How Battlestar Galactica Killed TV 749
Don Melanson writes "Following up on the MPAA going after torrent sites, you may be interested in Mindjack's latest feature - Piracy is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV by Mark Pesce. It includes a post-script written in reponse to the recent Torrent site shutdowns." From the article: "While you might assume the SciFi Channel saw a significant drop-off in viewership as a result of this piracy, it appears to have had the reverse effect: the series is so good that the few tens of thousands of people who watched downloaded versions told their friends to tune in on January 14th, and see for themselves. From its premiere, Battlestar Galactica has been the most popular program ever to air on the SciFi Channel, and its audiences have only grown throughout the first series. Piracy made it possible for 'word-of-mouth' to spread about Battlestar Galactica."
Great Show (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly (Score:1, Interesting)
Sure this is all non-mainstream stuff. But Albums get bought nonetheless. The only thing that suffers in Mainstream music. But that market could only go down anyways. It was already fully inflated.
The "Metallica" effect (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, now that they're rich, they call doing this 'being a criminal' and that it destoys the chance of new talent (or by extension, shows) being recognized and being able to survive, when the opposite is clearly true.
Same could be said about The Family Guy (Score:3, Interesting)
This is totally true (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sounds like the Photoshop Effect (Score:5, Interesting)
The most commonly used example of this is Photoshop (followed closely by windows). Through a very high piracy rate, and a very low litagation rate, photoshop gained so much market share that it is now the dominant application in its field (bitmap editing).
Adobe didn't condone the piracy of their software, but they also didn't actively pursue minor cases. That is, if some high school kid pirated photoshop, and used to create images for personal use, no biggie. If a company pirated photoshop, and used it for commercial purposes (and got caught), send in the lawyers.
So many people used the software illegally at home that when it came time to make a purchase in the work place, the choice was obvious. People already knew how to use photoshop, and kept hearing the name of the application over, and over again.
By allowing piracy (or in this case, downloading of tv shows) to happen amongst a demographic that 'doesn't matter' (home users that cannot afford the software anyways, or a small number of people that would have downloaded BSG regardless) but have influence over a demographic that does (companies that can afford photoshop, or friends and family that have never heard of BSG), companies can gaing huge market share. It's a grey area, but it has proven positive effects.
Joey: 35 seconds I will never get back (Score:2, Interesting)
Meanwhile "The Office" which is the best comedy that has been on NBC in many years was only picked up for 6 episodes. "Joey" gets a full season no questions asked while "The Office" gets six midseason episodes. Amazing. I told all my friends about "the office" and included a link to the torrent in my IMs. I know almost all of my friends watched it on tv when it aired after that. On the other hand I was so ashamed that I had even tried to watch "Joey" that I didn't even tell my friends I had downloaded it.
If bit torrent rusults in "Joey" being cancelled and "The Office" being picked up for another season then that in itself shows that it has legitimate applications.
Re:3 Reasons Broadcast TV will never die (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of the sites out there are getting quite a way. They've the shows listed with next air date and readily clickable links to the torrents for the newest episodes. In fact, that's how I watch Lost at the moment, since the Danish syndicated version is several episodes behind (and in pan & scan format).
Re:Great Show (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see much point in making a moral argument. I get the impression that talking about karma here would get me laughed out of the room.
How about a pragmatic argument, then? You want to be able to download high-quality TV shows and movies over the Internet, right? You want somebody to set up a store, like the iTunes Music Store, where you can legally get high-quality TV shows and movies. Well, guess what? Every time somebody says "Bit Torrent is just like a VCR" or "it's not stealing" or "I'm not doing anything wrong when I download," you make it just that much harder for Apple or anybody else to open such a store.
Every time you say something like that, you push the date of our opening back by a month.
If you won't buy a moral argument, will you at least buy that one?
The real problem with that analogy.... (Score:5, Interesting)
"I go to a convenience store and use my Star Trek Replication Device to copy a can of Diet Coke, without taking away the existing Diet Coke. I like it so much that the next day, I replicate a case. I tell my friend that I like Diet Coke, and he replicates his own case. Now none of us buy Diet Coke, and they go bankrupt. Noone will bother inventing new soft drinks anymore, since there's no profit to be made."
The whole "this is profitable" argument relies that a chain of events leading up to more sales (or other money-generating events like ad impressions). But if copying the first can is ok, why shouldn't the second, third or 100th be? Why should any of those you market it to bother to buy it instead of pirate it? You end up with a market with all marketeers and no customers.
Kjella
Pay-for-TV on DVD (Score:3, Interesting)
That works for me; it's like I'm years behind on my TV watching but gradually catching up.
(At least I hope it remains commercial-free. Sooner or later somebody will get the idea to put a non-skippable ad in the middle of the show. I stop buying all DVDs in perpetuity from the company that tries that. I'm serious: I really don't care that much about Sidney Bristow's latest antics.)
But many people would rather be able to discuss the current episode of 24 around the water-cooler the next day. It would be interesting if they made it available on a pay-for-download, heavily DRMed version. That would cut the rate advertisers would be willing to pay, of course, but in theory the fees balance that out.
But the economics don't work. Eventually somebody would notice that they could be making more money from their airtime (which they sort of pay for, though not really; either way it's a scarce resource). Then they'd make some shows "over-the-air only", which would have higher ad fees. Those would be the more popular shows.
How I'd want it to work, of course, is that gradually we get ala carte downloadable TV only. My cable fees stop subsidizing the channels I don't watch. The airtime gets put to better use than CSI: Waukeegan; say, cheaper cell calls and wifi broadband.
Oh, well. I'm just gonna go read a book.
Re:What if... (Score:1, Interesting)
Reminds me of the one episode of the Dave Chappelle show where he's going on about how the legal system treats blacks. Then they get to Michael Jackson and Dave says he innocent, so the judge asks "Then would you let your children stay with him?" and Dave responds "Hell no."
Re:Great Show (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Anime Fansubs (Score:5, Interesting)
Compare the fansubs with the massive marketing machine that anime enjoys today (visit any Suncoast to see what I mean), and it is easy to see that relatively low-quality fansubs with practically no distribution to speak of have almost no effect on sales of anime.
Its the same thing with Battlestar Galactica. People watched the show because the show was good, not because of BitTorrents. The vast, vast, vast majority of the people who tuned into the show did so not because of some guy who watched it on a BitTorrent and told his buddies, but because of a highly hyped miniseries, multiple magazine articles, a featurette in TV Guide, commericials out the ying-yang, billboards, print ads, and yes, even word of mouth of those who watched the show legally (which are probably 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than those who downloaded it via BitTorrent).
This whole article seems to employ a lot of wishful thinking and some very sketchy, highly faulty, and impossible to prove logic to rationalize morally questionable behavior.
Re:GPL violations killed the free software cause? (Score:3, Interesting)
Personally, I think that there are some people who do think A and B in this case. I think they do, though, because they see the GPL as a reasonable set of restrictions to put on a piece of software, and they generally sympathize with the goals of the people who create it. In contrast, they see the restrictions that the broadcasting companies want (broadcast flag, skipping commercials made difficult, nobody can distribute content without dealing with us) as unreasonable.
There are surely some parallels, but wouldn't you agree that using someone else's freely-provided work to make money without agreeing to share your work on that product is quite a bit different from getting a show which is already widely distributed from an unauthorized source? They're both copyright infringement, but that's about all they have in common AFAICS.
Re:GPL violations killed the free software cause? (Score:5, Interesting)
Consumers are NOT an organized whole. They are not out to destroy anything. As long as the TV/Music industry chooses to evolve, they will never be put out of business. OTOH, if a company like Microsoft could violate the GPL, they could virtually destroy Linux for all but the most dedicated enthusiast (use their war chest to build a ton of awesome improvements, convert all of the commercial users and a significant portion of the home users, then slowly break compatibility.)
Your analogy fails because commercial enterprise is not the same as personal use. Downloading a TV show might not be "right", but it's not in the same league as major GPL violation. One is for profit; the other is not. Corporations do not (or rather should not) have the same rights that individuals do, and you just can't compare the calculated tactics of a software giant with a bunch of preteen p2p users who just wanna catch last night's Inuyasha.
Re:Wow (Score:2, Interesting)
I myself was going to point out that the same logic would suggest it's ok to carjack Bill Gates if you could show that the extra press would be good for him, but I was smart enough to just let this issue lie.
Re:Great Show (Score:4, Interesting)
He was just hoping the fact that he used a lot of big words would convince you that he was smarter than everyone else. Clearly, he isn't.
There is no "qualitative difference" between recording a show yourself when it's on and asking someone else to do it for you. "Qualitative" in this context would mean that there is a distinction between the act of recording for yourself and for somebody else. This strikes me as a very printing press-era sort of mindset - when media is media, it's freely available over the air, and it's possible for that media to exist in an infinite number of places at once, then how is there a qualitative difference between watching media I have recorded and watching media someone else has recorded? Either way, I'm watching the exact same media, and I am costing the broadcasters the exact same amount of money: zero.
The dirty little secret of the TV industry is that they don't have a moral leg to stand on here. They may have a legal one - which is why they keep throwing words around like "theft" and "piracy" - but how do you steal something that's freely available over the airwaves, or that my household pays to receive (and indeed, did actually receive) but that I choose to instead download from somebody else later?
The fact is there's absolutely no difference to anyone when or how I watch TV programs, morally, ethically or by any other standard. The problem for the TV networks is a) they lose the ability to track my viewing habits when I download vs. watching on cable, and b) they lose the ability to serve me ads - but then I skip through the ads on my TiVo anyway, and there's certainly no law that says I have to watch them. (Not yet, anyway.)
Bottom line is it screws up their business model and they don't like it. Too bad for them; they choose to put this stuff out either for free over the air, or over cable that I already pay them for anyway. If they were smart, they'd host downloads for all their TV shows themselves and put everything on free (i.e. basic) cable VOD, which would solve most of their problems. In the absence of that, though, I'm going to keep right on downloading shows from the usual sources and I'm not going to feel bad about it. (Not with a $98 per month cable bill, that's for sure.)
Re:Great Show (Score:5, Interesting)
You still have a full bladder in the later scenario.
Other than that... Fuck 'em, I don't want to see their ads for tampons: I'll never buy tampons in my LIFE, if I ever do, it will be a brand specified by the woman making me run errands, not a brand selected based on advertising.
I use the mute button or channel-surf when ads come on, I'm not watching ads on TV, I don't see ads on the net, I don't read the ads in the magazines, I don't listen to them on the radio, I don't owe anything to the advertisers.
They try to brainwash me into giving them money, I resist by ignoring them, changing channel, muting, adlocking, turning the page, or skipping to thwe end of the commercial break. It isn't wrong of me to do this, like it isn't wrong of them to spend money to get me to know their product exists.
Re:Unbiased much? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The REAL problem with that analogy.... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Great Show (Score:4, Interesting)
meaning let's say i recently purchased the firefly tv series on dvd. i'm paranoid that somehow these dvds may get scratched and damaged so i want a backup of it before anything happens. i don't have a dvd burner, but i know a friend does. can i bring over my dvds and ask him to help me create a backup? now taking this a step further, let's assume my friend already has his own set of the firefly tv series on dvd. is it illegal then to ask him to duplicate his copy so i won't have to bring mine over. the end result is the same, but the mean is slightly different in which my friend is using his dvd set to backup instead of mine.
to translate this over to the tv scenario. i purchase cable tv and so this my friend. i'm legally allowed to record stuff from tv onto tape or harddrive, but i personally don't own a vcr or tivo or dvr. However, my friend owns a vcr and i asked if he could help me record something (note that both of us has access to the source and both of us are legally allowed to record the source). is that really illegal then because he's not using my source to make a recording for me? as stated before, the end results are the same, it's just the means are slightly different.
Re:Same old, same old (Score:1, Interesting)
No, you do not. Not legally, not morally, not ethically. The crime of theft is very, very simple: It's taking something that someone else owns without permission. "Depriving" somebody of something doesn't come into it. We all learned that in kindergarten. "But he wasn't using it!" is not an acceptable defense when one gets caught taking something from a classmate. "But I didn't deprive him of it!" isn't an acceptable excuse when one gets caught taking illegal copies of TV shows over the Internet.
"Copyright infringement" is theft. It's a very specific piece of legal jargon for a specific type of theft. Just like embezzlement is a specific type of theft (theft of money from an employer) and shoplifting is a specific type of theft (theft of goods from a place of business) and burglary is a specific type of theft (theft from a residence), copyright infringement is a specific type of theft (theft of a copy of something).
Re:Sounds like the Photoshop Effect (Score:3, Interesting)
She had a pirated copy, had learnt to use it (pretty well) on her home Macintosh, and convinced us to go out and buy a copy.
KPT (by Kai Krause and MetaCreations) actually had a "readme" text imbedded in the installer that kind of, somewhat, "allowed" for this. I don't have the file with me now but I remember the point made in the text.
"If you get a copy of KPT which you have not paid for but you go ahead and use it on your home machine to make hobby files... fine. However... if you use our plugins to make up commercial art which you are charging a client for then PAY us for our tools. You are making money off of our work so pay us!"
Worked for her... and us... and MetaCreations/Kai too.
Best to learn to work with reality instead of trying to make up your own.
"The street finds it's own use for things." - Willima Gibson
cheers
front
Re:I remember it somewhat different.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Even the original Galactica was 10 times better than this fiasco.
I'm sorry if someone takes ofense but I'm really disapointed. Perhaps is only me, may be I'm a cylon...
I stopped watching broadcast LOST because of MPAA (Score:1, Interesting)
After the MPAA started going after the bittorrent TV show downloaders I stopped downloading the shows that I missed. Since I missed some shows, I didn't want to watch the next episode since I missed the prior show. It's like ripping a chapter or two out of a novel. It's just not going to be as good, you have no idea of what you missed or if it is important.
Since it's been so long since I've seen LOST I have stopped caring & haven't missed it a bit. I do more things with my time. So thanks MPAA, by stopping me from watching TV you have improved my social life! I would say that I have a girlfriend now but nobody here would believe me.
Re:I remember it somewhat different.... (Score:3, Interesting)
She is super super cute and has a terrific body. Don't knock her 'til you do your research
The problems isn't piracy. (Score:2, Interesting)
Fans desire to see the show as soon as humanly possible. Where the production company screwed up, they released it in the UK first. Myself personally, I saw the entire first season thanks to torrents before it ever aired in the US.
No offense to the people overseas, but Battlestar Galactica is an AMERICAN creation. (not to be politcal here...but it's blasphemy to release "our" shows over there for you guys first, imho).
Anyway, back to the point. The problem isn't piracy. People are going to share television shows and movies regardless. If not thru IRC, thru Gnutella, if not thru Gnutella, thru Kazaa, if not thru Kazaa, thru BitTorrents, if not thru BitTorrents, they'll find another way. The MPAA is a victim of its own success. By pissing off and alienating every single person out there, it does nothing but fuel people's resolve.
Sure there are going to be people who are going to try to get something for nothing. That's true in any society. There are those of us who not only download things to be the "first" to see them, but we still pay our $8.50 at the box office to see it in the theatre. SW Ep2, I saw 2 weeks before release, did that stop me from going to see it in the theatre? No. In fact I saw it twice. (not because it was good, just because I was taking others to see it.)
What the MPAA doesn't understand, is that some "art" is art...some art is utter crap. If people like what they see, they WILL spend the cash to get the "real thing". Unless they're a broke college kid, and what does it matter if they see it for free on the internet, or see it for free on television 3 years later. The "but we have commercials for network showings"...does cut it, because nobody pays attention to those anyway. Darth Vader choking a red M&M doesn't make me want to buy more M&M's, (in fact it makes me want to choke a muppet.)
Truth be told, it makes not one iota's difference whether people watch things for free, or pay their money, the corporations still dump their profits into promotions, people still buy their products, most without the influence of advertisement. If things are of quality, that's where people spend their money. If a show is good, and someone downloads it, watches it sans commercials, it's not going to affect their spending habits.
This is turning into a rant, so I'll just leave it at that. (on a final note, F' the MPAA)