NewsLine Column: Watching The Programme Pirates
class=”article”>
Internet piracy has long been associated with music, but Ben Coppin, COO of leading Internet monitoring company, Envisional, explains that internet piracy of TV programmes is beginning to shape the future of the television industry in much the same way as early music sharing networks did for record companies….
The online distribution of music, films and software has received a great deal of media attention over the past few years, but less widely understood has been the ability to download just-aired television episodes and even entire series of TV programmes from the Internet.
It has been possible to obtain television programmes online for a number of years, but distribution was limited by the technical knowledge needed to acquire them. What has happened recently is that systems such as BitTorrent (a file sharing protocol which is very simple to use and which becomes faster the more people are using it to download a given file) and the prevalence of broadband have made downloading television programmes a serious alternative to watching them in the normal way for some people.
Unlike pirated movies, TV programmes downloaded from the Internet are of a similar quality to those obtained through a satellite dish. Those who still rely on analogue TV can obtain better quality material from the Internet than through their TV set.
More importantly, consumers in the UK who have grown used to waiting months before their favourite US TV shows are aired over here have found that they can watch the same shows a day after they are aired in America. We recently monitored TV downloads by country and found that the UK leads the world in the number of illegal downloads of TV programmes from the Internet.
Our research also found that TV shows such as 24, Six Feet Under and Desperate Housewives are available for download less than an hour after they are broadcast in the US, meaning they are available to UK viewers (and those in other countries) months before they are due to air over here. Clearly this is attractive to viewers, but it has serious implications for the companies involved in making, broadcasting and selling the rights to those programmes.
Advertising and syndication fees are particularly vulnerable: if a TV company finds that the latest series of its top American sit-com is downloaded by hundreds of thousands of its viewers before they get the chance to air it, what impact will that have on the company’s willingness to pay the usual syndication fees; or its ability to generate advertising revenue?
The future of television is being shaped right now by networks such as BitTorrent and the millions of people that use them. Music companies have already begun to sell their products online, and TV companies will not be far behind. The BBC has announced plans to make all of its home-grown material available in an online archive. It’s possible now to envisage a world in which television on-demand is a reality which uses the Internet to distribute its content legitimately: consumers choosing what to watch , when to watch it, and how to obtain it. Most importantly for many UK viewers is the idea that they will finally be able to watch TV shows at the same time as their American cousins.
The television industry today is in a similar place to the recording industry when Napster emerged to revolutionise music content distribution. Providing it learns the correct lessons, the industry could capitalise on the obvious desire of viewers to obtain content through the Internet.
Subscribers can access previous articles by NewsLine columnists in the Columnist Archive – click button on left.