MTV Takes on P2P by Making South Park Free

thefickler writes "MTV Networks, the biggest division of Viacom Inc., has announced plans to make every South Park episode available online for free as part of a plan to make the show available to a larger audience." This is apparently largely because of the success of a similar project where they put every episode of The Daily Show on-line a few months back. This action didn't hurt ratings, and it may have actually helped them.

too late

http://www.southparkzone.com/ [southparkzone.com] been there done that Oo

Who the fuck cares?

About the fucking blog reporting the story? Link to the free episodes please. For fuck sakes editors.

Did they consult their customers?

No, don't be silly. Not the people watching TV.

I was talking about the various networks around the globe that license Southpark, often first of all having to dub it. That this takes time is a given (it's gotten better in the past years, but it's still about a season difference, give or take).

When I can watch a show online, why bother waiting for our networks to dub it? Yes, I "have to" watch it in English, but then again, usually that's the better version anyway. Anyone who has ever watched The Simpsons in German will agree.

So, any response from the networks? I mean, I don't know about the Daily Show (never heard of it, actually, and possibly not as much an export as SP is), but a show like Southpark which is being licensed widely might cause some negative reaction from the networks licensing it.

DVD Sales

As far as I know the Daily Show is not available on DVD, whereas South Park is. So if you wanted to watch the Daily Show and you didn't have Comedy Central, your only option was to pirate the episodes; making them available for free online made sense. But with South Park you can buy the DVDs, so making them available for free online would only hurt their DVD sales (unless of course the downloads are of very poor quality).

Re:DVD Sales

Yeah, because the artistic quality of Southpark is a definite selling point. Watching that in YouTube quality would certainly hurt the show.

different market segments, tradeoffs.

But with South Park you can buy the DVDs, so making them available for free online would only hurt their DVD sales


I doubt it, or at best it would affect them only a little. People don't buy the DVDs because they haven't seen the show, those people will just rent it. The people who buy the DVD want to watch it over and over.

The other thing is, the episodes are still going to contain ads. Ads which you can't easily skip over. Comedy Central is going to make direct profits from those ads. The people who buy DVDs buy them partially because they don't contain ads. Even if it does make a small dent in DVD sales, the profits from selling ads will likely make up for that.

torrents

i hope they put them on (legal) torrents so they are just as easy to download.

but more likely, they will just make it an embedded player, so we can't FF through the commercials.

Incidentally...

...if you were wondering why the Writers Guild of America are still on strike, this is why.

No advertising, no residual payments... not fair?

Re:Incidentally...

Well, isn't the issue that the companies ARE making advertising revenue from this, and that's what they tell their stock holders, but they are telling the writers that they aren't making anything so they don't need to be paid for online shows...I'm probably wrong but that's how I understand it

Re:Incidentally...

Isn't it great? My girlfriend started downloading documentaries to make up for the lack, and we've learned about a whole host of different things. It's amazing how little you miss the crap they churn out.

Did you hear the one about the crack dealer who went on strike? Where all his clients cleaned themselves up and the market disappeared?

No, me neither. Guess crack dealers are smarter than the Writers Guild.

Re:Incidentally...

I'm an engineer. It takes a lot of skill and creativity to make products work on first revision. Guess what? I don't get residuals for work I did last year, last month, or any time before my last paycheck. I don't need residuals to retire because I, you know, save money.

Both of my parents were writers and editors at one point, for the newspaper industry. Neither of them got any residuals, either. I don't suppose you continue to write residual checks to the artists that designed your car, or your sofa, or you house, either?

No advertising, no residual payments... not fair?

Go on strike and get a better contract. The law allows you to do that. But in no way do most of the working world consider this "unfair" to the special subset of people who feel that they need to be paid for the rest of their life for one momentary spark years ago. And when the time comes around that we can finally change copyright back to 50 years, thereby cutting off residuals for thousands of older writers or their descendants, you won't find me or most other people on Slashdot complaining.

Re:Incidentally...

But in no way do most of the working world consider this "unfair" to the special subset of people who feel that they need to be paid for the rest of their life for one momentary spark years ago.

I think the issue is that, unlike you, writers aren't paid up front what the distributors believe their work to be worth. To avoid the risk of paying for scripts and shows that bomb, they pay only a small amount, then pay for further showings. That way, if a show does extremely well, the writer is rewarded, and if a show bombs, the distributor didn't waste a lot of money.

A better analogy to your situation: imagine if you developed a product, but were only paid a small amount, and told that you would be paid well later on if the product sells well. Then, you find out that the distributor is selling your product but not holding up their end of the bargain by giving you payments. I dare say you wouldn't be as sanguine as you are now about the whole thing.

Re:Incidentally...

Add to that that, unlike engineers, newspaper reporters/editors, script-writers do not have steady work. Even within writing, a reporter (or an editor) knows that the paper keeps coming out, and thus they are still needed. Many times the reporter is paid a salary, or at least not paid some small per-article fee and told they will get more money if that issue of the paper sells well. And they certainly don't wonder 'will this paper be renewed for next season?' or whatever. They have more permanence to their job.

Script-writers have a project to work on, then may go 6 months to a year without another project being available; since they do get paid so little to start with (as the parent post notes), many writers do rely on their residuals to still pay rent and so on. Unlike newspaper reporters and editors, they do not have a guaranteed job.

A better example would be novel writers, I think; if you end up in a 2-3 year dry spell without another novel published, you darn well still want royalty payments on any copies of the last one that are still being sold! If you were a novelist and your publisher somehow decided to sell the book as an eBook and went 'oh, but we're not going to pay you for that,' there would be outcry, dismay and rage. (This is why novel/story rights get laid out pretty clearly in a given contract!)

Re:Incidentally...

You hit on what so many miss by not thinking past the limited context maintained by media cartels to the larger principles involved. At its base artists and writers feel entitled to a portion of any income that makes use of their works. Sounds reasonable but it begs the question, why just the arts? Truly important works, works which literally changed the face of society beyond recognition, have been created by scientists and engineers for generations. They are infinitely more important to society's health and yet most, Shockley for example, never see returns greater than the most forgettable and transitory media darling. Songwriters would scream blue murder if forced to pay back a percentage of their earnings to Intel, Logitech and Samsung for use of the engineering IP in creating their works yet see no conflict in chasing taxi companies and restaurants for playing a radio. Until they demand to reimburse society for taking from the common weal of sentence structures, forms of literature, words and phrases to lock into their 'IP', it's hypocritical opportunism and an unquestionable corruption of copyright's intent.

Cool

I think I go to Amazon and buy another couple of seasons.

Daily Show

This is apparently largely because of the success of a similar project where they put every episode of The Daily Show on-line a few months back. This action didn't hurt ratings, and it may have actually helped them.

Two weeks after all the past episodes were put online, The Daily Show had to shut down production due to the writers strike. I doubt those two weeks are really enough to make any solid conclusions from. It's strange though, I'd have expected ratings to drop considerably after that, considering there weren't any new episodes to air (or are the ratings referencing only those two weeks?)

I'm sure that putting them online wouldn't noticably hurt ratings (or perhaps could even increase them), but I don't think that you can evidence much from those two weeks.

I bet NBC will quickly counter

by releasing the complete "Golden Girls" archive.

South Park is just awful, the kind of stuff you and your buddies congratulated yourselves on coming up with at about age 12, only more skillfully drawn.

Credit where credit is due

I think this is less about MTV and more about Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They've already expressed a pro-P2P stance, and considering the nature of their show, this move fits in quite nicely with their "libertarian" attitude.

How does the WGA strike factor in?

I'm wondering how the WGA strike factors in. Matt Stone and Trey Parker are obviously two of the important writers on the show, and they stand to make residuals from DVD sales. But now, if all back episodes are available for free on the site, are they going to get a cut of the advertising that goes along with it?

From the networkhead's perspective, P2P is screwing them over because they aren't getting any money for it. But from a show creator's perspective, having the company put it up for free online (with advertising) is screwing them over.

SOXMAS.MPG

Wow, I have been downloading SouthPark since the days of SOXMAS.MPG. I regularly downloaded them until our cable provider at the time finally got Comedy Central.

(SOXMAS.MPG, The Spirit of Christmas was a widely distributed copy of the original 5 minute South Park short, well technically second short)

Of course it would help them. Did TV hurt them?

Networks have been giving away their shows for free for years on TV. You just had to sit through the commercials. For years people could record the TV shows and do whatever they wanted with them... did this hurt the networks then? No.

The only thing different now is they sell TV shows on DVD more than they ever sold TV series on VHS. This is mainly because of the storage capacity increases and size factor of the storage... but people watch those shows for free... and even go to the lengths of buying them on DVD. Thats a pretty dam good base of consumers to treat fairly, because they like your shows, and have already seen them for free for which they could easily record themselves... AND they still want to buy them.

Giving away the shows for free online is not going to hurt them one bit. In a day with so many online distractions, so may cable tv stations... It is better to capture a wider audience anyway possible, rather than try to clamp down on consumers that would rather just go to youtube, or find something else to do. There are just too many options out there... and options have always been a good thing.

someone @ riaa..

oh my god! they'r killing the recording industry! You BASTARDS!

Idea is Comcastic

So if Viamcom is going to put shows on the Internet then it would make sense for them to recommend BitTorrent as a distribution method, even though Viacom is also an ISP, the total bandwidth is the same whether downloaded directly from a Viacom site or using a torrent. But using a torrent is the least expensive and most efficient method for the distributor.

OK, so assuming Viacom, as a content producer and an ISP, prefers BitTorrent, where does that put Comcast? I wonder if this will also encourage competition?

A bold move, but not as bold as The Music Business

So MTV networks appear to get it, but if you're interested in the whole 'free content to beat p2p story' you need to look at imeem.com [imeem.com] and spiralfrog [spiralforg.com] - both are allowing users free access to music. now I can hear the imagined caveats now

"It'll be low quality" - No - both sites deliver CD quality audio

"It'll be some crappy indie bands that nobody has heard of" - No both sites have signed deals with most of the major labels - Sony, BMG, Warner, EMI and Universal - this is on top of all the indie labels who sign on

"It'll be only a few free tracks - everythign else witll cost" - nope it's all free with a few exceptions (like the beatles) imeem even played host to the first legal Led Zeppelin video on the internet

"It won't be on demand - you won't be able to control what you listen to" - nope it's entirely on demand, I think the only restriction I see is the slow downloads from spiralfrog that force you to watch advertising

"It'll have tonnes of spyware/DRM/evil" - well no spyware as far as I can tell, imeem.com is streaming only and provides everything via a neat little flash player that works on any flash enabled browser. Spiralfrog however uses and active X control and windows DRM, so that's Windows/IE only

OK so why is this a bolder move than this story? Well TV shows primary channel is still considered to be broadcast, a TV show has to make money on its TV run otherwise it's not considered viable. However, music revenue has primarily been generated through sales of the media, radio broadcast earns the record labels nothing, in fact it may be costing them to get this free advertising.

In my mind the celestial jukebox that's offered by imeem is a hugely radical move by the record business, imeem has become the youtube for music that the tech bloggers keep talking about - except nobody in the tech blogging world has noticed it.

Subtitles make easy?

Isn't it easier to subtitle the episodes instead of dubbing it? When not dubbed movies/whatever seems better whilst you have subs to figure out what's goin on. I mean, anime in spanish just isn't quality anime ^_^

This will be in the U.S. only

What everyone is ignoring is the fact that this will be geo-targeted to the U.S. only - I guarantee it. (I can say that with confidence because the place I work pays Comedy Central good money for the online rights to South Park in our country.)

And no way this will go on any peer-to-peer network, or be downloadable without DRM. Content owners are still eager to divide up their rights (TV, broadband, mobile, whatever) by geographic location.

Where to find it?

When I heard about the Daly Show being free, I looked for it. All I could on the show's website was a string of Flash clips, pretty much one per segment of the show. I'm pretty sure I wasn't able to see even close to the whole show.

Did I find what people are talking about? Because to be honest I found it pretty clunky and unsatisfying.

this is really cool!

I am happy they understand that making shows like this available online (and free) is a good promotional/ marketing tool. However I am sad because I have already bought the DVD collections for the past 10 seasons...

more piracy - lower prices

So the real message here is that they've realized they can't stop people from copying it without paying them. And they're going to try to compete by offering content at higher consistent quality, and making money from ad revenue. There is huge demand for downloadable video, and some revenue is better than no revenue.

Isn't this what the copyfighters have been saying will happen, ever since Napster? And this makes it clear that DMCA and longer copyright protections are not going to help. You can't fight the tides with a bucket.

For anyone looking to cause and effect, the cause is widespread piracy. The effect is the official distribution channels are forced to compete with free by lowering their prices and improving their quality. And this isn't the first time in the last six months that a studio has decided to fight piracy by lowering prices. [wordpress.com] Maybe the're finally starting to get the message.

Warner Home Video said Wednesday it will begin selling low-priced DVDs of movies from two major Hollywood studios in China in a bid to curb widespread sales of pirated versions.

The DVDs, priced at 22 yuan (2.90 dollars) each, will be distributed in over 50 major Chinese cities beginning this month, according to the agreement that Warner Home Video signed with Paramount and Dreamworks Animation.

Alternatives

"One of these things is not like the others. See if you can guess which one."

MTV Takes On P2P By Making South Park Free Online

MTV takes on North Korea by Making South Park Free Online

MTV takes on water and sinks after hitting iceberg by Making South Park Free Online

MTV Makes South Park Free Online and some blogger happened to mention P2P and said nothing about "taking on" anything, while MTV did not even mention P2P.

A double layer misstatement by inclusions of /. buzz words. This is becoming all too common. Mod editor -1 for sleeping while approving articles.

Viacom "Satanists"

and not the good kind either Brain poison sold as comedy (not that the show and Parker and Stone aren't funny...they do approach some "deep" topics as well, so some points)

Sounds a bit like a stupid attack on P2P.

it is nice to finally see a network starting to implement a way to work with today's want of free content without the legal repercussions that can come along with P2P sharing.

Do they mean to say that P2P would be notably dangerous even if MTV would choose it to distribute its free content (well, it would, at least in Russia, because the laws do not care about people, so legally you are supposed to pay money for software no matter what)? Or that BitTorrent = Gnutella, or something?
Or that files on a website is a new, innovative, never seen before, method of distributing files???

Guilt

So does this mean I no longer have to feel guilty about all the South Park I've acquired through...alternative means? >_<

Look! Another way to screw the WGA!

DVD's pay writers.

Syndie pays writers.

Reruns pay writers.

"Promotional" online airings don't. Even if they contain commercials.

Need any more on this? [unitedhollywood.com]

Great News

This is really good news in my opinion. I have all the episodes downloaded already via bit torrent but for people who don't I think they will take advantage of it. I haven't watched an episode on tv for many seasons now. I would assume that there will be commercials included somehow in these versions. Does anybody have a link to the website they are on or is it not available yet?

It is funny in fact

So, they insist on paying millions of dollars to hosting companies instead of using already established technology such as Bittorrent.

They could even make money if they licensed the Vuze (Azureus) engine and put couple of animated gifs/flash while downloading with virtually zero cost to them.

I am sure the hosts, even if they are Akamai will choke and people will end up hitting Pirate bay to download them. See that happened on Radiohead, people downloaded their paid content from P2P.

Thedailyshow.com didn't hurt ratings?

The Schmaily Schmow had good ratings a few months back, before they put their archives online.

Today, everyone I know has stopped watching it.

Coincidence? I think not!

Re:I wouldn't watch the shit even if I were paid

South Park is the worst fucking piece of shit out there. The only ones who watch it are the fucktarded sheeple who should be eliminated from the gene pool.

Interestingly enough, that could have been a quote fromS outhpark.

Re:I wouldn't watch the shit even if I were paid

South Park is the worst fucking piece of shit out there. The only ones who watch it are the fucktarded sheeple who should be eliminated from the gene pool.

You forgot to say 'Screw you guys, I'm going home'.

Re:if it's not available off-line

How about if I just want to watch a video on my laptop while I'm travelling, or when I feel ill and stay in bed? Mighty good a tv card will do that I can't attach to my laptop or for which I have no cable connection available...
And don't forget about all the people who are still on dial-up. Not everyone has the fortune of having a 100MB fiber connection at home.
Downloadable videos provides the most freedom to watch video when someone wants to. (which is the reason VCRs were invented, remember?)

Re:I wouldn't watch the shit even if I were paid

wait, you forgot! [youtube.com]

Re:if it's not available off-line

> Added bonus, you get to also view every other streaming available, including NBC shows on their site, youtube and whatnot. *AND*, it saves some plastic trees :)

I'm not the original AC, but I think you missed his point.

He doesn't want to stream it, he wants to download it so that he can watch it offline, that is, without TCP/IP connectivity.

Streamed video is not merely inelegantly wasteful of bandwidth (why re-download something just to watch it next week?), it's highly vulnerable to factors outside of your control, such as the performance of the network between your PC (or your friend's PC when you want to show him something).

Worst of all - and this is the dealbreaker - it's entirely dependent on the whim of the content provider to keep hosting it. That's an implicit form of DRM: When MTV decides it's not making enough money, the content disappears forever, or worse -- when MTV decides that it doesn't want to risk being sued by the Cult of $cientology for Season 9, Episode 12 (The OT III story) or bombed for Season 10, Episode 4 ("Remember the time I got a salmon helmet from Mohammed while wearing a toga?"), the episodes get censored server-side, and you never get to know that the originals existed.

Ever watch Warner Bros. cartoons on broadcast TV these days, as opposed to the remastered and uncensored originals being released on the annual 4-disc DVD collections?

In the case of Looney Toons, I've "downloaded" (by containershipnet, trucknet, and sneakernet) that content, and I can archive that content to a RAID array should the DVDs eventually fall victim to scratches) and enjoy it forever. The "streamed video" equivalent was called "network TV", and it had been censored to the point of unwatchability as far back as the 1980s.

Re:I wouldn't watch the shit even if I were paid

Absolutely.

1. create a the worst fucking show on the planet based on cock sucking uncle fuckers that fuck their own uncles all day instead of boring show based on mowing the lawn or driving to work
2. ?
3. Profit

Re:I wouldn't watch the shit even if I were paid

South Park is the worst fucking piece of shit out there. The only ones who watch it are the fucktarded sheeple who should be eliminated from the gene pool. Oh, I see where you are confused. This conversation isn't about Family Guy.