TV Torrents — When Piracy Is Easier Than Purchase 474
An anonymous reader writes "NBC's recent withdrawal from the iTunes store leaves the millions of Apple's customers who have Macs or iPods without a legitimate way to purchase and watch NBC's content. Online media stores such as iTunes, Amazon and Walmart have never been able to compete with the pirates on price, or freedom and flexibility — as the content they sell is typically wrapped in restrictive DRM. The one advantage that legal purchase offered was ease of use. CNET looks into the issue, and discovers that with mature open-source media players such as Miro supporting BitTorrent RSS feeds, it is actually trivially easy for users to subscribe to their favorite shows. Want to wake up to the latest episode of The Colbert Report, Top Gear or any of hundreds of TV shows automatically downloaded and waiting for you? CNET offers an easy three step guide."
NBC Offers Their Shows on Their Site (Score:5, Interesting)
$5/episode (Score:3, Interesting)
"Flexible pricing" would be more appropriate as offering some combination of episodes and movies as a bundle, at a discount compared to everything bought separately.
Missing out on an opportunity (Score:5, Interesting)
They wouldn't even have to make the torrents particularly high in quality. I suspect that most viewers would be perfectly happy with 352x480 pixel (DVD-lo) quality if it was free and legal. They're not looking for full DVD quality for archival purposes. They just want to see the episodes they missed. And yes, although the commercials could be stripped out, most people simply wouldn't bother.
Sell the higher-quality commercial-free episodes on DVD or iTunes, and everyone is happy. You're no worse off than now, bandwidth requirements would actually go down (TV torrents are invariably HD quality, with corresponding larger file sizes), and advertisers would still reach viewers. The networks could even reseed old torrents with new commercials on a periodic basis.
Re:No legitimate way to watch NBCs content? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No legitimate way to watch NBCs content? (Score:5, Interesting)
2. nbc.com has their shows available to stream, on-demand
3. enjoy.
"Totally Illegal" (Score:4, Interesting)
If these are shows that are broadcast over the airwaves, don't you have the legal right to receive them? If you _download_ a show that you already have rights to watch as an OTA broadcast, how is it copyright infringement?
Has this been tested in court?
tv feeds (Score:4, Interesting)
That is the problem though. You never know when the new daily show will come out. Sometimes they are released around 9pm (pacific) and sometimes as late as 4am. There are also issues when multiple groups release, or someone does a crappy job with the encoding. Groups also change filenames, making it annoying to maintain a good regex that isnt going to accidentally try to download some new 1.2 TB pack of simpsons rips or something.
I make enough money to pay for a good service, but I have not seen anything (and I am not going to duel boot or something every time I want to watch a tv show). Some sort of DVR style thing would be nice, without having to pay to get a cable line installed. Hell, you could even distribute over bit torrent so the service provider wouldn't need to pay as much to keep the bandwidth up. All that and simultaneous releases with the actual content, and I would be totally sold. I am sure that it will happen eventually, but until then I think my system works fine.
Re:So, are you saying that (Score:5, Interesting)
I think they can stay ahead of the curve if they really need to. However, I don't think they will.
Re:Since when was purchase easier than piracy? (Score:4, Interesting)
Legitimate media download:
1) Get out your credit card and enter in all those pesky details
2) Enter your address and phone number and then wait for it to verify
3) Card Declined. "Bill Address Does not Match". Call Bank.
4) Bank says "You forgot to change your billing address when you had it delivered here."
5) Change Billing Address, Hang up from Bank. Try again.
6) Card "Accepted". Take Screenshot. Media does not download. Call Bank.
7) Bank says, "The charge is on hold, waiting for the vendor to verify".
8) Tell Bank "Let's do a 3-way call". Bank says "We cannot start it."
9) Call NBC. "Let's do a 3-way call". NBC: "It's not our policy to do that."
10)
Re:Wow (Score:5, Interesting)
I want it and I can get it for free easily as long as I am willing to break with my otherwise sterling principles to get it. I know perfectly well I'm "infringing" and I don't care. I want it, I don't want to pay for it, and I can get it. So I do. End of story.
Strangely, I would NEVER consider physically stealing something from the company I work for or anyone else. When I left my last job I even returned the PENS because they weren't mine. Hell, I WROTE their corporate security policy, with an emphasis on corporate IP. So I'm not a thief or a dishonest person by nature. But when it comes to TV, Movie and Music torrents I'm a complete Pirate. Go figure.
Re:No legitimate way to watch NBCs content? (Score:5, Interesting)
Then again, if I'm paying for basic cable (or a premium service), and thus authorized to watch these shows in the first place, again, if I torrent them, is it still illegal as I could just as simply recorded it with a VCR, DVR, TV Decoder card, or even just as simply a line-in video feed to a PC...
I thought anything broadcast on TV was covered by personal use rights, as long as it's not rebroadcast for profit or trade of goods. Operating a torrent (if I did) technically would cost me money (in terms of electricty, hardware and time) and I get no goods or money from doing so, thus no profit. It's not a broadcast in that sense and thus not illegal in my interpretation of the laws. Provided the downloaded stream is "as broadcast" unedited, and containing all the appropriate commercials.
Distributing pay-for programming to those who do not have license to receive it would of course be illegal, and distributing illegally pirated or unreleased media would be as well. However, distributing legally broadcast footage to those who could otherwise recieve it already, or the reverse, downloading content you could otherwise get legally, should not be illegal. That stated, it should not be the government (or a companie's) job to make it illegal across the board, but that it should only be punishable if one is proven to be using the technology to illegally receive content. I challenge then the government to do so, prove I have actually downloaded content that I'm not already authorized or paying to recieve.
What NBC is arguing here, as are all other broadcasters who charge for downloads from sites for already broadcast content, is that they loose revenue. Really they're arguing to get more revenue then they would have gotten otherwise. They're arguing for the legal right to bill us for something they already give us for free! Downloading edited versions of these programs (where comercials have been stripped and thus advertisers are losing viewership) is a different arguement as we may actually be talking about misrepresentation of viewership and hence lost ad revenue, but these numbers are based on surveys anyway and are grossly inaccurate as noone can tell for certain what people other than cable TV subscribers watch (there's no feedback from broadcast TV or sattelite systems to pattern viewership or neilson ratings, it's all a guess).
Their argument is that people pay for TV episodes on DVD willingly, and in great numbers. Sure. Many people will not only pay for the convenience, but it's a professionally produced media, saves time, saved disk space, saves bandwidth, and MOST importantly, the commercials have been legally removed. By itself, many will be willing to pay for TV without commercials. Again, not the argument here is not "is it illegal to download,", but is it illegal to download "as broadcast" which is not the same thing.
Re:NBC Offers Their Shows on Their Site (Score:3, Interesting)
You can, don't worry. Would it hurt them too much to offer cheap downloads online. Cut the middleman, get more sales.
Not to mention they limit it all to US audience.
Re:EZTV + uTorrent + XBMC (Score:4, Interesting)
The obvious way for the cable company to battle back against this is A La Carte Cable. All the programs I want to watch are on 4-5 channels, but to get those channels in HD I'd have to pay at least $60/mo with with 70 other channels that I'll never watch. Add affordable A La Carte programming and the Cable providers have essentially eliminated any reason for me to pirate shows.
Now to the question of what's affordable: Right now Time Warner Cable offers A La Carte packages in San Antonio [timewarnercable.com] that work out to be about $0.80 per channel per month. Say more than double that for the ability to choose exactly what channels you want, and my 5 cable channels cost me $10 / mo. Piracy problem solved. I get to watch what I want and the Cable company gets my money.
I'm sure there wouldn't be subsidized DVR's and the like under a system like this, but I'd want a cable card in my PC anyway. Though I suppose a fully functional cable card is another pipe-dream.
Re:Yes, really. (Score:1, Interesting)
In the digital world capture it to file send to friend over bittorrent or email or something. I don't see the difference in the 2 methods? But not sure how copyright law applies to analog vs digital copies? Also a good point is capturing it in one location and watching it another remotely? If i have a big enough atenna i can watch broadcasts 100's of miles away. With internet if i have a tv capture card in somepart of the world i can watch it remotely over the internet from anywhere i am at. Is that copyright infringement. It seems that there needs to be disinction between analog and digital versions of a broadcast and how copyright applies?
Re:Seriously, how stupid do you have to be... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:NBC Offers Their Shows on Their Site (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, when some networks decide to cancel a series, rather than airing the remaining episodes, they sit on them or only show them on the web, like Fox with Drive, so even homebrewers can't get a complete series. And will they even bother to release such a short-run series to standard DVD let alone HD? (With TV contracts as they are, can they if they were never broadcast? I'm still waiting for a US release of the Fox Doctor Who TV-movie, apparently held up by a contract requiring one more broadcast airing by Fox before a Region 1 release can be made. FX and other cable channels apparently don't count.)
My ethics demand that if I make my own set and later they release it commercially, I buy that version too. After all, it should have features I couldn't get for myself.
Re:Fox has there shows online with less ad's then (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No legitimate way to watch NBCs content? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:comma (Score:4, Interesting)
Check your grammar retard. (why aren't you checking?)
Check your grammar retard. (don't look at mine)
Check your grammar retard. (your spelling is okay, but your grammar...)
Check your grammar retard. (god, you're such a bozo)
The punctuation provides some of that stress, and the last sentence above equates to placing the comma between 'gammar' and 'retard.'
Crap. What has my life become, that I write posts like this? (sigh)
a correction on your correction (Score:3, Interesting)
For the 1,000,000,000,000th time, that is copy, thank you. The number of thefts in the history of Napster/gnutella/Azures/etc: zero.
And you forgot something: downloading from p2p is only free if your time is worthless. With p2p, you have to deal with poorly encoded/incomplete/fake files and crappy connections. If you make decent money, it makes far more sense to get a subscription on iTunes: fast, reasonable quality, guaranteed downloads. If you don't make decent money, you are unlikely to buy the media in any format in any case.
P2P was never about "free". To borrow that old line about the economy: it's about the convenience, stupid. And NBC is making it far less convenient for many people who would happily buy their shows on iTunes. They are killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Re:torrent != as-aired (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, it's not illegal to bypass adds in the first place, so should I have made the personal choice to allways fast forward past them. My VCR has a function called Commercial Advance, which automatically displays a blue screen and fast forwards past commercials for me automatically. Should I choose to download broadcasts, even those missing commercials, but in cases where I have decided to opt out of the advertising anyway, is this still illegal, even if i's legal for me to have devices that do this automatcially?