Disclaimer: Now there are finer points that I am avoiding simply to make my point, and that I’ll fill under “artistic licence” and move swiftly along.
Give me a moment to outline my thoughts before harpooning me. My thought is that pirated TV shows hurt the show’s producer, due to supposed lost revenue.
However, I am not wholly convinced of this – should the show be syndicated it will still be bought regardless of the levels as to which it is pirated. As no one pirates the season and then broadcasts it (as far as I know) to secret masses out there.
I must admit that a following season may not be picked up due to falling numbers as a result of piracy but here is a situation that could prove to be an opportunity rather than a threat.
Furthermore in reference to the number one most pirated show of 2009, Heroes the reason often touted as to why people do not watch it on TV as the weekly show as it is intended is the its simply to good to wait for. Heroes Season 5 has 5.9 million TV viewers, and 6.6 million downloads in the same period.
But should the producer cotton on to the fact that those evil “pirates” are in fact a free distribution network. I mean they even host the files and spend money getting it out there (connectivity costs, servers etc.) It is an out of the box opportunity that is begging to be taken.
TorrentFreak compiled a list of the most downloaded TV-shows, together with the viewer average for TV in the US, based on data from Nielsen. The data for the top 10 is collected by TorrentFreak from several sources, including reports from all public BitTorrent trackers. All the data is carefully checked and possible inaccuracies are systematically corrected.
| rank | show | downloads | est. US TV viewers |
|---|---|---|---|
| torrentfreak.com | |||
| 1 | Heroes | 6,580,000 | 5,900,000 |
| 2 | Lost | 6,310,000 | 11,050,000 |
| 3 | Prison Break | 3,450,000 | 5,300,000 |
| 4 | Dexter | 2,780,000 | 2,300,000 |
| 5 | House | 2,590,000 | 15,600,000 |
| 6 | 24 | 2,440,000 | 12,620,000 |
| 7 | Desperate Housewives | 2,180,000 | 15,500,000 |
| 8 | Terminator The Sarah Connor Chronicles | 1,960,000 | 6,340,000 |
| 9 | Grey’s Anatomy | 1,740,000 | 15,640,000 |
| 10 | True Blood | 1,600,000 | 12,400,000 |
UPDATED: Does this sound too far-fetch? I found the following story just a few moments ago, which in fact inspired me to dust off this draft and get it up.
Adobe’s product manager of Flash Media Server recently spilled the beans about his company’s efforts to build the upcoming release of Flash player 10.1 to fully utilize a built-in P2P network, specifically meant to alleviate bandwidth costs for media providers. The service would work through the use of a system called Stratus, which Adobe says can be used to facilitate all manner of P2P Flash activities. While it could be used for anything from multiplayer Flash games to Flash-based chat, it’s streaming video that really stands to gain from the idea.
At least, it stands to gain from it if you’re looking at this from a major video provider’s point of view — like CBS, ABC, NBC, or Hulu.
In other words, sites like Hulu will soon have the option of shifting a large portion of the bandwidth burden over to the people watching the videos, instead of serving up data to each and every user. This would allow the big networks to stream video content and reap the rewards of mass advertising, while only paying a fraction of the bandwidth cost as it currently stands.
Full Source: Adobe’s newest Flash player to be fully P2P-capable, able to shift bandwidth usage to the users
We live in interesting times indeed.
