Telly watching is changing. No news there; over the years there has been a steady move away from scheduled passive watching to time-shifted viewing on the device of your choice. TV viewing is no longer confined to the big screen in the lounge room but happens on the PC, the laptop, the mobile phone, iPod and PDA.
But there is still a great deal of resistance to this move to viewing on demand, particularly when it comes to how people choose to access their programming over the internet.
Piracy goes Mainstream
I was prompted to think about the topic of illegal downloading again on reading today’s DigiHub blog post over at the Sydney Morning Herald. What the post demonstrated was that there is a huge backlash happening against the Australian free-to-air networks – one that is actually driving people online to download rather than keep them on the straight and narrow.
Big business, particularly media organisations, are having a terrible time adjusting to the new world provided by the world wide web. The interent gives power to the people and once users have that power to access and share digital information at whim, the major distributors become threatened.
Yes, let's not forget, copyright infringement is illegal. Downloading the latest U2 album or the new 'Frost/Nixon' movie or even last night's episode of Neighbours is a breach of copyright. Copyright is there to protect the rights of the original creator or, more commonly it seems, the rights of the business distributing and profiting off the material. If they choose to restrict how a piece of music or film is distributed, that is their right to do so. i say this so that no one assumes that I am anti-copyright. The law is there for a reason and is unlikely to change - nor should it.
Yet, the issue is about more than copyright, as I previously discussed in a well-received article for Nett. It is about consumer behaviour and how the modern audience wants to access material. One area where this argument is especially strong is with television programming.
Free TV
Most of us still watch television for free. Yes, there are Pay TV channels, and some of the best programming from the past few years have come from them. But the majority of television users, particularly in Australia and the UK, have free television (bar the BBC licence fee, but that is a seperate issue). A family doesn't need to pay to watch Doctor Who when it is scheduled to be on. They also don't need to pay to record it on their TVR and watch it later. Ratings have long since included TVR viewings in the final figures to reflect how common time-shifting of programme viewing has become. There is currently also no real debate about keeping those recordings indefinitely - just as we all did in the heyday of VHS. Technically, we knew taping Red Dwarf off the telly and keeping it in the drawer was not allowed, but it was tolerated and seemed accepted in the wider community. No one saw it as a credible threat to commercial VHS sales.
This is why the downloading of television seems to be so popular and why there are people who willingly download television when they would never consider illegally downloading movies or music. It is perceived as no different to watching it as broadcast - the VHS sharing of today - of no greater harm than getting Dad to tape your favourite show while you're down the pub. Dad has just been replaced by an anonymous group of fellow Bittorrent users and some software. But the difference, in the eyes of the broadcasters, is that Bittorrent allows that friendly sharing on a scale never possible in the days of swapping VHS tapes at school. What the networks are missing is that Bittorrent is one of the most effective distribution channels currently available. Surely, there is commercial value in that.
So if current copyright law says this is wrong, but established consumer behaviour sees it as a tolerable and very minor transgression, we have a problem. Especially when, as the Digihub post demonstrated, many, many people are frustrated with how the free to air networks handle their favourite shows. Lost seems to jump around the schedules. Channel Ten dumped Battlestar Galactica years ago as far as I can make out. Channel Nine's treatment of The West Wing was televisual vandalism where fans never knew when in the schedules it would pop up next - usually late at night. Thank goodness for the ABC who bought the rights and showed it in a steady prime-time slot for the remainder of its run. Once the ABC started running the series, I only ever felt the need to download The West Wing should I have missed the previous night's episode - Bittorrent was an efficient catch-up service. So it is not surprising that viewers want a simple, uninterrupted and convenient method of viewing these programs once they are aware that they have been broadcast and made available elsewhere.
Another key point, and one that seemed to be supported by a few of the commenters on the Digihub post, is that downloaded TV shows do not appear to be seen as a replacement for DVD sales. I know from my own behaviour that I still buy every Doctor Who DVD Season Box Set the week it is released, even though I have already watched downloaded versions of every episode. The downloads are the equivalent of the original viewing, the DVDs are for repeated enjoyment, with the benefit of special features. I treated The Sopranos the same way along with many, many other worthy shows. If ever a program maker wanted to knock on my door and complain about my downloading behaviour cutting into their profits, I would only have to point them at the shelves upon shelves of official television DVD box sets to show how much money I have given them in return. I wouldn't have even considered buying the Deadwood DVDs - not being broadcast on free to air telly - if it wasn't for downloading the first few episodes on the recommendation of a friend. That's right - Bittorrent downloading introduced me to a new series I would otherwise have missed and led to me buying all the box sets. The program makers profited off that download. The only ones to miss out were the broadcasting networks who refused to offer the programming in the way the audience wanted.
The Death of the Commercial Break
If copyright is about creators and distributors reserving the right on how they control and release their material, the answer should therefore be to change the way they do so to reflect how people want to access it. Right? If the mountain won't go to Mohammed, and all that. Consumers won't stop downloading so find a way of making that work as a business model.
It is clear that attitudes will have to change and the way television is financed and distributed will need to account for modern consumer behaviour in the era of the internet. It is also clear that the networks will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to that realisation. But the dependence on advertising revenue means that commercial-free downloads are seen as the enemy by the industry.
Ads are dead. It isn't just Bittorrent that's killing the commercial break - Tivo and the other time-delay digital recorders are also allowing viewers to skip ads with startling skill. The networks need to find another business model - such as watermarking commercial messages - that not only allow for the commercial break to be eradicated while keeping advertisers funding programs, but also allow the monetisation of legit Bittorrent downloading. We are all used to seeing the 7 watermark (or whichever channel) - would we really be upset if that watermark rotated between advertising logos? Let's not forget, downloads are a digital medium. Surely if the networks put their mind to it there could be ways of piggybacking marketing messages in the form of links to websites etc at appropriate points that don't interupt the narrative. As more television viewing is happening on platforms that have internet connections, hotlinking (for example; at the end of a program during the credits) should be very possible and should generate hits to advertisers. Or, alternatively, imagine a scenario where a network allowed legitimate Bittorrent downloads of its programs from a network site constructed for each program. This website could then be populated with advertising to fund the venture - online advertising being far more productive in this day and age of one click selling than TVCs in a lot of ways. I know I would go to the 'official Battlestar Galactica download site' if it existed, even if it meant seeing banner ads and partner promotions while I clicked and downloaded the episode for free.
And that is the last point to be made - the model has to be free. iTunes may have now launched its television download service in Australia, charging on average $2.99 per episode, but any cost still means that someone else will offer the same program for free elsewhere. If the original download is free, secure and complete, the motivation to download from a pirate site disappears completely. Monetise that model and television may finally enter the 21st Century.
For more opinion and thoughts on the downloading debate, watch Mark Pesce's brilliant lecture - 'Piracy is Good'. I know I've pointed it out before, but it is essential viewing for anyone who wants a clearer understanding of the issues.
