As you may know, I'm a sci-fi nerd, hence I've been pretty excited about the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series coming to a close. So, me and my fellow connoisseur of the awesome, Greg, put together a quick survey on Google Docs to get predictions about the end of the show. The internets filled it in.
The Battlestar nerdery was all in good fun, but more interestingly, I also asked a question about how people watch the show: via live broadcast, recorded or downloaded? Legally or illegally? Depending on your point of view, these results are either entirely obvious, or quite surprising. So far, 313 people filled in the survey, which was advertised only through blogs and Twitter for two days:
Given the circumstances, the people who answered this fit two descriptions. One, they are fan enough to actually fill out a survey about a show on TV. Two, they read blogs, talk on Twitter, hang out in forums, i.e. they know and use the web intimately. So, SciFi channel SyFy, NBC Universal, all big name media: do you see that big green chunk of people who download your shows illegally? These are merely potential customers that you haven't reached yet.
When you look at your ratings and bemoan the dwindling numbers, think of that 30%. Sure, these people are probably not getting you any ad money, but you can profit off them indirectly. Tech savvy people are the backbone of your nerdy fandom, and they add value to your precious intellectual property. Who do you think helped all those girlfriends, husbands, parents or siblings get over the silly name 'Battlestar Galactica' and actually watch the show? Who wrote all that stuff on the Battlestar wiki in their spare time, providing an anchor for online discussions and activity, keeping your brand active? Yup that's right, the nerds with their computers.
And seriously, those 30% aren't all anarchistic hacker types who despise copyright. A lot of them are just people who want to enjoy the show they love in the way that is convenient for them. An illegal high-definition torrent released a couple hours after the TV broadcast is indeed pretty darn convenient. Lucky for you, you are in the unique position of offering something even better.
Just stop treating the live broadcast as being sacred: it is merely one showing after the content has been made available. Instead, provide your own episode downloads at the same time as the TV broadcast. Make it attractive with additional extras for your hungry audience, like director commentary or deleted scenes. By all means offer a free ad-supported plan like Hulu for those who don't mind having their shows and brains invaded by rabid commercialism.
But please, open up the modestly priced option of high quality, ad-free, DRM-free downloads. The technology is there. If you do it right, you will go from making no money off of these people, to making some money off of them. Trust me, this group is only getting bigger by the day. Of course, it won't be easy: your inaction has caused an entire ecosystem of illegal distribution to spring up across IRC, Usenet, private trackers and the web. These people are organised and very good at what they do. Your competition is tough.
In this light, it's a bit silly to try and push region-restricted, delayed and limited online releases onto people. You're only providing a product worse than what's already available. You're clinging to your old ways, and only succeeding because a lot of this stuff is darn new and only the kids are doing it anyway.
Except, even the grown up folks around me are starting to figure it out. Some run Boxee on their cracked Apple TV (a plug and play process). Some have a dedicated torrent box at home that they log into (screen sharing built into their Mac). They've got phones in their pockets that can network literally anywhere, and look, someone can sell them an app to torrent their shows for a buck or two. See how this whole digital economy stuff works?
Do you honestly think you can control all that with increasingly restrictive DRM backed by increasingly restrictive law? Time's arrow points to our point of view becoming the dominant one. Either reinvent yourself, or continue losing. It's your move, TV.
go steven go
pithy concise and correct as always!
Another major reason for downloading illegally
Living abroad.
You don't want to wait months or years before a show gets broadcast in the country you live in.
I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said, and I've been thinking the exact same thing :) Thanks for writing it down so concisely! :)
@Wim: Regional restrictions
I agree. For most digital media, Canada is 'abroad' as well: we get blocked from Hulu, Comedy Central, NBC and Amazon just the same.
In fact, it's partly the reliance on advertising that prevents these content creators from branching out worldwide: they can't make money without targeted local advertising for each region served. If they offered a paid model instead, they could easily cover multiple continents.
Even Joe Hacker can now get his own CDN and cloud storage service to run this off. Why can't they?
I can't get Space Channel or
I can't get Space Channel or SciFi in Canada in HD. I record the episode on my PVR to watch, and download a 720p version from eztv (bittorrent). I don't watch commercials on broadcast tv either, haven't for probably 4 years now. I'm sure most people have PVR's now so why do they care about broadcast tv?
TV's niche is broadcasting live events, the Internets can't do that very well at all.
Battlestar galactica
Steven,
Battlestar Galactica available on the internet. I'm hospitalised with time to watch andthe one who used to help me with stuff like this is in Canada...
Can you give a little hint...
If only they'd listen...
I've similarly published my outrage about the movie industry in 2004 and 2007.
I've come to understand that it takes a revolution to change the huge industries like music, film, and television. Huge companies in these industries have been in control of the market and reaping huge profits for years. Now that they're industry is changing and they are scared shitless because they're losing control and they don't know how to maintain the same profit levels. So instead of doing something to better cater to the needs of consumers, they do nothing, and leave it to someone else (iTunes, Hulu, etc) to come up with services that keep making them money. Now those services still play by the old industry rules (DRM), but eventually they will have the power to set their own rules. Fortunately for us, the revolution began with music back in the late nineties and is in full swing. I'm confident that it's only a matter of time before we can buy high-quality, DRM-free content.
Glimpse of possible hope?
Last year when season four began, SciFi.com conducted live airing at 12 PM CST for the first three or four episodes. At the fourth or fifth, they aired the first segment or two, which then dwindled into a sneak peak and eventually being nonexistent. If you came at 12:10, you missed the first ten minutes without being able to rewind, so they know the capability is there, but for whatever reasons, they are less willing to adapt. I thought the live airing was great, and it wouldn't hurt networks to show repeats on other nights. SciFi and FX does it, why can't NBC, CBS, FOX and ABC do it? All this leads to is more "piracy".
Wim & Steven are correct
As Wim Leers and Steven have already said. The most inticing feature above all is being able to watch a show at all.
I live in New Zealand. Far far away from the US and while we share the same language it often takes years for a particular program to reach these distant shores, if they arrive at all.
I frequently try (or retry i should better say) to watch the episodes of the tv series i like on the broadcasters website but so far I haven't found a single site that would allow someone outside the USA to watch their streamable content.
I basically have given up and see TV torrenting as a victimless affair. I reckon you cannot even call it a crime since I am in no way having a negative impact on their (networks) ad sales since the content is not available to me ANYWHERE.
And rather than having to set up a US address proxy to be able to stream (low resolution) content, I prefer having the faster and easier way of torrenting the entire show.
With broadband it takes about 8min to download an entire 45min episode which is faster than filling your cache for a video stream that is routed through a proxy.
So until we see simultaneously worldwide—legal—releases for TV shows then there is simply no alternative, is there?
PS: I enjoyed reading the article enough to comment here which says a lot. Keep them coming.
I actually have a tinge of moral regret...
But I torrent anyway.
I'm perfectly happy using services like Hulu or network sites, and I don't really mind watching the advertising. It seems fair enough!
But I do want to watch it in a comfortable format. When Hulu was removed from Boxee, I set myself up with the TVShows app. Now I get new episodes, ad-free and in HD within a few hours of a show's airing.
Honestly? I would still consider going back to streaming, even if it had ads and lower quality. I make my living as an open source developer, and I choose to believe that people want to support my work, just like I choose to believe that supporting other jobs and economies is a good use of resources.
But now that I have something free, easy, ad-free and high-quality, it's going to be a much tougher sell than before the content producers forced the issue.
Regret and torrents
There's a crucial difference between streaming-with-ads and torrents. It is trivial to archive a torrent for rewatching later. Whereas Hulu's catalog (so I'm told) is still somewhat time-limited and requires more effort and know-how to save streams. So, torrents are not just cannibalizing on advertising eyeballs, but on later sales as well, especially, like in Jannis' case, when the legal availability comes months or years later.
About the guilt factor... oddly, I feel less regret or guilt over torrenting something that was only just broadcast vs something that came out on DVD a while ago. But in both cases, the illegality, process and convenience is the same. Which, in my book, is only more reason to forget about this romantic notion of an exclusive live broadcast for episodic television.
Innit.
Hi Steven... Long time. I actually stumbled upon acko.net again whilst searching for a new text editor. Anyway...
It's always good to hear someone else spouting my views on illegal downloads. It really is a wasted opportunity... something I continually point out at work (I still work for Virgin sadly, but not for long I'm moving into a games dev role at the end of the month :)) is that our services are more difficult to use AND more expensive than stealing it from the internet. If you are especially good at torrenting you will actually find more high quality HD content that way than if you watch it on TV, even with digital on demand services and the like.
I think the businesses involved need to stop competing with each other and band together to start competing with the pirates... after all, the entire industry is miles behind providing a level of service that compares to what is available illegally. Unfortunately thats the nature of the capitalist philosophy... its very difficult for a profit-making business to compete with pirates, its just too expensive and resource intensive. If they all banded together though it would become practical. The main reason that we offer inferior content at Virgin is the exorbitant cost of getting the rights to broadcast...
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