Over the past decade the music industry has made claims that digital pirates illegally downloaded millions of songs depriving the industry of revenue. In the late 90s broadband internet access was starting to become a commodity which allowed users to download songs in just a matter of seconds, the music industry was extremely slow to adopt this music format known as mp3 which transformed the landscape of how people listen to music. Over the past few years television studios have took notice to the same with their content. Television shows are available for download nearly minutes after they've aired without commercials in high definition. The article spoke of a popular show called "Suits" which airs on the USA network, NBC the parent company of USA has a digital dashboard that monitors people downloading the show. Illegal downloads multiply exponentially just one hour after it has become available. NBC issues what is called a take down notice which requires the operator of the site to remove the content, however after the content has left the U.S. the likelihood of removal is slim. This was not a problem a few years back, computers weren't powerful enough to encode video so quickly and lacked the ability to remove commercials as they aired. This type of technology is going to be in industry game changer, if the television industry acts appropriately and embraces the technology this could be an opportunity to generate revenue from this outlet. If however it is rigorously fought by fining, suing, or other methods of coercion to stop users from downloading, I believe the industry will lose billions of dollars trying to win an battle that can't be won.
One solution I believe would have an immediate impact is allowing cable subscribers to move to an al-la-cart plan which could bring cable subscription bills down and perhaps more people would subscribe to cable than pirate their favorite TV shows.
I choose this article because I do believe there is a legitimate argument to downloading TV shows when the basic price cable TV starts at $50 dollars. I think there are many conduits in which the television studios can profit from this but they'll have to be quicker than the music industry to do so.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324906004578292232028509990.html?KEYWORDS=piracy+suits
No comments:
Post a Comment