TV Show Piracy Soars After CBS Blackout 314
TorrentFreak reports that piracy rates of the television show Under the Dome shot up by more than a third last weekend, even though official ratings dropped. What caused the increase? On Friday, three million subscribers to Time Warner's cable TV service lost access to CBS programming, the network on which Under the Dome airs. The article says this provides compelling evidence that the availability of a show is a key factor in the decision to pirate it.
"To find out whether download rates in the affected markets increased, we monitored U.S. BitTorrent downloads of last week's episode as well as the one that aired this Monday following the blackout. The data from these two samples show that in Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit and Pittsburgh, relatively more people downloaded the latest episode, an indication that customers are turning to unauthorized channels to get the show. With hundreds of thousands of downloads Under The Dome is one of the most pirated TV-shows at the moment. Of all sampled downloaders in the U.S. 10.9% came from the blackout regions for last week's episode, and this increased to 14.6% for Monday's episode, a 34% increase. In New York City, one of the largest affected markets, the relative piracy rate more than doubled from 1.3% of all U.S. downloads last week to 3% for the episode that aired after the blackout."
What's funny about Under the Dome (Score:4, Interesting)
Is that you can get that night's episode hours before it airs on CBS, without commercials. I'm not sure where else it's airing (maybe Canada) that shows it early.
Re:What's funny about Under the Dome (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Q.E.D. (Score:5, Interesting)
This goes well with an assertion I have held about piracy for years.
It goes something like this:
Producers control supply, and have a "target" price they wish to meet. This could be perfectly sensible, or it could be inflated in a fashion that would make even the debiers diamond cartel blush. Does not matter. They control the supply, and have a target price.
Because they control supply, they restrict the supply until demand for the product permits them to reach that target.
Piracy happens when:
The hidden and intrinsic costs of piracy are less than the inflationary costs induced by restricting supply, via puncturing the producer's stranglehold over the supply.
Thus, piracy rate is a fundemental feature of the modern information economy. It shows, without bias, how artificially stacked the target price is against what the natural market price is. It is every bit as useful as tracking wages, tracking unemployment, or tracking free time.
The problem, is that you whave whole sections of the economy that are propped up by the wholesale control over supply. Without being propped up above the true market ideal price, and enforced via artificial scarcity, the product is simply not profitable to produce. (At least in some circumstances.) The market really does not fucking care about that. The price is inflated, and piracy rate consistently indicates that fact.
Piracy, being a fundemental feature of the information economy, (owing to the nearly free cost of duplication and distribution that can be employed), should not be seen as "the boogey man" of content producers. They would be much better served to simply accept piracy to be as inevitable as a rainy day is, and instead focus on how their business can cope with the presense of piracy in the market.
Again, piracy occurs when the implicit and explicit costs of piracy are less than the costs of legal purchase. Those costs are NOT all monetary.
1) downloading a bulk pack of episodes takes time.
2) the download saturates the download pipe, preventing the downloader from doing other things, like playing games online.
3) the download could be broken, encoded poorly, be in the wrong language, have hardcooked subtitles in chinese, etc.
4) the download could contain malicious software
5) you could be sued for many millions of dollars per file downloaded.
People are willing to put up with a pretty significant amount of crap, if the inconvenience cost of the legal distribution method is less inconvenient than the illegal method.
This is why there was a HUGE reduction in "illegal MP3 activity" when iTunes hit the stage, and went DRM-free. While iTunes is FAAR from perfect, and clearly does not nor is meant to, service everyone-- it does present a significantly "easier" and "cheaper" alternative to the illegal alternatives, that is usually much safer as well. (Some argument can be made about the quality and nature of the iTunes client software that are noteworthy in that dept, but this is slashdot, and I am sure you already know.)
Likewise, when Netflix came on the scene, there was a HUGE reduction in illegal movie activity.
The reason, in both instances: the cost of the legal offering came down significantly, both in terms of monetary value, and in terms of inconvenience. They both presented an option that was "simply better."
The inconvenience costs of the pirate distribution system are endemic, and can't easily or sensibly be removed. Some pirate distribution systems have tried to deal with that problem through exclusivity, like demonoid, but that only compartmentalizes the problem, and imposes another inconvenience to the pirate distribution model-- namely, now you also have to be invited to pirate, rather than simply participate. (If you can become a member to the sanitized secret pirate social club, the benefits become obvious, but the initial obstacle cannot be less than the trouble associated with the consequences of working with the rabble they keep out. Virus whores, porn re
Remember my.mp3.com? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Q.E.D. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yep, I don't get that mentality. Personally, I've become addicted to watching a whole season, or whole show history in a row. It sucks me in more than watching one episode every week, then missing some episode because I was out that night. Or forgetting all the details of the cliffhanger from a year ago.
I know, right? Watching a single series coherently you pick up nuances that the writers and director meant you to get but are lost due to the week-long (or more) gap between episodes and the months-long gap between season finale and season premiere. Well written shows (especially more recently) are meant to be experienced as a stream, not haphazardly.
Re:What's funny about Under the Dome (Score:4, Interesting)
You know, the funny part of this whole story will be when CBS removes their blockade and people continue to pirate it because the user experience is better. My prediction is that CBS's current execs will be looking for work in a few months, canned by a furious board of directors after delivering a catastrophic loss in advertising revenue in their desperate attempt to squeeze blood out of a turnip.
My parents watch one of CBS's daytime soaps. Watching it on TV is a pain because they're not always home, and they don't have any sort of DVR, so they watch it online. Problem is, CBS's web player is the worst piece of dingo turd I've ever seen. After about 50% of the commercial breaks, it fails to come back to the show, and just hangs there with a black screen. Sometimes a few minutes later, if you leave it sitting there, the audio comes back with no video. Either way, it lobotomizes itself. If you reload the page, you get to sit through the same set of commercials all over again. And they usually show just three or four ads over and over, often showing a single ad more than once during a single commercial break. It is by far the worst TV viewing experience I've ever had—even worse than watching it on cable.
And because CBS doesn't make their shows available through real digital delivery channels like Hulu or iTunes, there's no way to watch their shows that isn't horribly painful and clogged with tedious commercials. Frankly, I can't imagine what's going through the heads of the people at CBS. I really can't. I don't see how it is possible for anyone to be so utterly clueless about the needs and desires of their audience, and I can't imagine them retaining that audience for much longer if they continue to be so bad at digital delivery.
Re:Q.E.D. (Score:4, Interesting)
That "right to profit from it" started as an agreement with the people, media producers receive a short term monopoly in exchange for the content entering the public domain afterwards. This system has now become so distorted by greed on the part of the media producers that it's extremely harmful to society as a whole.
As to the other points:
1) Pure greed, not to mention the fact that lower prices would translate to more sales and potentially more profit overall.
2) Or just contracting to third parties who already have the infrastructure.
3) Have you never considered that obtrusive advertisements offend people and discourage them from making purchases? Quite a lot of people consider "i am sick of seeing adverts for X, so i'm going to try their competitor Y instead", personally i have taken this decision many times.
4) Users already have this power, and are already abusing it. Those who want to do so are already doing so, making it easier for everyone else means nothing as most people won't do anything with it. And to put it another way, if you treat us like criminals then we will act like criminals.
Noone has any "right" to profit... Provide something useful and you can earn profit from it. But many in the content industry are extremely arrogant and greedy, they treat their paying customers with the utmost contempt and expect then to just bend over and take it.
And your talk about "reasonable terms" is extremely arrogant...
What exactly is reasonable about copyright terms that mean anyone who was alive when a work was first published will be dead before it enters the public domain?
What is reasonable about regional discrimination? Why should someone be charged twice as much, 6 months later, and actively be prevented from importing their own legally purchased copy from another country?
Why should i not be allowed to buy something *AT ALL* because i happen to live in a different country? Even if we're willing to pay the costs of shipping the media here? (and this is even more stupid for online purchases)... What do you have against other countries?
What is reasonable about drm schemes, which are aimed at extracting more money from paying customers and do nothing to discourage piracy?
What is reasonable about expecting users to pay again to watch the exact same content on a different device?
Copyright started out reasonable, 20 years in the days of mechanical printing presses and distribution by horse drawn carts and sailing ships was a reasonable length of time for content to be published and widely distributed. Today those terms should be much shorter, not longer.
Reasonable is about give and take, your desire to take take take is completely unreasonable.
Your demand to punish those who won't put up with unreasonable behavior into submission is exactly what many dictators throughout history have done. Instead of finding a happy medium which keeps citizens content, you treat them like dirt and use the threat of force to keep them in line. Comrade Stalin salutes you.