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Not Even Free TV Can Get People To Stop Pirating Movies and TV Shows (qz.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Since the internet made it easier to illegally download and stream movies and TV shows, Hollywood struggled with people pirating its works online. About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to piracy globally last year, Digital TV Research found (pdf), and it's expected to approach $10 billion by 2022. Streaming-video services like Netflix and Hulu have made it more affordable to access a wide-range of titles from different TV networks and movie studios. But the availability of cheap content online has done little to curb piracy, according to research published in Management Science (paywall) last month. Customers who were offered free subscriptions to a video-on-demand package (SVOD) were just as likely to turn to piracy to find programming as those without the offering, researchers at Catolica Lisbon School of Business & Economics and Carnegie Mellon University found.
The researchers partnered with an unnamed internet-service provider -- in a region they chose not to disclose -- to offer customers who were already prone to piracy an on-demand package for free for 45 days. About 10,000 households participated in the study, and about half were given the free service. The on-demand service was packaged like Netflix or Hulu in layout, appearance, and scope of programming, but was delivered through a TV set-top box. It had a personalized recommendation engine that surfaced popular programming based on what those customers were already watching illegally through BitTorrent logs, which were obtained from a third-party firm. The study found that while the participants watched 4.6% more TV overall when they had the free on-demand service, they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering.
The researchers partnered with an unnamed internet-service provider -- in a region they chose not to disclose -- to offer customers who were already prone to piracy an on-demand package for free for 45 days. About 10,000 households participated in the study, and about half were given the free service. The on-demand service was packaged like Netflix or Hulu in layout, appearance, and scope of programming, but was delivered through a TV set-top box. It had a personalized recommendation engine that surfaced popular programming based on what those customers were already watching illegally through BitTorrent logs, which were obtained from a third-party firm. The study found that while the participants watched 4.6% more TV overall when they had the free on-demand service, they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering.
When I cut the cord in 2004 I did it because of ads, not because I was cheap (I am cheap, no denying that).
Free TV most definitely will mean infestation with ads.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Actually I thought this was the real tell:
The on-demand service was packaged like Netflix or Hulu in layout, appearance, and scope of programming,
I still pirate some stuff because I can't get it on Prime or Netflix.
I'll readily admit to being lazy and honestly pirating content is a PITA compared to just grabbing the remote for a fire stick and streaming content... but when the library of streams is totally missing the long tail that made Netflix (DVD) popular in the first place, then the alternative is piracy.
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Up front I am not a huge proponent of peoples rights to pirate/share even though my commentary below would tend to contradict what I am saying here. But there is some nuance to the issue. And I say this at a time when I am now replacing all of my 800 plus legit DVD's with legit 1080P and 4K copies.
Way back in the day everyone bought a bunch of programs and games for their computers. They cost like $50 bucks each and so as geeky teenagers with not a lot of funds from lawn mowing and oddball chores we also collected programs. Personally, I bought up stuff as my money allowed and collected lots of game copies from other collectors.
But the thing is the bulk of what I collected was largely an archival collection .... I never even used most of the programs and I didn't play many of the games other than to see the disk worked. I generally had to own my favorites which I purchased and played all of the time.
I even find myself seeking out copies of the games I enjoyed wasting weeks and months on now to play again under emulation or as apps.
Just got Dragons Lair on iOS. Got Worms Armageddon also because I was obsessed with that game. Got Duke Nukem from GOG.
What I posit is that, I am not certain the actual damage to the industry is. Is such damage really so great as the numbers the industry puts forth? I remain doubtful.
Now I knew of a guy who was supposed to have collected over 10K programs for the Apple 2. He was a true collector. Made me a mere speck in terms of collecting.
How many did he actually use? Probably not many since he was spending all of his time collecting programs.
Sometimes when I hear how much damage to the industry is going on, I think about this guy because he really wasn't doing damage to the industry at all. Just the amount he was spending on Floppies and Hard Drives was maxing out his budget. So to me, the industry was getting his money on aggregate anyhow.... just in a tangential way. His joy was in collecting... not so much in playing or using. To collect, one spends an inordinate amount on hardware and media.
Were those 10k content creators losing out on real sales from him? Perhaps marginally or maybe not at all, but if you think of a guy collecting 10k games and programs, he isn't actually deriving benefit from the copy sitting in floppy case. He is merely collecting because of an odd penchant to collect. More of a fetish.
Plus, many people don't have connections fast enough to stream video. I know where I live in Seattle, I certainly can't. I paid the $15 per month for HBO Now to watch Game of Thrones, because I want to support it, but I had to pirate it in order to watch it. I received a DMCA letter for every(!) episode, but ignored them.