4. I don't have to watch any adverts or listen to any annoyingly placed continuity voiceovers;
5. (not very often, but sometimes) I can find higher quality online.
Reasons for waiting for broadcast:
1. Requires less effort - not any issue for anything popular enough;
2. Nice to be able to enjoy something all at the same time - this one is occasionally relevant;
3. Nice to have someone else pace things for you - more relaxing;
4. Concern that unicast streaming is highly inefficient - this bothers me in technical principle, but in practice servers and service providers aren't run in the public interest, so I am happy to hammer them with all Adblocking in place;
5. Well programmed, twisted sense of ethics concerning "intellectual property" .
For a long time many defended their pirating of music and videos with the argument that they only did it because the industry didn't provide a legal, user friendly and inexpensive alternative with timely release across countries. Now that we have Spotify, Netflix, etc. and releases like this, and people still pirate, many of these arguments have proven to be just invented moral excuses for the people who continue to pirate. Too bad, because these services really are at a level now, in terms of a good, fair and user friendly offering, where they deserves to be supported by consumers, to continue to fund them and good content.
It's all about the ads, nobody wants them and downloads rarely have them :-)
Should I be ashamed to admit that I am unfamiliar with this show completely? Saw brief mentions of it on Facebook, but figured it was some new movie coming out soon.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Spoiler alert: This season will end with Walter White joining witness protection as Hal (Wilkerson?) from Malcom in the Middle.
Costs $57 a month to get cable where I live (NZ) and for the premium content channel that has it.
So I don't watch it anymore. Used to watch it on free to air, and there's nothing else on cable I'd want to pay for.
It's kinda like saying there was free ice cream at McDonalds but nobody came.
1) People need to know about it. I'm in the Netherlands and I didn't know Breaking Bad ever aired here at all. I simply never watch the public channels because the commercial breaks take 4 and a half minutes. (Not kidding.)
2) You need to have the time to tune in. I'm so used to watching stuff online (Hulu and Hulu-like websites) that the notion of having to turn on the TV at a specific time just doesn't compute anymore.
If you've been pirating TV shows for so long and have become accustomed to its benefits (no ads, offline watching at any time and not just when aired/networked, encoded in cross-platform, DRM free formats for easy transfer to multiple devices, etc), it's very hard to go back to traditional methods of watching TV shows.
I want to see it when I want to.
I don't even have an subscription on a cable provider because of all the ridiculous amounts of crap they broadcast.
I live in the Netherlands.
Downloading is much more convenient.
One would think that they would air it in all country's while the hype was in full swing, nobody wants to follow a has been. Kinda like following the U.S. government failure to it's people.
Was that some sort of Grampa Computer?
Tried to buy it on Amazon and iTunes at midnight after it aired, but it wasn't available.
And certainly not for free. In most countries these series are being broadcast through channels that require a monthly or yearly subscription (i.e. satellite). Also lots of people download the episodes for their library..So, nothing new in this article
7 Billion people - 2.6 million pirates - x.x million who pay. There are more people who choose not to pirate it than people who pirate it and people who pay for it combined.
In the US, it wasn't broadcast on open airwaves for all to consume. Instead, it was carried on private cable providers that you had to pay a heavy tax for channels that you don't want or need. This is likely why in the US it was still heavily pirated.
Until content providers start to self publish their content, then cable providers have no incentive to provide a le carte programming. There is no competition for many of them (cable providers) in a geographical area, so why would they want to not force you to have as many channels as possible. Their model ensures every channel they add increase profits. Right now pirating is the only major competition to these monopolies that the content providers continue to encourage.
And to play the devil's advocate, many cable stations get large sums of money from cable companies without those people watching any of their programming. So there is no incentive there to decouple themselves from the gravy train.
This cycle won't end until somebody either outsmarts the content+cable monopoly and provides some form of legal streaming, or pirating exceeds the cable companies profit margin gaps. The only problem with the later is that the cable companies own the internet distribution, so they will just reduce QOS to ensure their content monopoly, which we already see happening.
It wasnt aired in my country AT ALL. How was i supposed to watch the show ?
How is this a global release? This is what a "global release" should be:
1. Put episode on breakingbad.com/amc.com/whatever
2. Include some ads if you want
3. Profit
Forget this subscribe to cable w/ extras for ~100/mo nonsense.
I have basic Foxtel. If it was on one of the basic channels, and if I had known about it, maybe I would have watched it there.
TV networks here in Australia break up programmes and play them in whatever order works for them. They repeat episodes from five years ago and trickle in a new episode now and again. So of course people will just go online and download what they want to watch now. Its easier to do that than to record off the TV just to time shift it. Its easier to download than to record from the TV to watch on a laptop in bed. lets face it: The internet is closer to us than television these days.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Global release 1 episode out of a 50 of them...people pirate cause they already did for other 50 episodes. Claim from this experience Global release is useless.
You really don't want is to global release... just admit that and we can all go home.
Even if they did I can't just imagine sit at TV on a specific date/time. This is not how it works now, I will watch it when/if I have time not when they think I should watch it.
I also like to watch multiple episodes at a time, and the legal way of me doing this (can't use hulu or netflix where I live) is ordering box set via amazon which costs 45 pounds for seasons 1-4.
No thanks, make it 10 pounds and you got a deal since it's just piece of plastic with printed out papers.
The only advantage I see in a dvd box set is that audio levels and quality is consistent across all the seasons/episodes but even this can be a non issue if you take your time searching right torrents.
Plus it will take 1 week for the DVDs to get here and would require me to go to the post office, wait in line, get back home to finally view it.
Now lets compare the other alternative that I have:
Open up the bay, type in breaking bad season, get the one with most seeds/ok quality and press magic download button. 1 hour later I have what I needed without all the annoyances.
So guess which route will I or anyone sane would choose?
It didn't air in Germany. Not sure if it would have been available on some network website that I wouldn't bother to check in the first place because everything on those sites is usually region restricted anyway. Would someone care to elaborate on where it was available?
"Fifth on the list was the Netherlands, where it had aired hours before the U.S. premier on a public channel."
This shows something that should be obvious to anyone familiar with TV pirating (whether they do it or study it). People will pirate TV shows even if they are broadcast on public TV channels. Why? Many people are ditching TV's completely and just using their PC for all entertainment. Some people have TV's but want to watch multiple shows that are on at the same time. Some just want to avoid commercials. There are many reasons and the solution is to make it more readily available everywhere through multiple means and with options to either watch it with advertisements for free or without ads for small fees (they currently charge way more than ads give).
People still watch TV on their TV?
TFA gives a lot of numbers about how many were downloaded this episode ... but doesn't compare it to anything.
Of course people pirated it. People will always pirate it. They could be handing it out for free on every street corner, and some people would still download it illegally. The question is whether or not the global release decreased piracy
How about this, for science... continue the worldwide simultaneous release via netflix or whatever, all season long. Then take it offline for the very last episode, or just delay that episode by a day. See how much piracy increases. (yes, I'm joking ... mostly)
This signature is false.
I usually don't respond to the threads on /. about piracy; I don't see any point in debating it. I'm pretty much going to do it regardless until they hand over full control of me being able to do what I want with something after I have purchased it. I believe many others out there have the same reasons, so I decided I would post them.
1. It's easy. I turn on the computer, surf over to The Pirate Bay, search for what I want, click on the magnet link and a few minutes later I have it.
2. Freedom. I can then do whatever I want with the file. Put it on my laptop and take it with me, watch it on my 27" monitor, stream it to a TV or run it from a computer connected to TV via HDMI. I can give it to a friend on a USB stick. Save it on my hard drive for later. Pause it in the middle to do something else and resume later.
3. Cost. Buying a new television every few years is expensive. I don't know about you, but I want to retire early. I move around a lot because of work and having a television with me is not an option. Also, in my country of Norway, we have to pay a TV licence fee of around 500 dollars a year if we have one. I hate Norwegian television, it's boring and ethnocentric. The rest of the world seems to be in a television series renaissance, but here it's the same boring shit that no one outside of this small and insignificant country cares about. Mostly about "Big Brother" type of programming and gatherings of celebrities.
4. Advertising and commercials. I don't have to fucking watch them when I download something. Period.
5. The Man. I'm just trying to make my way in this world and I'm sick of people better off than me trying to get their hands in my pockets. I don't want theirs, I just want mine. And to keep it. Knowing that they didn't get it this time gives me pleasure and satisfaction. I will ultimately buy the stuff I really like because I support the artists/authors. I have over 1000 music CDs in storage I've bought since my first CD player in 1993. Now, I try to buy FLAC or 320 kbps MP3s directly from the bands. I have over 400 games on Steam, many from Indy publishers, most I haven't even played. Especially since I gave up computer games as my new year's resolution 2013. But I still buy them because I support what they do, and I like that I will always have them on Steam. Movies? They release them on DVD, then Blue Ray, then a special edition, then an uncut with added scenes, then 20 years later with lost fucking footage. This doesn't make me feel like they give a shit about me getting what I am paying for. Sure, I could forgo films and television series completely, but there's that social aspect of being a part of conversations at work and at gatherings that I would miss out on. I already don't give a damn for sports, might as well drop out of society completely.
If they were to figure out a delivery system like Steam for music, films and books, where I would actually own what I've paid for, I would give up downloading. Imagine buying a film in 1080p and when they decide to upscale it to 4K with new footage and features, it would automatically get updated without you having to dish out more cash. I think that's something we all want. I also want an itunes alternative, a real one, I don't support companies who bully and sue everyone.
Could this spell the doom to future global releases, since the evidence is people just pirate them anyways?
Probably, but I'd like to solve the puzzle, Pat: "The demise of broadcast TV and push-media in general." Now tell me what I've won!
I had no idea it was airing where I live, but why would I care when the "pirated" version is waiting for me to queue it up at my earliest convenience on myriad devices. (So is the Netflix version, but I use a region-unblocker for Netflix--is that still "piracy?")
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
You can't say global release is a flawed model just by the piracy numbers. The key is the financials. If AMC can get more money from international rebroadcasters by offering it to them on a shorter timeframe, then global release has some merit.
And it is possible that the content is considered to be more valuable on the shorter timeframe, because the airers prefer their content be more "fresh".
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
"Which is why the second episode of Breaking Bad's final season was aired globally within a few hours of each other yesterday evening."
I am assuming that the poster meant second part. Furthermore the Netherlands aired the 13th episode of the 4th season. Which could explain why the latest episode was torrented to such an extent.
So, you go to the mechanic to get some work done, you agree on a price (which includes a bit of profit), they do the work and get paid once; You don't pay each time you start up your car.
The same can be true with infinitely reproducible bits, that's how your Free & Open Source coders can make money, they get paid to do work once, and don't charge for the work again for each copy.
Note: With code or music, film, games, etc. forms of art, it doesn't benefit one individual, it benefits culture as a whole (if you're lucky). So, there isn't this One to One : Work to Benefit ratio (like with mechanics, home builders, fast food, etc). Artwork is a one to many production. That means that everyone who benefits can chip in to get the work done. So, set a price for the next episode (plus a bit of profit), let folks donate to get the show made, it gets made and everyone gets to watch it because everyone already paid for the work to get done. Fans have deeper pockets than you think; You're actually limiting yourselves by not doing this.
Watch as publishers go extinct as they become publicists instead -- In fact, you want everyone to watch everything so they'll pay more for the next show to get made (redundancy solves your archival problem), and no one wastes money on shows no one wants to watch. It's as simple as not doing the work until the payment is agreed upon -- like all other labor markets in the world. Why gamble your stability away via the copyright futures market? You could reject the idea of "starving artist" and respect it like all other forms of work. More job security, less money wasted on garbage shows, more money available to put into better shows, no commercials required... and all piracy is eliminated.
Is it a "miracle" that the information which benefits many is also infinitely reproducible? No, that's the nature of information; Most of you just fundamentally misunderstand it. You humans are so... no, I dare not say; There is no concept in your culture to describe the effect anyway -- Like a Frustratron with a fused Overkill setting, to say the very least.
In Australia, season 4 finished airing on ABC only a few weeks ago. I don't even know when season 5 will be shown, let alone the latest season. Showing on Foxtel really doesn't count - free to air TV is still dominant here.
If all shows would always be available in a convenient way, they people wouldn't pirate. But it's too little, too late. Only a few shows are available globally (and judging by the comments here, even in this case that is not entirely sure). But it is certainly too late. There are so many alternative ways to obtain a series or movie that people don't go back.
5-10 years ago, many people couldn't be bothered to figure out how this whole downloading thing worked. But the commerce of TV made them figure it out. Now, everybody can do it. There are loads of streaming websites, and torrents. By now, viewers do not only demand it becomes available globally, but also that it is available 24/7, so they can watch it at their own convenience. That is the luxury that downloading provides.
I'm so happy that streaming and downloading (but not uploading) is still legal in the Netherlands. :-)
http://torrentfreak.com/downloading-movies-and-music-stays-legal-in-the-netherlands-121221/
No airing whatsoever in Ireland as far as I could see, including on Sky, which I would assume was probably the same situation in the UK.
and never will again.
I am to old and to set in my ways to change anymore. The content industry treated me like a leaper and thief for to long for me to now start dancing to their tune again. The old practices of charging high prices for 2 episodes on a single VHS tapes, charging 1 dollar for a single song only accepting credit cards, the endless unskippable ads and warnings on BOUGHT content, lame copy protection that only bothers paying customers have just completely turned me of paying for content. I get better, faster service for free then when I payed for it for over 20 years. Fine, I take the hint. I keep my money and spend it on other stuff.
People like me are lazy, it took a LOT for me to start blocking ads for instance, it was just to much hazzle in the beginning. But now installing ad-blocker is part of my routine after installing a new browser. And I won't change that routine anytime soon. Push me over the edge and I won't climb back up, I will stay there and nurture my grievances long after you claimed they are gone.
Oh and TV shows are STILL over priced, DVD's still have unskippable warnings and adds and songs are STILL a dollar a song AND it is still a nightmare to pay with iDeal (dutch cross bank payment system) on most services.
Oh and since breaking bad aired on a dutch public channel, may taxes payed for it whether I want to watch it or not, so why shouldn't I be able to download (it airs without commercial breaks) it? Downloading is legal in Holland anyway.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
If something is popular and gets pirated normally 2-3x as much as is sold, then if this one is less than twice as pirated as sold then all you're saying with "heavily pirated" is that it is popular, not that worldwide release had no effect.
But I guess you're just a copyright troll, pounding the meme that it's only EVERYONE ELSE who is being greedy, not the copyright industry who have had an 8-fold increase in the length of copyright and a 10-fold increase in what copyright covers, and state handouts in the form of criminalising copyright infringement so that they don't have to pay to prove losses, they can let the government chase them without having to foot the bill.
Habit - if you already get it from pirate bay, why change.
I expect to watch movie releases and TV shows at my discretion, without commercials. I expect it to always be possible because of the "analog hole", the question is only whether it will always be more convenient. I'm ready to pay for it if tre price is right. Only spotify have so far been able to reach the cost/convenience treshold by offering all the music I need at a fixed cost. The only way to stop pirating of TV/movies would be the same thing: A stupidly simple interface, available on everyone's TV (i.e. has to be on all TV's, consoles, devices) and with everything you want to watch within a few clicks. Dealing with cable companies and TV channel packages is analogous to signing up on a 12 month listening deal with a record company. A record company that only has half the artists you like. Its a business model that is dead in the water.
Let me start off by saying I really love netflix.
After discovering that breaking bad is also on netflix, I was curious to try it out yesterday. The whole reason I bought netflix is that it provides good quality streams with nice catalogues of movies & series (no, I haven't watched TV in 10 years so most of the shows were/are new to me), and my reasoning was that I'm just getting older and it's very convinient to flip on PS3 and simply to watch stuff instead of finding the torrents first etc having the "trouble" of downloading them etc..
As I got home from work yesterday (since I live in Finland, the show aired in US previous night), I downloaded the torrent right away. Then I remembered that I'm subscribing, PAYING, for the same content I'm pirating, I should check if the episode would be on netflix. Guess what? It wasn't there.
In my case, the pirating happened because netflix dropped the ball and the content wasn't viewable hours after (atleast 12+) it had been broadcasted. We've all been told, and I've even said it myself; provide me a service which updates quickly with good enough quality, and you'll have a deal. This "pirating" is on CDNs and their inability to provide content on time. Besides, I already paid for the show, who cares if I download it from the piratebay.. (is netflix subscription a free pirating card, that's a whole another discussion, but IMHO the whole pirating thing becomes a question of a convinience.)
I'm not much of a tv watcher myself, but the show I do tend to watch, Dr. Who, is free to air where I live. Without commercials too. I don't think I've ever watched it on live tv, I always pirate it purely for convenience. As long as the most convenient thing is pirating, I will continue doing so. For music on the other hand, the most convenient thing is generally spotify, so I pay the reasonable price for a subscription. The things not on spotify I pirate. Afaik Netflix is not yet available here in the Netherlands (it wasn't the last time I checked, about a year back), but if it were and there was a subscription that fit my consumer pattern, I wouldn't mind paying something for it either. Digital on demand media is getting there. Its just a matter of time. The traditional media will either adapt to the demands of a new generation of consumers, or die out and be replaced by those who do understand how to deliver what I want.
If there were two buttons next to "Breaking Bad S05E09" on your chosen torrent site - one button labelled 'FREE' and the other one labelled 'PAY $3' - which button would get the most clicks?
In the spirt of the show, everyone watching shoud be pirating it. Come on, haven't you learn anything from the show? Do we have to get out a barrel of piranha solution for your sorry ass?
You can't just do this once or twice and expect everyone to stop downloading :)
So they got the When part of the equation torrent here... what about the other 2 parts of it? the How I want it and the price I want it?
I am an Aussie with out fox tell so i cant watch it here, I want it in a format I can watch on my existing setup at home, that's DRM free and I don't have to stream it over my limited connection speed and quota every time i want to watch it (and this can be several time in my house with me and my wife not being home at the same time.
then there is the price, I don't want to pay $30+ a month to watch one or 2 shows. and only get to see them once, give me rights to watch it whenever I want for say $15 a season (and I doubt they get that much PER VIEWER selling to the channels) then i might consider the legal options.
the other question unanswered by the full article is how many downloads where there compared to the previous non simulcast episodes? if it was statistically lower then the whole assumption here should be that it works, you wont stop piracy, you can only reduce it by doing the right thing by your customer base.
note, i have never watch breaking bad and dont really care about it, but this point needs to get across to the content creators sooner or later...
why should i use tv when i can download? i like my life easy not complicated.
they made the world understand that downloading and playing their media in media centers is the way to go.
i don't care about their global releases and shit. fucking industry shit. who the fuck wants to even follow that? let it die so we get more alternative content and people can support smaller producers instead.
I assume this "airs" thing they speak of has to do with those "television" things old people stare at. I have not had one of those in years and I see no reason to get one. It's about 10 years too late to try "airing" things within a reasonable time-frame from when the show is released in my case. I know some people under 30 who own a TV which is hooked up to their computer or XBox, but I know very few who actually watch TV-channels anymore. I know old people (50-60+) like their propaganda box, but it's a bit late to try to attract younger people who are used to getting all media from the Internet.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
The episode broadcast last Sunday on Dutch public television was over two years old.
Does anyone verify these stories?
The deal:
I'll pay you that £25 a month that you want me to pay to watch TV when:
- I can just watch EVERYTHING. No exclusives, specials or "just pay extra to see this".
- I can watch what I want. Old stuff, new stuff, nobody decides for me. You just put your whole archives online and I can watch them.
- I can not watch anything I don't want to watch. This includes adverts.
- I can watch it when I want. Sorry, but the days of me staying in of an evening to catch particular show X died with the video recorder and are just laughable nowadays. The kind of people / entertainment that such scheduling works for are those things that are just "on" when people slouch down in the sofa for the evening not intending to move, and the program is entertaining enough that people don't switch over - this has bred the entire Big Brother / X-Factor crap for the last 10 years.
- I can watch it how I want - online, on a TV, on a tablet, from abroad, etc. You NEED me to say things like "Oh, you have to see this program, look, watch this for a minute, it's great" and/or "we have this program in England, it's fabulous, here I'll load up an episode for you". Honestly. If I can't, then you will not get new people watching programs.
- I can watch it when it comes out. No preview, exclusives, region differences, etc. I can just watch it from the release time onwards, forever.
- You have to stop giving a shit about piracy. Honestly, every measure ever implemented has been next-to-useless. All it's done is stop genuine people watching things as much as delaying pirates. I still refuse to buy Disney DVD's because they JUST DON'T WORK in my daughter's laptop. Simple as that. End of. If you can't make your money from TV channels WANTING to show your stuff and the associated licensing / merchandising rights then you should just stop making it.
Honestly, I'm infinitely more likely to pay £50 direct to "thebigbangtheory.com" for a lifetime membership that lets me view any and all episodes than I am to pay £25 a month to a channel that occasionally bothers to screen random episodes of it years after they come out and that you get literally PENCE of licensing revenue from per viewing.
The fact that you STILL haven't picked up on this as a possibility - alongside the traditional methods - means that you just don't care about actually making money as much as we'd like to think. You just care about nothing more than holding the rights and having the power to decide what's "big" and what's not, which is what the whole anti-piracy game is. I don't blame the actors or the writers so much as all the middle-men involved in the process. And it's about time we just cut them out.
If you haven't noticed, this is how people buy video games nowadays. It would take about a month to work out how to use Steam to distribute video content in the same way. The day Steam lets me "buy" a season of my favourite program, and I can just double-click to download and view it offline on as many computers as I like and not have to worry about if it will play or not, TV is dead. And not because of piracy.
yes the pirate tv is Occupy the world
http://www.th3pt.blogspot.com/2013/04/muslim-hackers-are-launching-attack-on.html
people still watch TV?
This is also part of the reason.
"Breaking Bad's final season was aired globally"
Yeah, right. Just went on their page, there's only ep9 from s5, when clicking I got: "The video you are trying to watch cannot be viewed from your current country or location". Global release my a**.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
In New Zealand it was aired on a premium channel available only on a premium service only available via satellite.
I'd have to buy a dish, or sign up for a 12/24 month contract + install fee, then buy the base package full of 50 channels I don't want for $50 a month, then buy the soho channel for another $10 a month, then stay up late because it started at 11:15PM. It's another $15 a month to get a PVR decoder to watch it when I want.
That's $75/month just to watch a TV show.
I didn't even know that the show had started up again, before I noticed a new episode automatically downloaded from a RSS feed.
I have access to the show through my cable subscription, but I rarely use my tv for watching stuff. Afterall my computer has a 30" screen, surround speakers and a darker room. I sometimes use my PVR to record stuff from tv, but I rarely turn it on to watch whatever I've recorded.
When you have practically unlimited storage space at home, you sort of like to keep whatever you download as well, just in the rare chance you'll ever want to see it again (or share it with someone).
Torrents are much better than streaming, and the selection of things to watch is MUCH greater than any online service I've found. It's not about the money for me, much more so about the convenience.
How do you define "Global Release" ? Maybe it's close in meaning to "football world championship", which means...USA teams only (I didn't say soccer).
They're only airing season 2 here... And Netflix isn't an option neither: "not available in your country". They don't want my money, it's been like this for years. Now I'm used to torrent/magnet, why would I change if someday they allow me to use their service ?
but they AREN'T global releases, they are releases to select channels of pay TV providers. In Australia I still download as I want to watch it in HD and I don't have a HD Foxtel Box (only SD). So while yes the release is global, it is still only a select few that have the desired Access. I would happily pay for Breaking Bad in HD, but not at the abortion of price gouge that Foxtel want.
Stupid TV stations need to realize that global communities are a thing and people regularly talk about things with people from ALL OVER THE FUCKING WORLD.
People will and DO stay up just to watch something airing at the same time as it does somewhere else. VERY OFTEN. Even if it means heavy eyes or having to shift sleeping patterns, IT HAPPENS, DEAL WITH IT.
They seem to be basing an average viewer off of someone that watches TV to kill a few hours and nothing more.
Not to mention TV packages are downright terrible these days.
I don't fucking want packages, I WANT A CHANNEL, JUST A CHANNEL. 300 GIGADOLLARS? YEAH WELL SCREW YOU TOO.
Packages are doing more harm than good to the TV industry.
I'm not paying for 500 channels if I watch 3 of them. I'm also not paying for 3 of them when it goes far past what it costs to pay for 500 channels.
Fix your shit, industry.
Better yet, let me buy the damn thing digitally in a system similar to Steam and let me watch it whenever the hell I want, without a billion layers of stupid DRM that will be ripped apart.
You already lost control of TV anyway, at least be decent and make bare-minimum Steam-like DRM system, it isn't going to make it any easier to pirate your TV shows, it is already a trivial effort to do in the first place!
wikipedia indicates that there were 5.9 million viewers in the U.S. alone, vs 2.93 million for the season opening episode. I think one can easily call this a massive success. The piracy issues seems minor in comparison.
Second episode? "Australia we the top"? C'mon guys...f**king ridiculous.
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
look, I checked it up and in germany it is on AXN which is a cable TV channel, and not even in the basic package, for entertain cable TV it is on the big TV *upgrade* package. So please next time you pretend it is a global release, check that it is not or pay TV. On public TV it is a global release. On cable TV ? not so much.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I don't count pay TV channel (not even the default cable TV) as being global either personally.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Foxtel in Australia is far too expensive, and, I'm renting (as many people are), so couldn't install it (even if I wanted to and had a TV)
Call me when there is a Breaking Bad website, were I can subscribe or pay a fee, which lets me stream when aired and download a drm free file after it airs. Also they should have the previous seasons on sale.
So it was on Netflix in the UK? Not much use to me as I have LoveFilm. And no, I'm not signing up for a duplicate service just for one programme.
It's almost like industry practices have made people so used to doing it this way that watching it on TV even when you can is way more effort.
If Sickbeard is set up to snag it and record it, it means that it will be waiting for me, on my schedule, properly sorted and tagged in my media center for when I'm available to watch. Of the four shows I track, don't know when any of them are on. Of the four, one is broadcast and two are basic cable that are posted by the content owner, to the web, and without commercials within 12 hours of airing.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Uhm yeah, the breaking bad episode in the netherlands was not the premier of this season, but the last episode of LAST YEARS season. Please OP, get your facts right. Here's a link: http://programma.vpro.nl/drama/afleveringen/breaking-bad-serie-4/aflevering-13.html
I found it by googling for a bout 15 seconds.
Attacking ships is wrong!
It wasnt aired publically in the netherlands. The OP made a mistake. What aired in the netherlands was the last episode fo the previous season.
Don't hurt your back lugging those goal post around when you change tack and claim the yet to be fucking released complete series on disc sales have been hurt.
Fucking Hollywood, mutter, mutter
The parent poster was alluding to getting a Sky Digibox which allows you to record what you get over Sky or Free-to-Air.
However, if Breaking Bad (for example) were not available under Sky but required Rogers Cable, for example (whether this is possible in this example is irrelevant to the illustration), then you'd have to use the Rogers Cable DTV box to record that, since your Sky box can't decode Rogers' stream.
And you can't in most cases daisy-chain them to pass the signal through each. Because pirates, apparently.
Same-day in the UK; meanwhile, us USian Netflix folk who choose to watch BB in the purest form (heh) sans commercials, will have to wait, dancing in a year-long mine field of spoilers (Twitter, et al) while AMC milks their rerun and DVD cows.
Seems fair.
Why pay the "Gold Price" when you can pay the "Iron Price" ? :-)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
...how come we don't get that in the states?
From the group who have asked every few years for even MORE free handouts from everyone else, the claim that pirating is "2. I get stuff for free.".
You stole from the public domain by demanding extension of copyright lengths.
You stole from the public by demanding no copy be left for archiving.
You stole from the public by encrypting the product and making decryption illegal.
You stole from the public by increasing what is copyrightable.
You are stealing from the public by making copyright infringement a criminal offence, making the government (hence everyone else) pay for the work you were supposed to do.
You are stealing from the public by assigning "EULA" and "licensing" terms for your stuff but still want paying, not being licensed a temporary right to invest our money.
And you have the GALL to whine about "All you want is free stuff!!"?!?!?
Braking Bad? Is that the show about a driving instructor who decides to turn his hand to fitting custom ECUs to illegally supercharge vehicles?
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
It's things like this that make me think "How bad do I need to watch TV shows anyway?" You already know where this is headed. The studios want to do what they did with music. Lock up the content, funnel everyone into a select few distribution models that suck and maximize proffit. I have no gripe agains them wanting to make money, but when they make it so onerous at some point people like me say to hell with them it's just not worth it. Besides, even on TV you have to sit through 10 minutes of commercials for every 10 minutes of content to watch a show that sucks so bad that the commercials are preferable. In my mind they can keep it. I dropped sat altogether for a year and a half. I finally brought it back because the family kept whining. Netflix has everything I need. Sure, they don't have every movie and tv show but I've found some stuff I like: OC Choppers, Flying Wild Alaska (although they need to get the new seasons in there), 24. and a few others that I watch when I feel like watching tv (not very often). As it is now I've got DirectTV that I use to watch the news and it costs me ~$60 /mo. My wife watches cooking shows and lifetime dramas mostly in background while playing WoW. I turn it off sometimes and she doesn't even realize it's not there. To me that just seems like a waste of money.
I don't own a TV.
Where I can download legally the last episode of Breaking Bad? it is cheap (less than 2$)?
Why would I buy more than one device if my laptop can do everything?
You can't seriously be expecting me to wait for someone else to decide when I'm going to watch something. That's not normal. You don't pull a book from the shelf at a certain specific time. At a theater, you can also choose where and when to watch whatever you want, within a reasonable time frame.
My great-uncle was a computer pioneer, punch-card programmer etc... born in the 30s, my mom was also in IT, born in 1958, spent her whole life playing computer games as far as I can remember. You do realize that the old Magnavox Odyssey was released when she was in her teens? I'm 33, I was born into a family who already owned a console. It's not my fault if technologically illiterate media moguls are 1 or 2 generations behind the times, but the people who should be leading us should be at the LEADING edge, not way behind the times.
The last time I needed a television was back in the NES days.
I am from the Netherlands... and there was no information on TV, on when and where it was aired.
I like to watch at my own time... and since I don't have a DVR... well... you got to use other means...
We really need to re-evaluate the definition of pirated.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Am I missing something?
Seastead this.
I'm confused. You list all these ways you can't get Netflix, then strongly imply that you have a streaming-capable Internet connection.
Are you not, in fact, aware that the main way you get Netflix is through a streaming Internet connection? Or is your connection just not good enough to receive any random stream out there (but your ISP optimizes it for specific streams that pay them)?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Just because there is global access at some odd hour doesn't mean it's at a convenient time for people. When they do a global release on netflix or streaming from their site then you'll have a decent metric
Here's the deal. Whomever air Breaking Bad still made their money off it. Even though a shit ton of peeps downloaded it, they still had all the Cable/Dish subscribers that paid for AMC, plus AMC had commercials going (before, after, during?). When they release on it DVD & Bluray, they will still get money for it.
See, they think everyone that sees it needs to pay premium prices to watch it. And the truth is, they are making money, like they have always, otherwise they wouldn't be producing shows, AMC wouldn't be a channel, and of course, no one would pay for Cable/Dish TV.
Except, people pay for cable/dish TV, they pay extra for channels like AMC, HBO & Showtime. And people purchase DVD's & Blurays. The various Entertainment companies make money, make profits. Yet it's always about the pirating.
For the record, I haven't seen Breaking Bad. After the series is done, I'm planning on downloading it and watching it. Not buying it. Not paying Netflix. I will pirate the fucker and watch it. Does it matter? Fuck no, they made their money off of it. Sure, the actors might make a little cut off sales, but lets get real here. What about the grips? The makeup people? The lighting people? They got paid. They don't get anymore money. They got paid less then the actors, but had a very important job. If we are going to be fair here, which is what the entertainment industry is crying about when it comes to piracy, then they need to be getting a piece of the pie also.
This is why people that make TV shows do NOT deserve anything beyond the original airing.
Be seeing you...
I truly believe the future of distributed, paid content is for us consumers to be in control, with minimal distribution channels in the middle. As it stands right now, I need to pay Foxtel (Australia) $105 a month, for what they call "IQ2" and a bunch of packages (Standard + Entertainment/Sport). The only channel I actually watch is ABC News 24, which ironically is free to air and only comes with "HD" (another $30) which means I need to switch away to my TV Tuner to actually watch it. The only reason we have Foxtel in the first place is for the wife to watch Channel E and even worse than this, the only reason we have Channel E is because she watches the Kardashians (don't ask) and a few other trash shows.
Here's my point - I have $105 per month where I want to pay TV content creators direction. That is, the Kardashians (*sigh*), Breaking Bad, Suits, and a few others. "In the future", I'm looking forward to media regulation being relaxed (Anyone know why NetFlix isn't in Australia yet?) to using my Android Media Player, and selecting the shows directly I want to watch over the internet. Nothing more, nothing less. Sure, feel free to give me free shows and "recommend" shows to me, but do not (!) force me to buy a "Entertainment/Sport" package just for one TV show.
I live in the US, and pay a nice monthly fee for cable and internet service. I used to be able to watch and record my TV shows on a VCR using as many VCRs and/or TVs that I wanted. However, the cable company took away my right to do that by requiring that I rent boxes for each TV and encrypting there service. Also I must now pay a monthly fee for a DVR solution just for the pleasure of exercising my fair use rights of personal time shifting. Instead, I now just watch cable on 2 TVs and download my recordings from torrent sites, when I want to time-shift my watching. I have perfectly good hardware that can record and store digital video for me to use personally how I want, but the cable company has seen fit to take away my rights to use it as such. I don't understand why TV manufacturers aren't more up in arms about it, as it limits the number of TVs that I could use.
Have you watched US cable TV? The original concept of cable TV was since you were already paying a monthly fee for it there were no commercials. That lasted about six months before the greed mongers put them back in. US TV (including cable) is like 40% commercials now. While you can't avoid the in show "product placement", if you pirate a show you don't lose 20 minutes of your life for every hour watching commercials for stuff you'll never buy. I am never going to buy prescription drugs that my doctor does not prescribe. I am never going to buy into some shady stock brokerage firm because its being pushed on TV by actors saying how wonderful the company is.
Which is why the second episode of Breaking Bad's final season was aired globally within a few hours of each other yesterday evening.
Posted by Unknown Lamer on Tuesday August 13, 2013 @03:11AM
ME: Having heart attack, frantically searches for second episode of final season to torrent since I must have missed it only to realize this is Slashdot, where editors can't be bothered with facts, such as the second episode won't air until Sunday, August 18th .
A lot of people bought a season pass of breaking bad during the first half of season 5. It was already announced that the season would be halved and completed this year. Everyone was thinking "Oh good I'll get the whole season"
Well no.
On iTunes it's called season 6 so you have to pay again.
Nice money grab there.
I'm sure that contributed to piracy as well. After all, steal from people and many won't feel any moral problem with taking what they already paid for.
Very smart, turn your remaining paying customers into pirates.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Maybe the reason many shows get downloaded from pirate sites is because peoples dont have to look at publicity. I know a lot of peoples who hate publicity. Publicity would not ba as bad if they showed them before and after the shows instead of in the middle of the shows.
Long ago, before the VCR, people scheduled their lives around the TV schedule for their favorite shows. If you missed it, you missed it and couldn't get the opportunity back again until it was playing again during off-season re-runs.
The VCR enabled more freedom for the people and some people became extremely serious about them. (My mother, before she died, had four VCRs all set for her favorite shows and had more tapes than she could watch... well, she went a little overboard but I completely understand her mentality.) These days, we all have a similar mentality. We want to do what we want to do when we want to do it. Scheduling our lives around a TV broadcast is a thing of the past. It's good and fun to be among the first to see a premier of whatever, but lots of people, perhaps even most people, simply do not see this as a priority in their lives. I think the last true holdout of having the "now" experience is live broadcast events such as concerts, sporting events and political rallys. After all, there's money to be made in sports and live performances and the desire of people to gamble on sports will probably maintain the old model. However, with just about everything else? Not so much.
People are downloading their TV because they know they have it and can watch it any time they are ready. It's still about scheduling life on one's own terms.
I'd guess that people pirated it because that's the easiest and most convenient way of watching it.
I know my friends have been going on and on about this series for months but so far as I know it wasn't generally released here in the UK ( maybe just on Sky or something ? )
If the entertainment companies want us to get content from them directly then they need to make it a lot more easy and convenient than it is now.
The lesson the content producers NEED to learn (but are unlikely to pick up on anytime soon) is that if the only legal way to watch a particular show is to buy expensive cable/satellite TV and then buy an expensive channel package on top of that (which is the only way to legally watch this new season of Breaking Bad here in Australia) people will continue to pirate.
The trick to stopping piracy is to make it available in a form that does NOT require purchasing expensive cable/satellite TV and paying for vast amounts of content that you dont want just to get the few shows worth watching. But as long as Rupert Murdoch and his Foxtel empire (and the Foxtel-owned Showcase channel in particular) continue to throw vast sums of money at HBO, AMC and other overseas producers of premium high-quality drama, that's never going to happen.
What if the Breaking Bad global release was wildly profitable? Is it still a failure because it was widely pirated? If it's profitable then who cares how much it was pirated, chances are the vast majority of those people wouldn't have paid to see it anyway. Piracy certainly doesn't eat into the amount of money you've received.
BTW, this was probably pirated by people without cable subscriptions or people who wanted it in a convenient time-shifting/multi-device format.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
For eBooks (if you like fantasy/SF) I've found Webscription (Baen books) to be a very very good service.
http://www.baenebooks.com/
Start there. They have a fairly large library, with quite a few books for free download. No DRM, fairly inexpensive (think $4-$7 per book) and downloadable in just about any format you'd want.
Once you've created an account, those books will stay available on your account page for download on whatever device you want it on.
I've put this same thing in several threads over the last few years, but I think they're still worth mentioning :)
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
I've heard a little bit about the show ... isn't the protagonist an anti-hero methamphetamine drug lord?
And the creators are in a twist about its fans duplicating bits? Literary thematic victory, I'd have thought.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
1) Make it available for legal, affordable download from day one, and keep it available for as long as there is demand
2) Make sure it's REALLY available in a meaningful way. This means customers aren't impeded by poor network performance, political bickering between the ISP and the legal download site, country-specific barriers, the unwillingness to share unnecessary information with the content provider, etc. etc.
3) Make sure people who would otherwise seek the content through "other channels" know that #1 and #2 exist
4) For those who prefer physical media such as DVD, make that option available on a pre-order basis with shipping as soon as the TV show or movie premiers. For those who want BOTH online and physical media, the price should be the same or only slightly higher than* the physical media price.
*Delivering a 2-hour movie online is not a zero-cost operation for the content provider. Charging $X for a DVD and $X+the incremental cost to the provider for making the download available is not unreasonable. This incremental cost would probably be on the order $1 or less, probably much less. This is analogous in principle to charging a dime or two more for a "DVD+BD combo pack" vs. just the BluRay disk.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I'd pay $1 or $2 to watch it as soon as it comes out, as a high-quality DRM-free stream or download, without ads. Otherwise, screw it, I don't want to get cable and have to set up recording it and only be able to watch it on one device and it has ads that I have to fast-forward through etc.
Are you joking? A) People don't like commercials. B) People don't like it to be dictated to when they can watch what they want to watch. That's kind of why Amazon, Crackle, Netflix, and Hulu, and Apple TV, and the new Amazon system, and Roxio, and DVR, exist. C) People don't want to wait until 2 years from now when Netflix gets the 5th season all the way uploaded
The problem is, you can't make it difficult to watch a series, suddenly change your mind near the end, and then be surprised that people haven't abandoned the pirating they had gotten used to by then. A better test would have been to make the show (or some popular show) available globally from the very beginning.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Maybe because people want to choose when they watch something? Instead of sitting in front of the TV at a time prescribed by someone else? Get with the 21st century, guys.
I pirate TV shows that air on public airwaves. I receive the channel in glorious HD, but I rather download the show (even in SD) than to watch it on the TV, because of the horribly obnoxious advertising.
I would pay $50 for a service that offered all my favorite televised distractions without the obnoxious advertising. Unfortunately there is no such service. I ha-----
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-- I hate to have completely irrelevant junk interrupt an otherwise mediocre TV show or movie. They manage to stuff in 20 minutes of advertising into a 60 minute TV show, that's just insane, and obnoxious.
Never watched it, but it seems like trashy TV. Why not watch documentaries? Then you could isolate yourself a little from the dishonesty of fiction TV.
Then you should look again. Breaking Bad may be the best show ever. It's not trashy, it's really good.
I hate being tied to a schedule, and I hate advertising. Why am I going to spend an hour watching a 40 minute show just so a bunch of irrelevant CRAP can be screamed at me?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I HAVE cable and I DID watch it on cable on Sunday - except I missed half of it because I had no idea it was on. Even so, my living room is uncomfortable and the cable box in my own room is broken. Ergo, I torrent it. I ALWAYS torrent shows, especially after watching them on TV. Let's see - store them for my media server, or pay 60 dollars for the bluray box set in 6 months? I'll buy the bluray when it's not overpriced, thank you.
Given that "Which is why the second episode of Breaking Bad's final season was aired globally within a few hours of each other yesterday evening." doesn't make sense, I'm wondering what on earth the summary is about. The episode on August 11th was season 5 episode 9, which given the splitting of the season could also be called the first of the final season.
The obvious hypothesis to me here is that the show got more popular because it went on break in the middle of the final season. People spent months on the Internet talking about Breaking Bad and trumping up is worth. Everyone wants to guess how it will end.
This is common for the last season of shows. Even truly bad shows will have people come back after season 8 or 9 (this is the USA) & watch the end.
Some of us does not even watch old fashioned TV.
I have my HDTV hooked up to my pc and only watch streaming services like netflix and hbo and anything that aint on these services I will sadly have to download by illegal means.
I think piracy would drop drastically if tv industry did not shot themselves by placing restrictions on streaming services. Waiting a year or more after tv to watch a season just does not cut it.
It will have to be released the same day on both tv and streaming services for it to have any real effect.
Of course, many people pirated "the final season" of Breaking Bad after they purchased the full Season 5 then the retailers (Amazon, iTunes,.. ) turned the second half of the 5th season in "the final season" and charged users a second time... Source: http://consumerist.com/2013/08/12/apple-demands-another-23-because-5th-season-of-breaking-bad-was-split-in-half/
It's not so much about Global Release for me and my friends.
It's about complete Lack of Commercials.
Seriously. If I can download and watch a show at my chosen pace, without any commercial breaks and no insipid "we'll be back right after this important message" interruptions every 7 to 10 minutes (that you can't fast-forward through [PVRs are evil in that regard]), guess what we do?
If it's downloaded (legally or not), we can watch it when ever we want to.
Besides, if it has been aired publicly, how is it pirating? The old "taped on my VCR and gave the tape to a friend" analogy applies.
I certainly do Love the internet!
When are we going to stop comparing people watching television to ruthless criminals on the high seas? Jesus fucking Christ slashdot. Shame on you.
I watched it on tv live in the U.S. and then immediately downloaded a copy to rewatch a couple hours later. Why? Because I hate watching tv live. Commercials suck. Additionally, when you have your own downloaded copy, you can pause and go back quite easily.
that's what these TV execs are operating under. The idea that I'm going to watch what they want me to watch, when they want me to watch it, is laughable. What is this...1950? With 3 channels to watch and no remote control and everyone huddled around the TV for the 6 o'clock news?
Newsflash Mr. TV fat cat....I'm gonna watch stuff when I want to, not when you schedule it. And you can forget about those overpriced, locked down DVR boxes you're trying to peddle. Nope...I'm just going to fire up Netflix and watch stuff that's interesting to me, on my schedule.
I am through paying for 250 channels only to find out that there are only 5-10 that I ever really watch. I am sick and tired of the ever increasing number of commercials that seem to occupy about 1/4 of the TV experience. I am thrilled to have a service that lets me watch every episode of Hawaii 5-0 ever made, in whatever order I choose, whenever I like, in high-def no less.
Simply put - your service costs too much and delivers too little. I would venture to guess that people gravitate to other services like Netflix and Hulu and, yes, even torrents because they feel the same way I do. Now some of these services are coming up with their own original content like House of Cards and you know what? It's every bit as good as anything produced by fat cat TV. Even YouTube is starting to do this.
Slowly but surely the big TV studios are turning into the modern day horse and buggy. Good riddance.
this aired in the netherlands on 23:05 local time, I'm not gonna wait for that, I'll just 've it automatically downloaded for the next day and watch it at a time which is convenient for me. Furthermore, it was broadcasted on _public_ dutch chanel, I actually pay taxes for that, then how is it possible that my download is a pirated one, while a DVR recording would be allowed?
To each their own. I do watch documentaries, but sometimes an escape into fiction is pleasant, and Breaking Bad is some very well-written fiction.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
An increasing number of people don't want to have to pay $60 - $100+ for a bunch of television channels they don't watch but there isn't a lot in the way of selecting only the channels they do want. The problem with cable is that not only do they force you in to a situation where if you want the good content you have to buy a ton of crap, but also that after spending all that money you get bombarded by advertisement anyway. The perverbial cablevision double (or even triple) dip needs to stop if they expect to survive.
Dear accomplished producers please take you thumb out of your ****, gather your writers and re-produce all the classic series please. And do it so that they are similar enough to the classics but do not infringe any IP s. Then just give all the fanboys (and others) the chance to pay per episode and thats it. If you are bored add some clever pricing schemes and thats it !
I pay for cable, I get AMC. I knew when the show was returning, what "fan" wouldn't?
I simply choose not to watch it live, and prefer my true 720p commercial-free version, available in the format I want, in the way I want, when I want. (Not too sound too selfish)
My cable company gets the same revenue from me if I watch the show live, record it, or download it.
The numbers they should be looking at are VIEWERS, that's all that matters in terms of success/popularity.
But if they want to cross-check theoretical advertising market loss or whatever, I think they need to come at it from a totally different way round.
But I think the one reason I haven't seen here, the one single primary reason...
Because we can.
"By that logic it has never aired in the US either. It was only shown on paid cable."
Yes indeed it was not released on public TV int he US. So even the US cannot count as a global release. Law and order *is* a global public release because it is on public TV. Look you cannot pretend soemthing is released globally and EXPECT bit torrent to go down, when in reality it is only available to a few private channel.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org