Pirating has become a much higher quality entertainment experience than any other. The pace of development is insane, and the things you can do with pirated content these days are, in a word, wonderful.
Let's say I pirated a show called Fest of Kings. The hour Fest of Kings aired, it would already be on my home media server. It would have downloaded at about 6MB/second (that's MegaBytes) over a secure SSL connection and be done in about 5 minutes flat in 720p HD. The moment it finished downloading, it would be available to watch on a beautiful media center in my living room, as well as on any internet-connected computer, as well as on my phone (Plex is amazing).
This is better than DVR, it's better than On Demand, and it's a breeze to use (it's not a breeze to set up, but whatever).
It's also not free. You pay for certain services you download from, you pay for the Plex Pro subscription to be able to stream your content to your phone, you pay for the Plex app, you pay for various management apps. It's not ridiculously expensive, but it's not free.
If there was a legitimate content source that did all this well, and gave me the content I wanted when I wanted it (right when it airs), I would be paying for it. But there isn't. This is a far better experience than any alternative. It's just awesome.
Sure, but the creators also don’t receive any compensation from you. It’s like jumping the turnstile at a subway station, figuring that because you bought NewBalance sneakers you're already paying the government for providing public transport.
That said, if I could pay, say $100 a month for ‘all you can eat’ pirating (providing that money would go to the studios and artists) I’d love to.
I think his point was that people aren't pirating purely because it is free, but because the experience is superior in every way measurable, even to the point that people will pay for pirating.
User experience counts. You'd thought companies like Apple and Google had taught us that by now.
Indeed. Even in the UK were we have the brilliant BBC iPlayer, downloading from other places is still a better experience. Quality and speed win out.
Of course, the BBC gets it funding from a licence fee, so it kinda doesn't matter (I pay the licence fee there for I have already paid up, so what does it matter how I see it?) apart from the fact that the BBC cant include a non BBC download in its figures.
I think that to be honest the experience point is a red herring. Its really about it being free. My position here is that in show or movie advertising, or product placement, is the best way to go. That way we get the show for free, and the producers get their advertising money.
If I in the UK was able to go to, say, HBO in the US and download a show for free, I would. Even if that meant a special international free version that was non HD and contained adverts in the middle, or even product placement. But I cant, so I would go for other sources.
This will only settle down when they release shows for free at the point of watching, and find other ways to make their money.
Capitalists: this is supply and demand. Its very basic and the fact that so many huge businesses and politicians seem to have forgotten the most basic law of economics is frankly contemptible and offensive to any one with half a function brain. Worse still is the government interference that seems to want to use law to criminalise citizens who are obeying the laws of supply and demand, while offering a protection racket to the very organisation who should be primarily guided by it, but chose to ignore it. This, IMHO, is a vile and disgusting abuse of law, society and government. Its up to the business to adapt, not have their old control freak behaviour endorsed and protected by government, who's election funding depends on such organisations.
And BTW, this betrays the biggest flaw in US democracy, which has become little more than those with money get to buy the government and dictate legislation. The military industrial lot paid for Bush and we get war. The media pay for Obama and we get draconian protection rackets.
Going back to OP’s post: just because I pay for cable (which I hardly watch) doesn’t give me a pass to download freely. Netflix is a good alternative, but it’s unfortunately not available where I live. My only legal option to get the TV shows I want to watch is iTunes (which is fine, but it doesn’t have everything, and sometimes you have to wait.)
I am definitely not justifying it—just saying that people are paying something for it, thus would probably be willing to pay for a service that offers similar functionality as well.
It is absolutely jumping the turnstile. No doubt about it. I have no legal or moral justification for this other than it is achieving a really high quality experience that you can't get any other way.
Your analogy doesn't really work, because with the setup the OP is talking about, the claim is that the media companies could provide the same services and get the revenue directly.
No one would claim the subway operators should be providing sneakers, or that people would pay for sneakers from the subway operators.
I pirated it as well. I could have watched it on tv, but I opted for my laptop. The content creators were paid long before I made that decision. They would not have received any more money had I turned on my tv or not.
Netflix does under certain circumstances does provide a better experience than piracy.
* You don't have to wait 5 minutes to watch the show, it starts playing instantly.
* You don't have to worry about storage or codecs.
* If you don't know what to watch, netflix can help with that.
* If you are on a train or bus, generally you can get netflix and watch movies on your phone. I do this quite regularly.
This isn't to say there aren't serious advantages to piracy or legal downloading (it doesn't work on linux), there are. Steaming can be a disaster if the internet is having a bad hair day. It depends on circumstance and goals. I invested in netflix the day I saw someone unwilling to wait for a show to download and use netflix instead.
Steam combines the best of both worlds. I just wish they would add a DRM free at 365 days from launch feature + price drops to 5 dollars.
Yep, I agree. Plex integrates with Netflix nicely and provides many options. When I can go through Netflix, I definitely do—but it is not providing instant new releases when they air.
And their interface is ugly and near unusable. It's a testament to the value of the service that people love it despite its disorganized interface, just because they can easily watch about 30% of the content they really want.
I torrented all the DvD's I own a few of months ago, because they are too much hassle to watch compared to a simple .avi file in my neatly ordered media folders. There is no place in my life for physical media anymore, it just doesn't fit.
The solution, for me, is to integrate movies and series into Steam. When it airs, it becomes downloadable through Steam. I probably can start watching about 5 minutes after everyone else, only instead of adverts I pay ~$1-2 for the episode.
If I want to keep it on my hard drive, I can. If I want to dump it, I know I can re download at any time. It offers the exact freedoms and ease I get from torrents, but without needing to be a pirate.
The key thing, though, is the delay. I won't wait 2 months after the series ended to be able to buy it, because I don't want to and I don't have to. Compete on speed and ease of use, and price becomes less of an issue.
I'd rather pay the content producers than the content providers.
In my case I can't pay either producer or provider to see the same content my brother saw last night so it's a moot point. He's my brother and I'm going to do whatever it takes to be able to start a conversation with him.
This is very true. The current experience of legal tv content delivery is terrible. It is stuck trying to squeeze the customer for every dollar possible, while not delivering the service that people really want.
The music industry is finally starting to get it, even if they are being dragged kicking and screaming by Rdio, Spotify, iTunes, etc. But still, these are all great services that are giving customers what they want when they want it. I just hope people like Netflix, Hulu and now Vdio will do the same thing for movie and TV content.
That's the key—I think video content providers are not going easily into this new world. I'm sure Rdio/Vdio, Spotify, and others would love to provide a similar service to how music offerings work today, but the content providers will not have anything to do with it.
It's really sad. So shortsighted. The first company to do this right will bring media into the future and revolutionize the industry. The profits to be had are insane, and they're going down the drain.
> If there was a legitimate content source that did all this well, and gave me the content I wanted when I wanted it (right when it airs), I would be paying for it.
I won't be available for everyone and for a fair price. So piracy will still exist.
That wasn't my point exactly. What I meant by fair price was a price that would be somehow accommodated to a market. If someone makes $20 a day, you can't expect him to pay $40 for a game (or $5 for a 30min TV show). And sellers won't risk setting a lower price for certain market ...even if it meant bigger income in the end. It's a risky business since Internet is a global market by default.. whatever content providers try to do about it.
Mostly because of copyright holders. Even with steam you can't buy many games thanks to publishers having exclusive deals with local distributors. It's even worse with tv/movies. Then there are different laws around the globe, but I guess that just takes some effort to solve.
People have always been, and always will be, willing
to pay for good products. We have always understood
Return on Investment, even if we don’t call it that.
Which is why World Of Goo[0], a fantastic indie game that was priced at $20, that has a 90 / 100 Metacritic score[1], that has absolutely no DRM is a game that had over 80% piracy rate at launch? The "People want to pay it's just the companies stopping them" argument is so much bunk it's insulting that people continue to write it.
People want stuff consequence free, if they have to pay to get rid of those consequences then they will. For a lot of people the consequences of media piracy are non-existant, they don't believe they will ever be caught (and it's not as if "getting caught" even matters) so the only result of media piracy is... saving money! So they do it. For me a consequence of media piracy is knowing I did not pay for something I have, that is why I don't engage in media piracy. For people that don't have this feeling that they should pay why would they?
Umm... It was $20 for what was essentially a cell phone game. Once it got lowered to a few bucks and was sold during the steam sales/humble bundles, it did quite well.
As a counter example, what about super meatboy? It did extremely well IIRC.
There are several issues in the entertainment industry and they all result in decreased sales(which is the real issue, right? I mean, should anyone really care about piracy as long as sales are good?)
1. Price point. Video games shouldn't be $60, movies shouldn't be $30, and music shouldn't be >$1 per song. As a consumer, this is just too much for the value I get out of these things. Sorry, that's just the way it is and yes, the internet is a big reason for this b/c there's tons of free stuff on the net that provide as good or better value for the money. This was the problem with WoG btw.
2. Barrier to entry. Simply having to drive to a store to buy a movie is too much effort these days. This is why steam and netflix are doing so well. Make it dead simple for me to get access to the content and sales will increase.
3. DRM. This breaks games. I think twice about buying any game with DRM, because I'm afraid it won't work when I upgrade my pc or the host company shuts down servers. I have NES games that still work from my childhood. It sucks when new games don't get the same level of treatment. If I didn't have principles, I could see myself pirating these games so that I can have a non-broken copy, but I don't pirate.
4. Publishing companies. Lately, these guys seem hell bent on ruining franchises. As an example, I bought battlefield 3. It had origin, the colors were terrible, and it was unclear exactly how much had improved from BF2(there was certainly a lot that was missing), but I still bought it, because I've always been a huge fan of the franchise(desert combat was the greatest mod ever). And.... it is terrible in comparison. I won't be buying battlefield 4. Now, I've been a fan of dice since the first battlefield came out. I watch their dev videos and follow their work. I was ecstatic when they picked up the DC team. These are a great group of guys. But this is not dice's game, it's EA's. They ruined that franchise. Maybe bf4 will sell well, who knows, but it will die just like call of duty has and it's not because of piracy. The same thing applies to movies, tv shows, and popular music these days. The people running the show don't care about the content.
I'm sorry, but piracy doesn't cause lost sales. The above does. The issue is industry wide and the cracks are showing. There's been plenty of indie games that have sold very well recently and have no drm. Piracy isn't the issue, the internet is. People are more informed now and expect better value for their money. Everyone just needs to accept that and move on(and stop scapegoating piracy as the root cause).
Who cares about % of piracy? The only value that matters is the absolute number of sales, not what the non-customers did or didn't do with that game.
DRM hurts sales of many products. If one more extra customer pays for your movie because the DRM-free service is better, then it outweighs a billion of freeloaders.
The percentage of piracy demonstrates that there is a demand for the product but the consumers don't want to pay for it. World of Goo is the example I used because it's a "perfect" product under the check list provided in the article: great product (90/100) affordable ($20 for a game that takes >10 hours to complete) same price in all markets, unrestricted, same availability everywhere.
Actually, statement "consumers don't want to pay for it" by definition means lack of demand; demand is the # of people that want the product at that price.
A pirated copy demonstrates a wish for the product but does not neccessarily demonstrate a real market with a real demand for it at that price point.
For example, if you look globally, there are huge populations that have the capability to play pirated games but (a) can't consider $20 as affordable; and (b) can't use western payment infrastructures such as credit card payments.
If you look locally, a person who would play World of Goo for free but if offered it at $20 would choose some other entertainment - that's not a potential customer, that's shouldn't be counted in demand.
The elephant in the room is, of that 80% of piraters, what percentage of them were actual potential customers at the $20 price, and what percentage had no interest in the game at that price. If 0% of the piraters were really customers, then you lost nothing through pirating and sold to the entirety of your actual customer base, which just happens to be only 20% of all the people who have your product. If 100% of the piraters were customers, then you have indeed lost out on most of your potential revenue. Of course neither of us can say what that percentage really is, I think probably very close to 0% and I expect you think much closer to 100%.
Many pirates in my country (some %, probably less than 50%) would buy a game... but they don't have the tools required - International Credit Card, which basically only adults with a good job are given, and which most DON'T use on the Internet (the local Groupon clone revolutionized local e-commerce by offering payments on a local physical payment system).
When I investigated a micropayments startup (we wanted to try it in our country), we found some surprising facts - a huge % of the world's population don't have access to banking systems, even if they DO have some disposable money and want to pay for online games - non-cc alternatives to buying Facebook currency and such were huge requests when we did our customer research.
I haven't played games in a long time but when I did magazines would give away discs with demos of games that had just been released. Is it possible to try games before you buy, on steam for example, or do you have to jump in and buy the game without trying it?
I don’t know about you, but for €15, I could enjoy 10 hours of films in a cinema and back then™ when I was playing and buying games, I got a few months out of a single game (Pharaoh and Caesar III come to mind). 2$/h is definitely not a ‘fair price’ for a game I have to run on my own computer.
For the few who consider DRM to be a moral issue or to those who use DRM as an excuse to pirate harder or distribute - but in reality, unobtrusive levels of DRM like those used for DVDs prevent the masses from making near free copies of movies to distribute to friends and relatives.
As an anecdote of how DRM hurts sales of DVD's - many of my friends now have 2-5 year old kids.
All of them bought a bunch of kid movie DVDs legally. All of them don't buy legal DVDs anymore as they are a bad quality product compared to downloaded movies:
1) The original discs get scratched quickly and they don't know how to back them up (as they are allowed by law but disallowed by DRM) - if the kids ask to "repair the movie" it is simpler for them to download & burn a fresh copy of the movie they bought, rather than try to break the DRM (again, breaking the DRM is explicitly legal here).
2) The original DVD's contain unskippable ads before the movie. It's defective by design - especially if you want to limit your kids exposure to that brainwashing. Pirated DVDs provide a better viewing experience.
So, a lot of people who would be perfectly willing to pay $$$ for many, many movies got hurt by the substandard product. If the content providers had legally sold the 'piratebay-style' DVDs at the same price, they would get their money.
And so are you suggesting that if it had DRM it wouldn't have seen such a high piracy rate? The fact is, there's going to be some level of piracy no matter what you do. There will always be people out there who will obtain the game but would have never otherwise bought the game. There will always be people out there for whom $20 is a reasonable price and will gladly pay it to obtain the game. It's up to the game author to determine the optimal price point to maximize their return. The option of preventing piracy, frankly, will never exist (barring egregious internet freedom encroachments). And people like you can continue to feel morally superior to everyone, if it helps you sleep at night.
The blog post presented a supposed solution: make it easy for people to acquire something legally and they will acquire it legally. However World of Goo is a perfect example that this is just not the case, even if the product is literally perfect piracy will remain rampant. Why would a company bother investing huge amounts of money into creating a "perfect" tv/movie distribution platform if it's going to make barely any difference to the amount of piracy? I wasn't suggesting DRM is good (I don't like DRM) I was suggesting that piracy is not a result of a poor product it's a result of the consumers desire to get stuff for free.
The solution is a bit different - "make it easy for people to acquire something legally and they will acquire it legally." means that there will be a lot of people (group A) who will acquire it legally and you'll get a lot of money from that market.
It doesn't say anything about the group B who'll pirate it anyways, no matter what you do with DRM.
Does 80% really qualify as "some level of piracy?"
Clearly there is a group of people who will always pirate what they want, regardless of the price or what it is (movies, TV shows, games, Photoshop). If that's the case, then I think it's also fair to say that there is a certain group of people for whom even the smallest bit of DRM would cause them to either go without the movie/show/program (I think the most likely) or buy it outright.
> even the smallest bit of DRM would cause them to [...]
> go without the movie/show/program (I think the most likely)
And this would benefit the producer how? It would only serve to reduce the userbase, and thereby dampening the word-of-mouth spread and the perceived popularity the game, thus harming the sales of the product.
Of course, it those people bought the game instead, it could make up for it. But you said it was the less likely scenario.
"I think it's also fair to say that there is a certain group of people for whom even the smallest bit of DRM would cause them to either go without the movie/show/program"
Really?
Because the pirate 'products' I've seen tend not to come with any DRM. DRM only affects the legit versions.
Look, the "people want to pay" argument is as much bunk as your "people want stuff consequence free" argument. Both are oversimplifying, both focus on extreme ends of the truth.
Think of piracy and legitimate media sources as competing services. Looking at the "consequences" of using a service is only one aspect of the value of that service to the user. Likewise, looking at the ease-of-use for a service is only one aspect of its value to the user. There are many criteria to evaluate services on, such as price, availability, convenience, security risks, additional services, legal and moral consequences.
Internet piracy is always going to be cheaper than legitimate sources (unless content providers and ISPs start bundling services together cheaply). This means that legitimate media sources have to beat piracy in other areas in order to stay competitive. The fact is, many media industries have focused heavily on the legal and moral consequences side of things, while continuing to provide a service that is actually WORSE than piracy in terms of availability and convenience. This is probably the least consumer friendly way of dealing with the issue, and rightly draws a lot of criticism.
These days, services like Netflix and Steam provide convenience and availability, with addition services (such as support and recommendation services) that are valuable to the consumer. Plus, there is the added benefit that these legitimate sources don't provide malware and other security risks present in pirated media (especially games).
The "people want to pay" argument is really just a way of saying that there is a significant market share that would be attracted to legitimate media sources that provide a quality of service competitive with piracy, but otherwise would be motivated to use piracy instead. The massive success of Steam and Netflix proves that point.
However, the continued and expanded provision of services like Steam and Netflix hinges entirely on content distribution companies believing that this market segment is large enough to compensate for the income they would otherwise get from providing restricted services where a small number of big spenders pay a lot to access artificially scarce content.
The moral and legal consequences that you care so much about are the result of very high level business decisions. Media industries have used propaganda to change public perception of morality (e.g. "you wouldn't download a car" etc) and lobbying to change the law (e.g. DMCA etc). I expect they did an analysis and found that the money they spent on this was much less than the extra income they got from continuing to be able to provide artificially scarce content for as long as they have.
There is a genuine moral issue with regards piracy, in that people who create beloved works of art should be rewarded for their efforts. However, the content distribution companies are massive culprits in preventing artists from being rewarded for their work (have you read up on how the music industry works?) Content distribution companies don't really deserve to be rewarded greatly for distributing content - it's an easy job that pirates do for free. The only reason they have been rewarded greatly in the past is due to their extremely strong market power (and probably because many artists aren't very business minded). You might argue that content distributors should be rewarded for advertising content - however, the journalistic review system, or external recommendation systems, could easily replace advertising in bringing new content to people's attention. In fact, in some industries (e.g. games) the money spent on advertising actually harms the integrity of the review system. Lastly, the financial rewarding of artists isn't the only moral issue involved in art. Good art being made available to the public is a good thing in and of itself. Content distributors are in a privileged position, protected by law, they should have some moral duty to make decisions that reward them with profits while also ensuring a wide audience. Game of Thrones is a significant work of writing and performance, it would be a terrible shame if people weren't pirating it, because then hardly anyone would get to see it.
The price was way too high. $20 for a casual 2D touchscreen game? When they shifted to "pay what you want" they made $100,000 on it in one week.
The lack of DRM had nothing to do with the piracy rate that rate would have been identical either way. If they had released it "pay what you want" I imagine that would have made a big difference.
Why people bring up that World of goo was DRM free and got pirated makes no sense to me. Games that aren't DRM free get pirated as much or more, I say more because then there's a legitimate reason to pirate it. To acquire a DRM free version.
The piracy rate is meaningless. The figure you want is the piracy rate amongst people who would have paid for the game if it hadn't been available to pirate, and determining that is close to impossible.
> For me a consequence of media piracy is knowing I did not pay for something I have
If you don’t engage in media piracy, you often end up paying for something you don’t have – be it because the DRM servers got shut down or because you moved from company X to company Y without being able to export your music collection or because you have to sit through N minutes of advertising/FBI warnings to watch 2N minutes of a movie.
I pay for HBO and they would have aired Game of Thrones on Monday evening this week. A day later than in the US, which is fine by me.
But I was on a plane at that time and I have boxing practice when GoT airs anyway. So I shamelessly pirated the episode while at the airport (when did airport hotspots become 3.5MB/s monsters anyway?) intending to watch it on my laptop while flying over the atlantic.
I ended up watching it yesterday morning as I woke up at 6am due to jetlag.
Exactly. You've paid for the content but simply changed the way you receive it. Ethically, I think you're on pretty strong grounds.
It's unfortunate that folks like us who would like to be able to do common sense things with content are caught in a war between extremists on both sides. We have the rabid content creators and protectors suing everyone for every infraction and corrupting our legal system in the process - then we have the piracy zealots who feel no compunction with having an artist make zero from creating a great deal of desirable content because "information/data should be free".
If Sky doesn’t offer the service you expect, why do you keep paying for that insufficient service? They will hardly listen to someone saying ‘I don’t like the way you do things, but I’ll pay you anyways for not doing anything’ – on the other hand, were they only paid if they actually delivered the expected service, they at least might consider doing so.
(Also the link is currently a little broken with duplicate http-s.)
Not at all? Both they and his cable provider are to blame for this mess and they are delivering as little of the service he expects as his cable provider. I am rather positive that, given an ‘enthusiastic’ creator/producer, there would be ways for Sky to air the show at the same time as it airs in the US.
I agree with all of sentiments in the blog post but this:
“Why should almost 40% of my time be taken up by adverts for something I am ALREADY paying for?”
Your cable subscription is a partial payment for viewing the shows. It's works in the same way as buying a newspaper or magazine: the revenues from newsstand sales are a fraction of what it costs to create and distribute the publication. The rest is paid through advertising. Even more, subscription prices are kept low so that the publishers can claim a certain degree of readership, thus being able to ask certain advertising rates.
This comment falls on the fallacy of assuming prices are defined by the cost of goods. They aren't. Prices are defined by what the market can bear. If the market is perfect, prices will fall down to zero Economic Profit[1], and are thus highly correlated with the cost of goods. However, if the market is not perfect, then the low limit of price will be higher than the point of zero Economic Profit.
Alas, the cable TV market is not perfect. Not by a long shot. Too many barriers to entry, too few players for competition.
The end result is that consumers are certainly overpaying for cable TV, be it through the subscription price or the advertisement time price.
In the UK we pay £145 per year [0] - call that US$250.
For that we get 3 HD channels, 2 SD channels, 2 kids channels, a 24 hour news channel, a dozen national radio stations, and a bunch of local stations. All FTA via your aerial.
Most countries have public service broadcasters. However, the UK has the largest broadcasting corporation in the world, with arguably the highest quality programming. PBS in the US and CBC in Canada have far smaller budgets, which is weird given population size of their respective countries. Perhaps if tax payers would ask to pay more for public broadcasting, we wouldn’t even need commercial stations.
EDIT: I just found out that most of the funding for public broadcasters in the US doesn’t even come from taxes. Canada's CBC receives two-thirds of its funding from taxes.
I did too. I would happily pay a reasonable price for the show, but HBO doesn't offer an option to do that. I cancelled my cable subscription months ago because there's really only a few shows I want to watch and they're on HBO. Paying an extra $50 a month ($600 a year) to watch two shows is ridiculous.
I like the way Downton Abbey was distributed on Amazon. It was, I think, $2 an episode with a small discount if you paid for the whole season at one. New episodes became available to stream as soon as they aired. I'd happily watch every show I like that way If I could.
"I would happily pay a reasonable price for the show"
The price they are charging is the bundled price. The fact that you do not get enough value from the bundled price means that you don't have to pay for it, but it also doesn't mean you can steal it.
If you go to the store and someone is selling a 30 pack of toilet paper but you only need 5 rolls because you live alone, you can't simply take 5 rolls, and say, "the price I would have to pay to get 5 rolls is ridiculous, so I'm not paying".
"HBO doesn't offer an option to do that" because they have determined that the revenue/profit they earn from bundling HBO with cable is higher then by selling HBO alone since cable isn't as desirable as it used to be.
The way to think about it is, HBO costs $600/year and you get some crappy free TV with it.
I pirate all the shows I watch. I know of no legal on-demand service that is available to me. I guess that if there were such service available it would be way too expensive (it's international market, highest price is usually the global one). But it would be something...
I wouldn't watch them in TV if I had the chance (I don't) either, because of all the ads. So if I want to watch the shows (I know I don't have to), I pirate them. Luckily it's not illegal for me, but it's still not the best thing to do I guess.
For now, I'm glad that I don't have to pirate software (games included) and just have to restrict myself (prices, see above). Though sometimes I wish I pirated a game instead of buying it (GTA IV for example - never played it thanks to their DRM mindset).
I have a netflix subscription and find it more convenient than pirating. It's less of an effort for me to sit down, turn on my PS3 and run netflix than it is to find a torrent, download a huge file, transfer the file to a NAS, turn on my PVR and select the file to watch.
Unfortunately netflix doesn't have everything and the netflix UK selection is sometimes really far behind what the US get so I have to either change my DNS to receive the US content, or as a last resort...pirate.
The argument of "I paid for it so I can pirate it" is especially funny when coupled with "Too many ads!"
When you watch a show on cable, you're not just paying with your subscription but with your eyeballs. Advertisements, shockingly, aren't designed merely to irritate the viewer but to bring in more revenues.
(What do you think is going to happen when Sky realizes that their viewership is down even if their membership is stable?)
You do realise that Sky offers a number of services that allow viewers to skip those adds entirely: fast forwarding in a a few different modes (live buffers or previously recorded shows like any conventional DVR) as well as advertless shows on Anytime?
Barring the odd show that demands real-time viewing (eg sports matches) most people I know deliberately watch their shows 15/20 minutes later from the Sky+ DVR just fast forward adverts.
However even without such features, many people just channel hop or walk out of the room to make a cup of tea / go to the toilet.
Then to top all that off, most people have become desensitised to adverts on TV; we avoid making purchasing decisions based upon then and even learn to block adverts out entirely.
The practical upshot of all this is adverts on TV have now become about as effective a marketing tool as ads on the internet.
And Sky get this. If you wait another 24 hours, the show appears on “Sky Anytime”, and you can watch it with no adverts and at any time you please. The adverts are an additional tax on the consumer for having the audacity to watch the programme when Sky decides.
Are you playing by the rules? Yes? Are you paying for the show? Yes. Are you watching it when we say? Yes? Are you watching it where we say you can? Yes? Good for you, here’s some adverts as a punishment.
And people wonder why that business model is failing…
"20 hours is a LONG time in Social media terms. It’s a long time in the news."
This is the most pathetic justification for piracy I've ever heard.
You couldn't wait twenty hours to watch it legally? Twenty hours? Many of which you'd probably be sleeping through anyway? That's not even a single day. You can't wait a single day?
It's like listening to a kid justify tearing open his Christmas presents on Christmas Eve.
"Wanting to watch GoT spoiler free is incredibly difficult when you have a 20 hour gap between airing in the US and airing in the UK."
Not really. I live in the States, but I TiVoed the premiere episode and watched it the next day. (The horror!) I stayed away from recap articles and had no problems avoiding spoilers.
Besides, you said earlier in the article that you had already read the books! Which means you have already pre-spoilered yourself, no? You already know every major plot twist the TV show is ever going to throw at you. The first two seasons followed the books pretty much note for note; did you think the third was going to suddenly change direction and bring in the cast of "Glee" for a big musical number?
"Basically, it means staying off Social Media and almost all “geek-news” outlets for a whole day. For some people thats easy enough, I’m not a huge social media fan/user anyway – but my JOB dictates that I check in on the different channels at least a few times each day... So I now have a choice: either don’t do my job properly and ignore my friends for a whole day, or accept that I’ll see some spoilers and my enjoyment of the show will be reduced."
That one's easy -- if your job and the scheduling of your favorite TV show conflict, your job wins. Because you're a grown-up. Right?
> It's like listening to a kid justify tearing open his Christmas presents on Christmas Eve.
I always opened my presents on Christmas Eve :)
> if your job and the scheduling of your favorite TV show conflict, your job wins.
Exactly, and the TV series/cable provider has one happy customer fewer that could have been satisfied easily. Which was pretty much the point of his blog post.
Wouldn't it be a little strange for the network creating the show (HBO) to air it after some other network? The author says Sky could have aired it at 10pm in England, but this is hours before HBO would air it in the US. You could maybe make the argument that Sky should air it at 2AM -- simultaneous to HBO's airing. But premiering HBO's show before HBO?
Thanks to piracy thinks are getting better. now most us series are translated within weeks.
Supernatural had a 3 years(!) delay in germany.
There will allways be people who want everything for free but there REALLY are people like me who want to pay but get rejected because of "licensing issues" aka "wait till it is published in your country even if you hate the voice over and want to watch the original anyway"
I think it's time for some people to admit that when it comes to certain things, they have become addicts. This is not a condemnation. I was there with Forbrydelsen III (which at least was never going to be shown in the US as-is, and DK had the sense to open the stream worldwide due to ex-pat outrage, and which I not only watched streaming in Danish without subtitles but then also downloaded later when fansubs were available).
Considering I am Danish, it would incredibly surprising if I had never heard of it. Personally, I am not a big fan of it, it was just a bunch of mumbling going on. I needed subtitles too!
I do apologise, I was trying sarcasm. Danish programmes are usually pretty hard to come by online. Things have changed, obviously, but I still miss some of our older programming, which are still difficult to obtain.
Pretty simple take: I admit, I've grown bored of listening to most people justify pirating. Is it a big deal? Not really. Does it likely hurt content producers? Probably. Do I personally pay for most of the art projects I'm interested in? Sure.
But I like this article. He's already paying for the show, why not watch it when it's out? End of story.
I think the mistake is in thinking a corporation can act like an individual. An individual can disregard most contractual agreements with impunity, a corporation has to navigate a myriad of byzantine international contract law because they have real assets that could be at risk. No conspiracy needed.
Let's say I pirated a show called Fest of Kings. The hour Fest of Kings aired, it would already be on my home media server. It would have downloaded at about 6MB/second (that's MegaBytes) over a secure SSL connection and be done in about 5 minutes flat in 720p HD. The moment it finished downloading, it would be available to watch on a beautiful media center in my living room, as well as on any internet-connected computer, as well as on my phone (Plex is amazing).
This is better than DVR, it's better than On Demand, and it's a breeze to use (it's not a breeze to set up, but whatever).
It's also not free. You pay for certain services you download from, you pay for the Plex Pro subscription to be able to stream your content to your phone, you pay for the Plex app, you pay for various management apps. It's not ridiculously expensive, but it's not free.
If there was a legitimate content source that did all this well, and gave me the content I wanted when I wanted it (right when it airs), I would be paying for it. But there isn't. This is a far better experience than any alternative. It's just awesome.
And that's why piracy is a problem.