TV Industry Using Piracy As A Measure Of Success 173
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.'"
Cost of Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
They won't have to resort to piracy . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get it (Score:4, Insightful)
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 move in the right direction.
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.
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.
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 turn-of-the-crank filler that we have been blessed with in recent years. No wonder the CD sales are decreasing.
Re:Makes Sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Free Distribution (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.
Re:I don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:Makes Sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
No commercials, good music, streaming over the internet if you don't live in Seattle.
Re:Makes Sense... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:would we be better off without TV ads? (Score:2, Insightful)
I have to take exception to that assertion, because, like everybody else in Canada, I'm paying for this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#Canada [wikipedia.org]
And, according to the Competition Board (sort of the Canadian equivalent of the FTC) private non-commercial downloading is perfectly legal in Canada.
And whether or not it's immoral is a matter of opinion, not a matter of fact. Given that I could just as easily record most of those shows from over-the-air TV signals on my VCR or DVR, I fail to see how it's immoral. Unless you're making the assertion that by not watching ads on a TV show is immoral?
That aside, I'd be perfectly OK with renting or buying the DVD's of the above shows, were downloading not available somehow.
On top of which, I don't think it's my distorted perspective that brings me to wonder if we'd be better off without TV advertising, because I lived without TV entirely from about 1999 to 2001, and did exactly zero downloading then. And I still felt the same way then on the subject of the effects of TV advertising.