Comment the real power of P2P... (Score 1) 749
... is availablility.
At least, IMHO. I frequently use gnutella, and I discount the claims of the RIAA, not just because they are taking the actions of a bullying conglomerate, but because they don't have what I want.
All the music I download is music not carried by major labels. Artists and remixes that I can't get in the stores, or imports that I'd have to pay four times the normal price for. I could see there being a legal qualm to be had with the last part there, but as I see it, the service that the record companies provide, how they earn their money, is in convenience and distribution. If they don't distribute what I want, I don't see what service I should be paying them for.
I do pay the artists, if I like them, by buying tickets to their shows if they're ever in town, which is how most recording artists make a living anyway. To the artists, the albums themselves are almost more like advertising for their live shows.
In any case, I think the significant thing to be noted from this article is that P2P technology was used here not to circumvent IP, but to get something not otherwise available (at least, not at the time). The article notes that most torrent users are in Australia, which I take as an indicator that Australian viewers enjoy a wide range of programs that their TV distributors are failing to provide to them.
This brings me to my vaguely innovative idea: judging the show's ratings by its torrents. The ACNielson (sp?) system has been laughable for quite some time, but nobody has instituted a better one, AFAIK. I propose that broadcast networks should pay more attention to P2P networks, not as a threat, but as a means to gauge the actual popularity of a show. Rather than rely on "Nielson households" to decide the programming agenda, watch how many people are interested enough to encode and seed a given show, then see how many people want to download it.
Certainly, such a system would be biased towards the tech-savvy, but any sampling system is necessarily biased somehow, and the representative samples would be much larger than the number of Nielson households. It has been shown that, where the shows are available on broadcast TV, at least some people still watch the shows they've downloaded when the shows hit the airwaves, so those torrent numbers do correlate to "real" viewers. This system has the added advantage of being much easier and cheaper to implement than sending Nielson boxes across the continent, as it primarily builds on the existing infrastructure of P2P networks.
A similar (though less interesting) idea is that, far from being upset about TiVo and related technologies, TV networks should try some opt-in system to find out what shows people think are worth recording. There definitely would be people who wouldn't want their viewing habits tracked, but some wouldn't mind.
To recap: I, and I believe many others like me, primarily use P2P to get content that I'm interested in that isn't available through the usual channels. TV networks should harness this new technology as a means of measuring the public's real level of interest in their programming.
P.S.:
[ mini-rant ]
For the love of all that is good and decent, don't seed "Fear Factor" or "Survivor", or "The Apprentice", or "The Biggest Loser" or any of that 'reality show' crap!
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