Movie Piracy Cost Australian Network 'Hundreds of Millions of Dollars' (theaustralian.com.au)

Film television piracy and illegal downloads are partly to blame for Australian broadcaster Ten Network's woes, according to Village Roadshow co-chief executive Graham Burke. From a report: He said piracy had cost Ten "hundreds of millions of dollars" in potential advertising revenue because of lower ratings resulting from pirated versions of films supplied by 21st Century Fox under an onerous output deal with the Hollywood studio. He said copies of Fox's Leonardo DiCaprio movie The Revenant and The Peanuts Movie were stolen last year and shared illegally via a piracy website. "Piracy is a much bigger channel and an illicit economy than the three main commercial networks combined. It is ripping off viewers from legitimate, taxpaying enterprises," Mr Burke said. "The product that Ten is buying from 21st Century Fox and is now arriving have been pirated out of sight."

Comments

What is this about?

[chipschap]

TFA is paywalled but the summary is incoherent. Pirating is costing them advertising dollars? They have an "onerous" deal with with the Hollywood studio?

I tend not to sympathize much with big media, but could we please have a summary that at least is reasonably easy to follow and describes what's going on in coherent terms?

(Yes I know, this is up to the Slashdot "editors"...)

Re:What is this about?

[dwywit]

This isn't cable - it's one of the three major broadcast TV networks in Oz.

We have similar problems with cable/satellite providers - "package" subscriptions vs. a la carte, and while Netflix provides a good service reasonably priced, it has nowhere near the content of Netflix in the USofA.

Ten, Seven, and Nine have all been struggling for years. Nine made a strategic deal with Microsoft (NineMSN) which hasn't really paid off, Seven made a strategic deal with Yahoo (Y7), which, well, you see where we're headed.

Ten had a couple of 'big' shows, but they were reality shows - Big Brother, and Master Chef, a cooking show. There's only so much of that crap that anyone can take, even avid fans - it gets stale very quickly. The rest of the content is 99% crap. The execs at all of those networks have shown that they just can't break out of the the broadcast model - "We have the content, you'll watch it when we decide and you'll watch as much advertising as we can pile on, damn the awkward breaks in a show's tension, and we don't want you recording it to watch later, because then you can skip the ads, and it wrecks the ratings surveys, on which we base our advertising rates."

Broadcast networks should have seen the invitable when VCRs became popular, but no, they had to cling to obsolete business models.

Ten will be sold to some overseas investment corporation, and might survive, but unless it changes its thinking substantially, it'll be gone inside a decade. So will the others.

And on a related note

[Weaselmancer]

I just got sued by Kroger's. Every time I drove by and didn't purchase something they considered it a lost sale.

Re:And film blocking causes MORE damage

[mjwx]

Australia's refusal to let their citizens buy/watch foreign films has cost them billions of dollars.

Hey, you gotta point out both sides of the problem.

Ex-Australian here. The problem is twofold.

1. American companies treat Australia like the recycling bin, old crap goes in and not a second thought is given. We regularly get things months if not years after other countries and are then expected to pay a premium for it. We got sick of it and then figured out ways to get around it such as grey importing and piracy. Aussies are actually a rather smart bunch (well some of us). So by the time these movies are shown on TV, everyone's already seen them.

2. Chanel 10 (CH10) is stuck in the 80's way of thinking before we had the internet with all the pirate bays, netflixes and VPN's. They signed a deal thinking the good times would never end.

The problem is, CH10's money spinners are crappy reality TV shows that have so much fake, overhyped drama that the E! network is openly jealous. People are moving on from these as well because its more of the same crap. Their other money spinner was The Simpsons, which is now on pay TV.

Also it should be noted that the article appears in The Australian, which is ironically the most unAustralian publication you can find. The Australian is owned by Newscorp who's been waging their own war against piracy because Foxtel (cable TV) has been steadily losing customers as well. So I wouldn't just take what you read in The Australian with a grain of salt, but a shot of tequila and slice of lime as well.