Slashdot Log In
TV Industry Using Piracy As A Measure Of Success
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Dec 13, 2007 03:12 PM
from the talking-out-of-both-sides-of-their-face dept.
from the talking-out-of-both-sides-of-their-face dept.
mrspin writes "Last100 has an interesting post from Guinevere Orvis, a web producer who works in the broadcast industry, who describes the way in which 'unofficial' but sanctioned BitTorrent leaks are being used as a measurement of a TV show's likely success. Orvis writes: 'Broadcasters aren't posting their shows directly on PirateBay yet, but they are talking informally and giving copies of shows to a friend of a friend who is unaffiliated with the company to make a torrent ... it's partially an experiment, but the hope is that distribution of content this way will lead to new viewers that wouldn't have been reached through traditional marketing means.'"
Related Stories
Submission: TV Industry Using Piracy As A Measure Of Success by Anonymous Coward
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Makes Sense... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I could always ask Microsoft, I guess. Their answer seems to be a simultaneous slackening of WGA lock-out behavior with a grand marketing announcement as to how well their anti-piracy efforts are going (50-some-odd-percent, was it?). Not exactly sure how to translate that for the TV industry, though...
Re:Makes Sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Makes Sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
Commercial Radio and Commercial TV suffer from the same things: crap scheduling, a lot of crap content with few gems buried among said crap (e.g. the occasional song that plays during "The Morning Zo0!!!11!111" on the radio, or conversely, television jammed to the gills with lame sitcoms and reality shows with the occasional "oh shit that was cool!" show wedged in there)... things like that.
They both suffer from being packed to the rafters with commercials.
Now, not all of either industry is like that - for instance, 94.7 FM (in Portland, OR) doesn't do morning "shows" at all - they play music all morning, with a couple of blurbs for "The Jon Stewart Minute" and a short 5-minute episode detailing how an alternative-type band or singer's career came and went. The closest they come to any kind of thing is what they call "The 8 at 8", where they play 8 songs in a row with a common theme... sometimes lame, but sometimes pretty inventive. They keep the commercials to a minimum (less than most, anyway), and even in the evenings on weekdays, the most you see that isn't straight-up music playing is a two-hour-long program of techno/alternative/industrial mixes by local DJ's (most of which aren't half bad).
Rattled on too long there... sorry. Now by contrast, broadcast commercial TV networks suck as a rule, but occasionally something decent shows on it. Their problem isn't the media format or technical means of delivery - it's the way the medium is being strangled for every last drop of revenue it has, and to the detriment of the folks watching it. I'm not even really talking show content here, which also suffers greatly from this. As a producer, if you've only got 36 minutes to tell a story (or at least some of it) in a full 60-minute slot --not counting time spent on intro and credits-- you tend to drop subtleties and intricacies in a hurry - as a result the show quickly becomes crap unless carefully constructed).
Little wonder that people are drifting away from television in general, truth be told...
Parent
Re:Makes Sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
No commercials, good music, streaming over the internet if you don't live in Seattle.
Parent
Re:Makes Sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
1 hour slots on HBO/Showtime tend to have less than one hour of show in them, by several minutes, though its not as far short of the full hour as on commercial networks. And the filler is in institials at the ends of the time slot, rather than interruptions in the flow of the show.
would we be better off without TV ads? (Score:4, Interesting)
Personally, I get most of my TV shows (BSG/Dexter/The wire/Sopranos/the office/30 rock) from bittorent. And speaking as somebody who just recently gave up my cable TV, I can't help but wonder if we'd be better off if the whole TV advertising industry went the way of the dodo.
Nothing's really been proven, but there's been some psych studies that have suggest that the deliberate manipulation of your emotions/unconscious motivations by the advertising industry may not be good for society as a whole. I mean, can it be good for a democracy to have regular doses of messages telling you to not trust your own judgment, and that you'll be happier if you just buy [product X]?
And that's without even discussing the impact that the huge high cost of TV advertising has on elections. I can't remember where I heard this (or verify it's veracity) but the statistic I heard was that a US senator needs to raise $10,000 a day every day he's in washington to pay for his re-election. So there's definitely a relationship between the high cost of TV advertising and how beholden politicians are to monied interests.
Parent
Re:would we be better off without TV ads? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your opinion is based on a perverted perspective - you're getting the stuff for free by doing something illegal and immoral. Not everybody can take the route of downloading TV from bittorrent because then nobody would be paying for the shows to be made so no shows would be made. If you want a real taste of an advertising-free world then buy the DVDs. OK, DVD is only a not-very-heavily-advertised-on medium, but it's the closest we've got.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So your idea does present an interesting perspective and a sound reason for ending copyright. So no more copyright and no more drunken drugged up minstrals, no more media executives demanding BJs in limos, sub
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Reference: your own damn law [justice.gc.ca]
Just like Fansubs of Anime (Score:3, Interesting)
Where are these new tv shows? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The list of hurting shows [wikipedia.org]
Re:Where are these new tv shows? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Cost of Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As far as I've heard, TV companies haven't been so vicious at hunting down pirates. Not as bad as the movie companies, and certainly not as bad as the RIAA.
It's probably that their product goes out free to all anyway - ad-supported, sure, but there's no revenue coming in directly from people watching the show. A heavily pirated show is clearly
Free Distribution (Score:5, Insightful)
Which brings me to something that I've been wondering about for a while; how would the entertainment industry survive if there was theoretically no way to protect their intellectual property from open and free distribution. How would they handle a world where there was no legal route to enforcing a royalty-style or licensed payment system?
Because it is my thoughts that as our world further connects itself together that this is exactly what will happen in the (no so distant?) future.
At least in the technological sense, the legal sense is difficult to gauge, though I hope the legal system will suffer a major overhaul in the coming decades.
Re:Free Distribution (Score:4, Insightful)
As much as I'd like to see that, I feel like society as a whole is far too lazy to do more than talk about such things until there is some major shift in society that makes them realize that laws and government aren't perpetual and tend to lose power as society revokes it.
Sadly, I feel like over the years people have come to trust the government and almost think of it as a given in the natural order of things.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Free Distribution (Score:5, Insightful)
People will pay for an "exclusive". If they offered a pay download of the "Sopranos" finale, you can bet that people would rush to buy it - not willing to wait for it to be uploaded to the P2P sites.
Ads can be intertwined more with the content. People probably wouldn't bother editing out all the scene where Ross in a future "Friends" style show is constantly holding a Pepsi or has dialog talking about how sweet Chandler's new Chevy is. It might be difficult to work in laundry detergent ads into soap operas, so I guess they'll have to wait until the writers call off the strike.
Finally, I don't think that YouTube and its ilk would suck so much if it wasn't essentially competing with mainstream TV and movies. I mean, there would still be mountains of crap, but there might also be more fun stuff on there. Even as it is, I can kill a lot of time just browsing around.
One thing is for certain - society would go on... this stuff just isn't that important.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
"Transmit" unencumbered official versions of shows from network
websites with all of the add still intact just as if you had
captured it yourself with MythTV or MCE.
Most lazy people won't bother to remove the ads.
These are the same people that own Tivos or cable provider PVRs
and don't bother to set them up.
Make it easier to get their version. Make the pirate networks redundant.
They won't have to resort to piracy . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Comedy Central (Score:2)
Comedy Central recently added the entire library of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to their website. This is a tremendous amount of content that you
Re: (Score:2)
I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Deja vu? (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I never saw the problem with the piracy of TV shows: a large proportion of those who watch them, assuming they like them, will probably watch the original broadcast or the next episode when it's aired anyway. It's a different matter for large-scale, large-budget Hollywood films, but in instances like these, I think that this is a m
Leaked pilots (Score:4, Informative)
I watched a few and they helped me make decisions, half of the Geico Cavemen pilot was enough forever, and the Sarah Connor Chronicles pilot renewed my interest in the Terminator series and I'm totally pumped for the show this January or February.
Re: (Score:2)
Why do you think Sci-Fi released their two minute mini-episodes, both on air and on the web, throughout the fall season? They're trying to create that buzz themselves, and get people to watch Razor and the next season in the spring,...
Win-Win, or alternately catch-22 (Score:5, Funny)
Not surprised... (Score:2)
It's not too bad a benchmark, I mean, if something is popular people are gonna want it. So they should see increased viewership and piracy as something gets popular. Which is kinda "duh" when you think about it.
Re:Not surprised... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now finally there's a doc who shares my feelings. Quite refreshing!
I saw the show at a friend's who got a few episodes from torrents. So now I'm sitting every week for an hour in front of the TV watching. That's one viewer more they wouldn't have without that torrent existing, or at the very least it would have taken me a lot longer to find out that I do actually want to see this medical show.
Parent
I don't get how it's really "piracy" (Score:3, Interesting)
This is exactly how I got hooked on Jericho. I watched the series after it got canceled. I really liked it and ending up watching it again with my friends, who, in turn enjoyed it. Now, we're waiting for the show in mid-January. With HD recording software of course.
I, for one... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've also discovered that it's not always an indication of quality.
Umm... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like putting a diamond ring on a park bench, hiding in the bushes, and then calling the police when someone picks it up.
sicko (Score:3, Informative)
It was like that since Napster (Score:2, Insightful)
The P2P sharing shows immediately what people want, and allowing that would force the record labels to produce high-quality music rather than mediocre one that can be forced down the customer's throats (ears ?). And high-quality music is a lot harder to come by than the
Piracy as an index of popularity (Score:5, Interesting)
TV piracy is the oldest kind (Score:5, Funny)
Because you can pick it up, unencrypted, right out of the radio spectrum just about anywhere. People have been stealing television content for years, with equipment kits you can buy at most garage sales.
Some content providers have started to insert commercials both as a deterrent against stealing content, and as a way to recoup the massive losses. Advanced piracy tools already have hacked this system, with things like a 'mute' button.
I oppose the mute button on moral grounds. Also, I am miserable.
Def works (Score:2)
Works for me! (Score:3, Interesting)
Though I think it may have had the opposite long term effect on my viewing. I don't see ads for new shows so I don't hear about them like I used to. I only have like 4 shows that I watch regularly and if they were ever canceled, chances are that I would simply watch less. So downloading shows and skipping commercials has weened me off of television on the whole.
Doesn't bode well for the producers. They have to balance between the number of people who might, like me, just give up on broadcast television and those who'll use Bittorrent only to sample shows and then switch to regular TV. I suspect that more people will begin to see what a ripoff cable/satelite TV is and switch to "piracy" in the long term.
Makes sense (Score:3, Interesting)
If it weren't for the advertiser-driven model that we currently have, the bittorrent "content delivery system" would be nothing but positive for the industry. What they need to do is make high definition, high quality video files available for download for a reasonable fee, and remove all ads (or at least make that an option). I'd say the removal of commercials is the second most valuable aspect of getting shows off the Internet compared to the tuning in at 8PM (the first being able to watch it when I feel like it, something about as novel as the VCR).
File sharing can't be stopped. Well it could, but it would involve stopping the Internet, and rather large economies would collapse if that happened. The writer's strike is all about writers getting revenue from "new media" and I have to say, I think they have a point since it's pretty clear that before long the boundary what is TV (coming over cable) and what is being delivered by the Internet (which, in my house, comes over cable already) will be less and less distinct.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
After air in the east coast, I expect it to be