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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.
Smells like bullshit to me. I've been offered so many "free" services all the time I turn them down without even thinking. I pay for Netflix, though rarely watch anything there or anywhere else. I'm sure I'm not the only one who is conditioned to turn down free services knowing there's a catch.
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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.
About $5.5 billion in revenue was lost to piracy globally last year
It's been proven time and time again that people who download "illegally" wouldn't actually pay for it in the first place, so you can't assign a dollar value to it.
Giving people what they don't want at any price, including "free", is not a substute for giving them what they want.
Seriously, we've all been there... I feel like watching, I don't know... "Dr. Strangelove" and netflix doesn't have it so it suggests "Dr. Strange", "Young Frankenstein", "House of cards", "Pulp Fiction", "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the..."
So I torrent Dr. Strangelove, because I've already seen, or do not care to see any of those titles; and I *want* to see Dr. Strangelove.
And they will get it, paying or not paying for it.
So you're better off not being on a situation where the only way is the "free" way, or people will take it.
I watch very little TV, and as such I want to make sure that I will completely enjoy anything that I do sit down to watch. I don't know about Hulu, but Netflix just seems like a bargain bin. Never has there been a greater selection of movies and shows that didn't quite make it. I consider the subscription fee inexpensive, but it is fairly spot on for what you get. As such, there doesn't tend to be much in Netflix that I want to watch ever. Not surprised it didn't fill the needs of people who pirate.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The customers continued to pirate the movies and shows they couldn't get via approved channels? Knock me over with a feather.
Did they really expect people were going to say "I don't want to watch the Wonder Woman movie after all, since my streaming service offers Super Girl"?
#DeleteChrome
Well, you could put a value to it, but it would be more accurate to state, "people pirated $5.5 billion worth of content" rather than, "$5.5 billion in revenue lost," because, as you say, most of those people wouldn't have paid for it. They just seized the opportunity to get it for free.
So they just "threw together" their own Netflix or Hulu, as if that is a trivial thing to do? Did they offer every movie ever made? Apparently not - what exactly was their "scope of programming" that they offered?
If their software sucked, and /or if their selection did not offer the specific movies and shows that the already-prone-to-piracy person wanted to see, then guess what? They're going to use the mechanisms they already know how to use to watch the exact shows they want. I'm really not sure what this study was supposed to show, besides the fact that offering a random assortment of video content will not satisfy the specific viewing desires of the average person.
Better known as 318230.
They can ramble all they want about things like Hulu or Netflix, but even with relatively-cheap services Hollywood still treats convenience like the plague. The show or movie you want to watch isn't available with your preferred service, or it is but is device restricted, or it is but only part of it (like one season out of seven in a TV series), or it is but you have to wait at least 24 hours after the live airing to watch it. There is a demand, but giant media corporations refuse to offer supply, and they complain when an alternative one is found.
Just because something is cheap does not mean it is good. And the more segmented streaming services get, the more people will turn to alternative sources for the entertainment they want; I expect that two or three services is the limit for most people, and as more studios start launching their own offering the consumer becomes more choosy about what they subscribe to.
Not all entertainment is equal, either in quality or in individual preference. Just because you gave someone free access to Jersey Shore season 3 doesn't stop them from wanting to watch Mr. Robot.
After 45 days, your account will be billed the full charge of $89.95, with a 2 year contract and 400.00 cancellation fee.
Seriously, every damn thing in 2017 has been some kind of underhanded anti consumer one sided deal, or a scam. Is anybody surprised nobody jumps at "Free" anymore? It's lost it's meaning. This is what happens when you fool an entire generation by redefining the meaning of words.
"Free for 45 days" means You can borrow it for a month and a half and all you pay is the processing fee, box rental fee, America fee, local fee, internal, and external fee, media tax, box tax, local and state tax and federal tax. The free 45 days also has a value of cash value 700 dollars (because we said so) and that's also going to count a income... so more tax.... and if you don't return the box and cancel service by 2AM on sunday (we're closed) you will be liable for the whole 700 dollars, btw Wendy the service cancel specialist and box processor will be out of the office that week so sorry in advance for that minor inconvenience. What a deal. Tell your friends and your welcome.
All this study proves is that bit-torrent is the most honest about the cost of the media, is reliable, less annoying, less conniving and underhanded, and has a better media selection.
If you wan't people to respect your laws, you need respectable laws. Artists death+70 year copyright owned by some corporation or media titan aint respectable even a little bit. Suck less big media. Nobody buys your bullshit anymore.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
Yeah, I occasionally have the misfortune to catch an hour or so of "Tee Vee" in some public location, and am always blown away by how much advertising there is. As well as by how idiotic most of that advertising is. After some 15 years of exclusively watching online, ad-free content, it's like being teleported into some horrible alternate dimension.
Hell, it's even worse than using a browser on someone else's computer and finding out they didn't install AdBlock.
I don't know how people can stand it ...
I pay for FOXTEL, NetFlix, Stan and Amazon Prime (basically all the major video services available in Australia). If a show is available on one of those services at the best available quality, I will watch it on that service.
Despite paying for all these, there are many shows that are either not available, or are only available with a significant delay (weeks or months), or are only shown in standard definition or 2.0 audio (when I can get HD video and 5.1 audio by downloading).
I've fulfilled my side of the deal - I pay for their services. If they don't want me to download then they can fulfill their side of the deal - provide the shows that I want in the quality that I want in the timeframe that I want.
I fee
"they did not stop using BitTorrent to pirate movies and TV shows that were not included in the offering." They had to do a study to figure out that people will watch what they want to watch. They must have been very hard up for subjects to study, because the result is just what anyone would expect.
"people pirated $5.5 billion worth of content"
If I torrent RecentShittyHollywoodMovie.mp4 and fill up a hard drive with a thousand c&p'd duplicates of it, is my hard drive now worth tens of thousands of dollars?
I see you have grasped the fundamentals of Hollywood accounting.
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.
It's not about price. It's about selection. If the powers that be want to kill piracy they should all get together and offer reasonable online purchase and and rental of ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING EVER MADE. If people knew everything was available from a reliable source for a reasonable price there would be no temptation to pirate. But they won't do that, because they all want to try to squeeze out the other guy and think that will some how magically give them more money. So piracy continues because people want what they want.
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.
It hardly seems shocking to discover that when you give people free access to content they don't care so much about, they'll still use Bittorent to find the content they really want to see.
I used to think that Netflix was going to stop movie piracy, then the studios decided that they didn't want one streaming provider to have access to everything, so to really watch everything I want to see, I need to subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Video, Hulu, HBO, Starz, Disney's upcoming streaming service and more.
While I *could* track down all of the services I need to use and subscribe to them, why bother when with a few clicks, Bittorrent has the content for free?
I pay for Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO, and a basic cable package. But I still download all of my shows and put them on my Plex server. I do this for two main reasons. 1) Avoid commercials.....I hate commercials. 2) To have all my shows in one app for my viewing pleasure. Regardless of what these media companies think, convenience is king and jumping around from platform to platform isn't fun. Yes yes, I know cable provides the convenience but the horrible service, commercials, and paying for content I never intended to watch ruins the convenience.
A lot of what I've pirated I didn't even watch more than 15 or 20 minutes of it. Hell, it wasn't worth the bandwidth I wasted on it. They should try improving the quality of their product. Right now it isn't worth free.
I was watching a show on someone's TV and nearly 1/3rd of the screen kept telling me that there was some concert now live on their web site. This was a Canadian TV channel. Over and over they kept putting this on the screen. It made the show shit to watch. Then there is the bug in the corner. These people simply do not respect my desire to not be continuously marketed at.
Netflix is free from this. Once in a blue moon netflix takes up the top half of my iPad app to blast some stupid series at me, and I resent that enough. I want to choose what I want, I don't want some MBA who has weaseled and backstabbed his way into getting his company to put his product in my face.
For instance, a number of people that I know are complaining about netflix continuously recommending Korean TV. None of us want it. If I find out that some exec did a Korean deal and is screwing with the recommendation system to push that crap, I will drop Netflix and go back to piracy in a heartbeat.
Ok, let's start with the obvious - predicted revenue "lost to piracy" is just bullshit. You start the article with that kinda crap I already see it as leaning to some agenda.
Let's put this clearly out there: there is absolutely no reason to believe that even a fraction of people pirating content would pay for everything they get if there was no other option. It's as absurd as claiming an open party with all expenses paid would attract as many people as if you charged everyone 50 bucks for entrance.
Moving on - for people who already knows and have a routine for pirating, it's just that more convenient. Changing habits will be just as hard, there's no way around this.
Othe reasons: I dunno exactly what they used, but for instance, I pay for services like Crunchyroll yet I often have to pirate the content that is streaming there, getting content slower than the streaming service offers and oftenly at lower quality... because even though I'm on fiber, with very fast speeds that most of my country don't have access to, the reality of it is that if I try watching it using the service itself, I'm stuck with buffering issues and whatnot. It's on their side, not mine. So I pay for it yet I never use, and have complained multiple time to no avail.
And I imagine Netflix, Hulu and other services have similar problems. I mean, it can work perfectly for americans, for europeans and whatnot, but what people have to get is that not all countries have optimal service, or even libraries of content.
Which is understandable for the most part - streaming backend is ultra hard, specially if you have a huge audience, and content is bound to the contracts made in the country.
But those are things that gets overstepped by piracy. P2P systems and whatnot will take care of this in an almost impossible to beat way, specially for new content. Not to mention that once you get it, it's there to watch offline and whatnot - which I do know is something that some streaming services are offering nowadays for part of their content.
I keep repeating this all the time, but let's just put this out once more: for the most part, piracy didn't come up because the vast majority of people are ok with stealing the hard work of others, not compensating directors, actors and whatnot, or worse, profiting at the cost of others. Yes, there are some people who would definitely go that route, but it isn't the majority of people. Most people just want some convenient system that works. And the industry has been slowly getting better at providing exactly this - I've been saying this long before iTunes or Netflix came into existence. And studios, industries and whatnot are not only victims of this: piracy played a huge role in spreading out content to places that it would never get to otherwise. This is evidenced by the growth in all entertainment and software industries over the years. If piracy was killing anything, all of those industries would be dead by now. The marketing effect is something that will be left unexplored and unmeasured, thanks to the interests in hiding it.
But on the industry side, there's still a whole ton of catch up to do. Systems that in one way or another supports piracy has matured a whole ton over the years, and it got to a technological performance that is unmatched by proprietary commercial systems. And it breached barriers that commercial systems can't. So, if you think piracy will die just because there has been some changes in how industries commecialize their stuff online... fat chance. Because even those changes have been marred by old industry practices.
Just look at what Steam did for game piracy, and look at the differences between a system like Hulu or Netflix, and Steam. The clues are there.
Okay, I'm a "legitimate content" person. I don't pirate. I see no point - I earn good money, I have enough spare to pay for what I actually want, which gives me titles I can play where/when I want to, and for which I don't have to worry about viruses, huge downloads, being marked by my ISP, or whatever.
I know, everyone does it, but I'm one of those odd people who just pays for my stuff. In fact, for the stuff I like, I've often paid several times over over the years. I have Amazon Prime so I get their Instant Video, and I have Google Play for a load of other things. I don't do Netflix as I don't see what they add for me and even with a friend's Netflix in the same house, I see no reason to use it.
But... this is my problem. If I want to watch it, I want to watch it. Every ad in front of the thing I paid for is an abomination. Every restriction on device, etc. is a pain in the butt. And every time you don't have the content I want, it's even more frustrating. I'm often standing in front of a online store, wanting to give them money, for maybe the crappiest old movie that's available everywhere and easily for free and I can't because it's not on offer for that service.
Two things pop to mind. Aliens: Special Edition. I love it. I'd love to have it on either the Google or Amazon account. But you can't. You can have Aliens. You can have boxset which include Aliens (but which you can only tell the version of by the runtime, and it's not Special Edition). You can have Alien: Director's Cut. But you can't have Aliens: Special Edition. Go into a shop, however, and that's all they sell, even in the boxsets.
Another is an old sitcom from the 1970's called The Two of Us. It's UK-specific but so is a lot of the content I buy and the online stores don't have a problem obtaining or selling it. But they released one series on DVD only, nothing else, and then never released the second series (despite it being listed as a pre-release item on Amazon for 8 years now and various dates promised). I can't find either online.
Now, I'm sure if I really Google hard, I could come up with somewhere selling the first as an online streaming movie, and I could download the latter in a minute via a torrent, I'm sure. But... I'd quite like to own them legitimately and on two of the largest services in the world today. And I can't. It's simply not possible.
Until the media industry gets together to make a rights consortium that can handle such things so that all the relevant players can licence content properly, and that the same levels of content are available across services, it's really just wasting my time and money. I'm literally trying to give them money for products they already have, but they have no interest in taking it, no way to gauge my interest, no way for me to give feedback.
By contrast, all the top line of Google Play Movies / TV and most of the stuff I see on Amazon Instant Video I have absolutely zero interest in. Literally I have stopped looking, because it's all just "latest cinema release", six months later, at premium prices, advertised only at the rental prices, that I wouldn't want to watch if they were free to do so anyway.
Given the amount of tech involved, I don't get why it's so hard to tap into a licensing database, of official content, allowing me to buy anything and everything that's ever been digitised, while recompensing all those people involved fairly, via any service I like, and to actually make sensible recommendations based on what I like to buy.
To be honest, it's totally worked against them. I just stopped watching movies instead.
Yes, this one https://yro.slashdot.org/story...
From this article:
And from the one I just linked:
And that one links to https://pubsonline.informs.org... which has a "Management Science" banner on it.
Allow me to quote from TFS:
"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."
(emphasis mine)
You're REALLY surprised that people kept downloading the stuff they couldn't get from your package? How on earth is this in any way a miracle? Or a proof that people would still "pirate" if they could stream it for free?
Here's the problem, let me put it in bold so you actually might get it: You did not offer what people wanted.
If you stream I Love Lucy for free, it will not convince anyone wanting Game of Thrones to stop downloading it.
I honestly wonder whether you're so stupid or whether you hope lawmakers are stupid enough to believe you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.