I pirated Game of Thrones season premiere
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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.
I won't be available for everyone and for a fair price. So piracy will still exist.
Where "fair price" is an amount that's so low as to be effectively free or at most substantially lower than it costs content creators to produce it.
If they do it right, people will pay for it. People will want it to an irrational degree.
But they probably won't do it right.
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.
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.
User experience counts. You'd thought companies like Apple and Google had taught us that by now.
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.)
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.
Oppps, again, longer than I intended......
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.
No one would claim the subway operators should be providing sneakers, or that people would pay for sneakers from the subway operators.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Goo
[1] http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/world-of-goo
[2] http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2008/11/15/world-of-goo-pira...
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.
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)
Of course, it those people bought the game instead, it could make up for it. But you said it was the less likely scenario.
Really?
Because the pirate 'products' I've seen tend not to come with any DRM. DRM only affects the legit versions.
It doesn't say anything about the group B who'll pirate it anyways, no matter what you do with DRM.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 $20 would choose some other entertainment - that's not a potential customer, that's shouldn't be counted in demand.
When I investigated a micropayments startup (we wanted to try it in our country), we found some surprising facts - a huge % of the world's population don't have access to banking systems, even if they DO have some disposable money and want to pay for online games - non-cc alternatives to buying Facebook currency and such were huge requests when we did our customer research.
I don’t know about you, but for €15, I could enjoy 10 hours of films in a cinema and back then™ when I was playing and buying games, I got a few months out of a single game (Pharaoh and Caesar III come to mind). 2$/h is definitely not a ‘fair price’ for a game I have to run on my own computer.
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).
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.
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.
I feel I did nothing wrong.
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".
(Also the link is currently a little broken with duplicate http-s.)
“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.
Oh, and you get the BBC websites.
All without adverts.
Totally worth it.
[0] http://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/check-if-you-need-one/topics/tv...
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.
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.
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.
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 find plenty of the "free" TV so offensively terrible that I'll nearly pay more for the TV I want just so no subsidization hits the rest.
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).
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.
Name your price, networks, I'd pay for a super-premium Netflix in a heartbeat. It just doesn't exist yet.
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?)
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…
> The adverts are an additional tax on the consumer for having the audacity to watch the programme when Sky decides.
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.
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?
Right?
Convenience is a value inherent to any product.
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.
Of course the ideal would be ad-free, on-demand and not geographically restricted, but that doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone.
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"
But I like this article. He's already paying for the show, why not watch it when it's out? End of story.
Didn't we all?