But…how do you know it would have had better ratings if I had to watch it when it aired? Maybe on chanels like SciFye, USA or TNT, that replay an episode at least one or two other times the week following the original air date, NBC, CBS, and ABC as far as I know only air their prime time shows once…then you won’t see it again until the season is over and it goes into repeats…and that’s if you’re lucky. So for shows like Lost, Heroes and such that build upon you following the entire series, if I can’t time shift it, I’m not going to watch it at all. So in the case of those shows, I wouldn’t be a viewer at all. The fact that I can grab a copy online means that I can keep up with the show, and when I can catch an episode live, then great…but if get more than 2 or 3 episodes backed up, I just delete the show and I’ll never watch it. Piracy had nothing to do with it.
I’ve already said it’s hard to quantify, but to interpret that as to mean that no pirate would possibly watch the show through legitimate channels if they didn’t/couldn’t pirate is an absurd position. As absurd as the position that every single instance of piracy is a lost sale/legitimate viewership. It’s clearly somewhere in the middle.
But in the event that a borderline show had a few million people pirating it, chances are that if some significant fraction of them watched it legitimately it wouldn’t be cancelled.
I agree with this.
But the thing is, I don’t think we can find an example of this animal in nature, despite its possibility. OTOH, we could look at examples such as Firefly and Farscape. Both good shows, but due to ratings, and a lot of network fucking around, both cancelled. Then the word of mouth starts, gets taken up by downloaders, DVD sales go up, the fan bases swell up all over the Internet like the TV industry as never seen before, and we get follow-on movies. That’s not bad. It’s not entirely thanks to downloaders, but they and the Internet have irrevocably changed the landscape.
You understand how the data used to produce ratings statistics is collected, right?
Actually Larry, I don’t. Is it still done by some Neilson device? I remember reading something about that a while ago. Personally I wouldn’t care if my DirectTV box included my viewing habits in it’s weekly call if it helped the networks figure out real numbers instead of what seems like guesswork to me.
The solution to every type of piracy is to make it readily available for a reasonable price. The reason MP3 piracy became the defacto way to get your music in the late 90s was because it was 736,000 times easier than going to a music store to buy a CD that requires a power tool to open and you only wanted one song.
If the iTunes Music store had come out about 6 years earlier, I really don’t think Napster would have been such a big thing. A dollar for a song is not a steep price to pay at all, and the process of buying a song on iTunes is much simpler than trying to find it elsewhere illegally.
Remember how mainstream Napster was? Parents and grandparents used it. It wasn’t a nerdy little back-room secret like IRC and newsgroups are. Everybody used it. Most of the people using it, I’d bet, didn’t even realize they were pirating. They just wanted to get songs by typing in the same and double clicking a result. If iTunes were there, I argue they’d all have been using that instead.
The TV people have come a long way in curbing TV piracy by offering their shows on iTunes, Amazon, Xbox Live, and so on, but I think they’ve priced themselves into a really bad position.
A TV show on iTunes is $2 for SD, or $3 for HD.
A song is $1.
How many times will you listen to a song you paid $1 for? Dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands of times.
How many times will you watch a TV show you paid $2 or $3 for? Once. Maybe, maaaybe twice if you hold onto the file long enough to get nostalgic about it.
Why does an HD TV show cost more than the SD version? Sure, it has a premium by being better, but is there any added cost to produce it? The TV network is shooting the show in HD anyway. If anything, having an SD version costs them more money, since they have to down-convert their original, HD version. It doesn’t make sense to charge more for the HD version, treating it like a premium, when it doesn’t cost me anything extra to watch the show in HD on the TV.
The pricing is ridiculous. With the $2 or $3 per episode model, it usually costs $30-60 to download an entire season of a show, which is almost always more than it would cost to buy the DVD box set, which includes commentaries and extra stuff and the fabulous premium of existing within our physical plane of reality, and not having stupid DRM to deal with (you can watch your DVD of Dollhouse season 1 on any DVD player in America, but your iTunes download will only play on up to 5 computers, or a device like an iPod or Apple TV only if it’s coming from an authorized computer).
While considering the possibility of getting rid of my satellite service and getting all my shows from iTunes, I priced it out. For the 30 or so shows I watch with passing regularity, it would cost $1,200 per year to buy them all on iTunes, or $100 per month if you spread it out. That’s more than cable or satellite, which includes not only those 30 shows but any other show out there.
If the iTunes model is ever going to work, shows need to be much cheaper. Cheaper than songs, for sure.
Imagine if a TV show was fifty cents to purchase. At fifty cents, you wouldn’t even need to hesitate before downloading a show. You’d be clicking “Buy” willy nilly. You’d probably end up paying more money overall (albeit for 4x more shows).
I don’t think that’s an unfair price at all. Watching a TV show is usually a pretty fleeting experience. Much moreso than listening to a song.
If you missed an episode of House or The Simpsons because stupid football screwed up the schedule so your DVR recorded the wrong thing, paying $0.50 to download that episode you missed is a complete no-brainer. Paying $2 or $3, though, is a lot more to ask of someone. Even $1 I think is too steep.
In fact, I think I would be fine if there were commercials in my fifty cent TV show. Not as many as on TV, but perhaps as many as on Hulu. Commercials are part of the vocabulary of television anyway, so we could probably deal with one for every act break on a show that costs half a buck. Maybe for $2 or $3 you could get an ad-free one. You’re probably going to just delete the damn thing as soon as you’re done watching, anyway.
The fifty cent model makes so much more sense. For fifty cents, I would be much less quick to torrent everything.
In fact, if I could get an HD version of it, I’d probably prefer it. Pirated TV shows are widescreen, and come from an HD source, but they don’t have that crispness. There are 720p downloads of some shows available, but only the very popular ones (like Dexter), and they often take a day longer to come available because of the added filesize. I’d gladly pay fifty cents for a real HD version of a show rather than pirate it.
For $3, though, I just can’t do it.
Yes, ratings statistics are extrapolated from a combination of set-top devices and low-tech pen-and-paper journaling in volunteer households. Participants have agreed to provide details of the habits, presumably because they want their tastes to be counted (if not accounted for.)
With the current methodology, it’s hard to credit that torrenting of video by the general population would skew ratings to any meaningful degree.
I couldn’t imagine it either mainly because Dexter has no ads.
Much higher bandwidth, which somebody has to pay for.
If we’re talking about streaming shows, then yes, more bandwidth would be required. However as we’re talking about downloadable content, it’s not actually a requirement to increase the speed of your pipe. Granted you’d need to strike a balance between not killing your connection and keeping your customers happy. If it takes 3 days for the latest episode of House to download, then most people will find alternat sources.
I agree with what wierdaaron is saying, it’s what I was trying to get at in my original post, just said much better. If the networks keep trying to hold onto “the way things always have been”, then they’re just going to keep hemoraging content and money. This also applies to the movie industry as well. There is still money to be made, but it won’t be on the same scale. Look at Avatar. Spent 300 million on it, and made over a billion in the first month. Know any other investments you can make to triple your money in a couple of years? It just can’t stay the same…what the end process or business model will be I don’t know. But it won’t be what it is now.
It’s still higher bandwidth from the seller’s point of view. It’s not like they only have one customer. Add up all the customers downloading HD versions and that offering will consume much more of your (the seller’s) bandwidth than if those same customers download SD versions.
Umm…no, not really. If I have a 3Mb/s upload rate, it doesn’t matter if I have one guy downloading from me who gets the entire pipe to himself, or a hundred connections that all have to share the same 3Mb/s pipe. It’ll take longer for each of them to download the content, but my bandwidth doesn’t change. Now if I want to make it so that all hundred people get that 3Mb/s rate, then my bandwidth costs would go up.
I’m not sure what sort of pricing method super bandwidth movers like iTunes use, but typically hosting services charge you by actual bandwidth usage, so the more data you transfer the higher your costs are. Even if the method you describe was used, people would still demand a certain level of transfer rate or they wouldn’t use the service - they’re not going to wait 4 days to download a TV show, so Apple is going to increase the available bandwidth. Either way, their costs go up by transferring more data - it’s pretty nonsensical to argue otherwise.
Now what the actual price is for bandwidth for them, I don’t know - if it only costs them an extra 5 cents to transfer the extra data of an HD program, then charging a dollar for it is quite a premium.
It seems to me with regard to TV broadcasts, the most important thing is advertising. Now talking about streaming and iTunes, it sounds expensive serving up files to paying customers who expect a fast download with no ads. Well, sure. They’re paying.
But giving away a half hour or hour-sized chunk of your programming, with some ads, should be as free as watching off the air. It’s not expensive to do. You just convert an hour chunk of programming into an xvid.avi file, and turn it loose as a torrent. After you’ve pumped it to a handful of viewers, the resulting swarm takes care of your bandwidth and distribution for you. Once the torrent dies on its own, well too bad for anyone who missed it. If it’s popular, someone somewhere will have saved it, taken the commercials out of it, etc. So what?
If you want a pristine copy of something on Blu-ray, go buy it. If you want a free, 350 MB copy of yesterday’s Anderson Cooper 360… well so? Give it away! I think a network regularly posting its programming as torrents would be very informative for them.
Oh, another thing I was thinking about today. I like some commercials. I like reading through our regular “commercials you like” and “commercials you hate” threads, and clicking on all the YouTube links.
Did you ever think about that? Do any advertisers care that their commercial is being illegally posted on the Internet and viewed by millions of people? Not so much.
For the people who have mentioned going back to the '50s style of advertising, I am guessing you don’t actually watch Heroes? Maybe I notice it more because they use my phone a lot but EVERY ONE on Heroes has a sprint phone and the camera always lingers over them for a moment. Lately they’ve even had mini-scenes before commercials using (minor) characters from the show that you have to go online to finish that mention Sprint every other line.
What about offering free HD Heroes downloads but you can only see it through Sprints website? Hulu style ads in between mayhap, but 1 advertiser specific. I’d be more inclined to watch and sit through commercials if it is only 1 product.
I don’t think the networks get either that even without DVRS people are more fickle, a.d.d., and now have smartphones and everything else with instant Internet access to distract us. I am much lazier about my commercial skipping if it at all seems relevant to me, especially if it isn’t endless tampon and weight loss commercials (I get it TV, I am bleeding out my imaginary fat vagina all the time and you have a problem with this, thanks). So considering that maybe a video version of google’s ads would work? Something along the lines of I have to log on through facebook or something similar where I have a profile and it learns how to advertise to me specifically.