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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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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.