Today's soap box is all about the silly TV Execs and their lawsuits against sites that post links to TV show bit torrents. If you don't know what Bit Torrent is or about the Powers That Be and their absolute fear and hatred of Bit Torrent, and you don't care, go ahead and skip down the page to other less tech-centric posts.
So I tend to watch a few TV shows. Some I'll watch if I have nothing else to do, some I'm a little obsessed with and have to catch every episode of. One of the latter is The OC (I can't help it. I must know what Adam Brody (ie Seth Cohen) will do next). I'll use them as my main example rather than bore you with all my TV shows. When the first season of The OC came out last year, Chris and I started watching it and got hooked. This was Before The Days of BitTorrent (well, before we knew anything about it). We would try and rush home so we didn't miss an episode. Then one day we had to travel down to Lakeland, and try as we did to make it there before the show started, the world was against us, and we missed it. There was no replay, and so we just didn't know what happened in that episode. The OC is one of those continuing dramas, so missing an episode meant we missed some major stuff - we were out of the loop. The next week something came up where we missed another one. At that point we just gave up and stopped trying. We had missed too much, it had fallen off our radar - The End. As far as we were concerned, we never needed to watch it again.
Later on down the line Chris learns of this program called Bit Torrent which is a super-simple file sharing program that makes it easy to download files, and one of the things he found to download were old episodes of The OC. He decided to download the whole last season so we could find out what we missed. So we watched them all, got hooked again now that we knew what happened, and now we were all about watching the next season. So when Season 2 started this past fall, we tuned in. On the TV. Complete with commercials. If it weren't for Bit Torrent, The OC would have lost a couple of viewers. But now, with Bit Torrent, if we missed an episode for some reason (like we had something to do on Thursday night), we could download it and not have to miss it. Rather than falling out of the loop, having this easy source of watching missed episodes meant we were much more likely to watch it when we were home on a Thursday night. Again, TV shows being available on Bit Torrent actually meant that The OC had MORE regular viewers than it would have otherwise.
"Okay," says Mr. TV Exec, "but I'm sure that your case is rare. There are plenty of people who only watch shows they've downloaded, and so they miss all the commercials, and we lose money." Well Mr. TV Exec, I hear you. But think about this. No matter how hard you try to quash this illegal trading of your property, someone is gonna come up with a new way to get around it. You guys thought going after Napster would solve everything, but now file sharing is even more prolific than it was when Napster and Kazaa were your enemies. You're going about it all wrong. People have lives. They aren't all sitting at home waiting to watch your shows. The people with enough money are Tivo-ing your shows and skipping commercials anyways. TV viewing as we know it is evolving whether you like it or not. So rather than fighting it, evolve with it. Here's what you can do.
First of all, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Start making the torrents available yourselves. Right after a show airs, make it available for download on your site. This way you have control over the quality, plus you get a great sense for how popular each show is. Download stats are a lot more complete than those silly Neilson ratings, anyways. But what to do about lost advertising? well...
Start with a little more product placement. As much as I hate it, you do it anyways, so just do it a little more. On one episode of The OC, Alex and Seth were talking about a movie, and Alex said something like "I'll be sure to NetFlix it for you." Hello? That is the perfect type of advertisement for these file-sharers. Who is more likely to sign up for something like NetFlix than a computer savvy person who's media-obsessed. Perfect product placement! Then you get Marissa to come to school with a bag of Burger King and have her say she's been craving a Whopper all day. Now all these weight-obsessed girls say "Well, skinny Marissa Cooper eats Burger King, so I can too!" I know, it's sleazy, but since when have you been worried about that?
But you don't want to over do it with the product placement. If all our favorite shows turn into 60 minute commercials, we'll stop watching them. So you supplement it with ads on the bottom quarter of the screen. Not on top of the show, we hate that. Use the already available real estate. When I download a show from HDTV, there's already a significant amount of black above and below it in full screen mode. So use a bit of that real estate to post ads every now and then. When Alex says "I'll NetFlix it for you" you post an ad for NetFlix, complete with URL, in that bottom portion. When they're driving down the road, post your car ad. Music's playing? Time for an iPod ad. If you're posting the show yourselves, you can even keep the commercial breaks in there, but be aware that we'll skip through those. That's why you just posts mini-ads while the show is happening, and we can't escape them.
I'm sure I'm gonna piss a lot of people off with the mere mention of ways to bombard us with more advertising, but I'm just being pragmatic. When my TV is ruined in an electric storm right before all the season finales, I'd rather be able to download them easily with commercials than miss them altogether. (Hello, I've watched every episode of Lost during its regular Prime Time slot, and you tell me I can't watch the last two hours because my TV shorted out and it's wrong to download media that I watch for free anyways when it's aired? Gimme a break!)
So, to recap, TV Execs, chill out and evolve with the technology. Downloading is big business, if you're not afraid to try it out. Oh yeah, and if you use my ideas, I want you to pay me whatever you're paying those silly lawyers who are trying to stop TV file sharing. You know you'll make more money in the long run my way.
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