TV shows..The Torrent effect.

The idea for writing this  has been floating around in the vast emptiness of my head for a long while. You know when every time you think about a topic & you draw the same conclusions.

I read of Torrent sites being pulled down by governments under anti piracy laws. All very legal reasons for applying the laws in these cases & and so they should.

Software piracy is rampant, with Wares sites & code hackers almost treating the breaking open of the hard working writers as a sport. I cannot see how someone with the “handle” of hAkKer69 for example, needing all the apps he has cracked. Simple, like mountain climbers climbing Everest, they do it because it’s there and they can do it. This starts the circle of writers going to more extremes to protect their work, the hackers go one further, then the writers go more add infinite ….

Not the point of this post, it’s the Torrent sites that push the information: where to download Television Shows from the internet. The question is why? Why do people want to download these shows, shows that will be on the TV soon (its hoped)

Why record the show- to play again later for personal use. So while you record the shows the size of the file is huge. That given, to save space, compress them to avi or DivX or MP4. Now you have them small enough, put them into a store file on your computer, it becomes easy to share those files. The snow ball effect commences.

Given that, why would people want to download them? To save them the time of doing the same said job of recording, editing & compressing. Also being the WORLD Wide Web, this gives access to the rest of the world, to share the files.

So there in lay the rub. The TV stations loose viewers, not in massive amounts, but enough to be annoying. And, here in Australia, being the other side of the world, Antipodeans have holidays all upside down so the times that TV shows take their breaks for the holidays are very different to the US & Northern countries. So in Australia, the New Season starts in February, runs till November, with all kinds of re-runs, repeated material etc to get the 24 episodes to run the 40 odd weeks or the ratings survey periods. (US shows run September to June for the same reasons).

Still, why not show them 1-2 weeks later than US, where they originate. THAT is the first way to retard the downloading of shows. The other way is not to have such a high priced DVD pack price, you’d sell twice as many if you cut the price in half, and then that would curb the TV show producers from whining about the returns they get (or don’t get) from shows that don’t rate well.

This leads me to the most frustrating thing, I saw a few weeks ago TV station Promo said “Back with the new season of Blah Blah for 2010”  Do they really think viewers are that dumb? This was episode 8 in a 24 ep season (all the season had all ready been screened in the US). The internet has episode listings for all to see telling anyone who wants to read whats going & whats coming up. Come on TV Networks don’t insult us like this, be open, honest

Most of all don’t put us through B-Grade TV from Nov 30th till Mid Jan & Ch7’s case into February. There really is enough good fresh new TV, without putting on the 30 min ‘reality’ shows or running re-runs of ‘Frasier’, to cover these holiday periods. No wonder Pay TV or Cable TV still goes well.

I wish they would not try to pull the wool over the eyes of the TV viewing public in Australia, just as I wish they would wake up and smell what they are shoving to the viewers. Because, lets face it they are the audience who watch the commercial advertising inside their shows, that pays the bills, that pays for the shows, that draws in the viewers, so you can play commercials to them, so they buy the products they advertise, that draws more advertisers, then you can charge a higher premium for those spots because the show is popular and so the circle continues…..

Sound like a good business model to me…..

Please note that I do not condone the practice of downloading…But fewer & fewer people are watching TV live, they record for consumption when it suits them, not when it suits the Networks. When you do record the shows, who watches the ads eh?.Hang on , isn’t this where we started from?

Work out a way to get viewers to watch the shows on TV or sell them on-line without mortally wounding us but charging too much. Greed is a powerful thing