Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Leonard to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday online media insights. Leo’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to communicate one’s passion.
No episode has been broadcasted yet on French TV channels, but it is already a success.
Heroes is the last blockbuster in TV series landscape. The first season just ended last week in the US, but it has not yet started in France (planned for this summer). I have been wondering for a long time why American TV series were taking so much time to be cross the sea. I now think it is part of a brilliant buzz marketing campaign.
I must admit that, as a series-addict, I couldn’t resist to take a tour to Youtube to corroborate all I read about this one (”a Marvel Comics with actors”). Since I saw the first episode, I have been promoting it all around me. I was quite surprised to see that, even though all episodes are available on the web (subtitled in French the day after it is broadcasted in the US), most of my friends were waiting to see them on French TV channels. They told me some reasons for this:
- Poor encoding quality
- Want to see it in French
- Prefer to see it on a TV than on their small laptop monitor
- Too complicated (not all of my friends are geeks!)
People watching TV series on the internet are early adopters (see Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations theory). They accept a certain level of service failure (not ideal broadcasting conditions), but can’t wait a year to see what’s hot overseas. More important, they are social leaders: their consumption habits will spread in their environment.
If TV series production companies were threatened by internet uncontrolled broadcasting, they would plan simultaneous broadcasting worldwide. This is not the case.
I think most of the readers of this blog can be categorized as early adopters. I would be curious to know how many of the TV series addicts reading these lines don’t watch them on the internet.
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Pingback by Illegal downloading : a good deal for entertainment industry ? « e-remediable — May 27, 2007 @ 22:25
I have seen the last episode of Heroes and I am a huge fan… And I have also done the same thing with the 6th season of 24, the 3rd of Desperate housewives, the 2nd season of Prison Break, the 3rd season of Greys Anatomy… so I absolutely know what you are talking about Leo! And no matter how hard it is to find episodes, subtitles, or even how poor the quality is, I am really too impatient to wait… It is just the media chronology which has to be thought again (one year is just too long!) if the media industry wants to decrease illegal downloading.
Comment by fidjissimo — May 27, 2007 @ 23:52
Actually, I think the media industry doesn’t want to reduce this one year gap because it generates hudge buzz around the series. No matter if a limited part of potential viewers download it illegally, they will promote it around them!
Comment by Leonard Sellem — May 28, 2007 @ 00:16
But don’t you think that one year is too long to sustain a buzz? For blockbusters one year is probably sustainable, but for series that are more targeted 6 months would probably be sufficient, no?
And concerning the problem of language, don’t you think that a growing part of TV series addicts want to see series in English? That is how I have learned English
And about watching series on TV, a lot of devices are available to connect your computer with TV, so I tend to think that the barriers preventing people from dowloading are getting weak.
Comment by Fidji SIMO — May 28, 2007 @ 09:18
Well Fidji, what I wanted to suggest through this post is that, like me, you may belong to early adopters of TV series. Don’t you agree that watching a 40 minutes program encoded in DivX on a laptop computer (most people cannot plug their computer to a TV!) is less pleasant than seeing it in High Definition on a large TV screen? And if you, as a brilliant student in business school, want to improve your english while watching movies, most people’s purpose watching series is just entertaining. And don’t tell me learning english is entertaining!
Comment by Leonard Sellem — May 28, 2007 @ 11:50
Ok ok, you got me! I feel less guilty of spending hours in front of series if it makes me feel like an early adopter… Thanks Leo
You are right, this probably exactly because I am an early adopter that I don’t really see those problems and think that there are less and less barriers to protect the industry from illegal downloading. I am probably too focused on my habits to see the whole picture. Thanks for the interesting post!
Comment by Fidji SIMO — May 28, 2007 @ 12:01
As an early adopter, I find the reasons odd you’ve listed a bit odd. At least they differ quite from what I hear.
First of all, I’m really amazed by the quality of the TV series available on the net (which amount to estimated 80% of traffic, yet 20% of the files, in a BitTorrent). At 350 MB per episode, encoded in XViD from HDTV source, the resulting image is better than what I’d get if they were sent through normal TV here.
No subtitles is not a problem here as we’re more than used to that, but like in France, the Finnish subtitles float around the web in days after an episode is released to the web.
I agree that it’s complicated. Not only is acquiring the episodes difficult (I usually see people spreading DVDs full of episodes instead of downloading them off net), but the initial setup of installing different codecs is a problem.
I think the one year gap is of natural reasons that has nothing to with buzz or anything like that. When a new series starts, for example in the USA, no European network is willing to invest in it straight away. The want first to see how it does in USA. I mean, the amount of series that get cancelled in a year is quite huge actually.
Comment by Kari Silvennoinen — May 29, 2007 @ 08:11
I think the content owners are making a big mistake if they wait too long to tackle this issue. It’s already very easy (esp. if you own a Mac!) to download a US TV series, burn it to DVD, and watch it from the comfort of your living room. Staggered release schedules by geography are not sustainable and efforts to maintain them will only lead to more downloading. DRM has effectively collapsed in the music industry, and the TV market will be no different unless content owners get creative about addressing it.
Comment by Max Bleyleben — May 29, 2007 @ 17:36
@Kari: You’re right, you can find good quality TV series on the internet, and plug them with subtitles, quickly available after the first public broadcasting. And the one year gap to cross the Ocean indeed primarly aims at testing the success of a program on a first market to set commercial terms between producers and foreign TV channels. But do you think series like Prison Break or Heroes would have generated such a buzz if “social leaders” hadn’t downloaded episodes before official launch? As I wrote in the title, I think that at the end of the day, in the TV series market, illegal downloading is not such an issue.
@ Max: If this gap hasn’t been reduced so far, there must be a reason. As Kari wrote above, producers need to test the success of their products before selling them worldwide. Americans are the lucky sample! On top of that, I strongly believe that it can foster a hudge buzz around the program, thanks to official channels (critics, magazines, …) and unofficial ones (llegal downloading).
Comment by Leonard Sellem — May 29, 2007 @ 18:30
Hey Max, it seems we’re to meet on Monday in Brussels, @ Microsoft’s VC Summit. Looking forward to meeting you there.
Comment by Jeremy Fain — May 29, 2007 @ 23:27
I guess you have a good point here. I don’t know if it is one of Hollywood’s techniques, but I do believe Hollywood certainly takes into account what’s happening on the internet.
More people should.
As for the geek-argument : more and more people find a way to watch downloaded stuff. In student communities hard disk data are swapped in large amounts in no time every day. It reaches their families and their friends, so it might have more influence than you think.
Last night I saw a copy of Blade Runner, dvd quality, via a wire from someone’s ipod to the tv. it’s a fairly simple way of dealing with the “movies-on-crappy-computer-screens”-problem and I think this is a great evolution.
There’s so much fuss about high definition, while 10 years ago everybody was watching inferior VHS copies. Nobody cared. There is of course a difference, regarding video quality and sound quality, but it doesn’t always matter.
Depends on what you’re looking at (a cartoon, an old drama without special fx versus a blockbuster full of fx), depends on the quality-tolerance of the viewer (young people that don’t want to see movies in black and white ).
In the end, I don’t think the entertainment industry is losing at all. Exactly because of this downloading, the shows become more popular, tv channels buy them on demand, dvd boxes are very popular ( and that’s a new market ), so they shouldn’t be whining at all. It might be a cover up even for what you say : it’s a good deal for them.
Comment by Nexus — August 15, 2008 @ 18:16
Funny that this thread is reopened. The Economist recently had a good take on the matter:
http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11751035
and
http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11750492
Comment by Vincent van Wylick — August 16, 2008 @ 11:00