In this arti­cle in the Aus­tralian five days ago, Aus­tralia and the UK are iden­ti­fied as being the two largest pirates of TV con­tent, espe­cially mate­r­ial from the US. I found this arti­cle immensely amus­ing, espe­cially the fol­low­ing excerpt:

“Unless you’re a pretty big cybergeek, peo­ple are gen­er­ally happy to watch it on TV,” said an exec­u­tive at one UK broad­caster who asked to remain anonymous.

Nev­er­the­less, Hol­ly­wood is not stand­ing by idly. Fear­ful of a repeat of the ram­pant down­load­ing that crip­pled the music indus­try, the Motion Pic­ture Asso­ci­a­tion of Amer­ica (MPAA) has forced the clo­sure of sev­eral sites that pro­vide the links needed to down­load movies and tele­vi­sion shows.

In my pre­vi­ous post on piracy-related issues, I talked about the inad­e­quacy of stag­gered global release poli­cies in an envi­ron­ment in which con­sumer sov­er­eignty exists to the point where this stag­gered release sys­tem is com­pletely irrel­e­vant, and serves only to pro­mote and give addi­tional cause for piracy. We’re see­ing exactly the same issue with stag­gered tele­vi­sion episode release, too.

Suc­cinct ver­sion: The UK broad­caster exec­u­tive labelling the issue as being niche and only for “pretty big cybergeek[s]” is hor­ri­bly, hor­ri­bly naïve and gen­er­ally mis­guided, mak­ing him/her more than a lit­tle bit the fool.

Not-so-succinct ver­sion: They’re hor­ri­bly wrong, and I’ve got anec­do­tal and other evi­dence to con­clu­sively prove him so. Really. Admit­tedly, anec­do­tal evi­dence which is drawn from a smaller spec­trum of soci­ety, but it’s indica­tive of a greater prob­lem to come (teenage cul­ture rep­re­sent­ing an “early adopter” mar­ket within the field of con­sumer elec­tron­ics and tech­nol­ogy), which can­not be sim­ply ignored in the way that it appears broad­cast­ers have ignored this.

Today a group of peo­ple at school were talk­ing about the TV show “Des­per­ate House­wives”, and some­one said words to the effect of “I wish I knew what hap­pened next week, this is addic­tive TV!” (appar­ently most of Aus­tralia would agree with them, as evi­dent from the sta­tis­tics posted on Steve’s weblog). That’s far less inter­est­ing in and of itself than what came next – a com­ment along the lines of “Oh, in the US they’re up to [some other sea­son or some­thing], I’ve already seen them”, cou­pled with an offer to plot-spoil for other watch­ers of the series. Which isn’t exactly some­thing the net­works need to worry about – plot spoil­ers rarely would actu­ally deter some­one from spend­ing an hour (or 47 min­utes, given the 13 minute adver­tis­ing restric­tion in that times­lot in Aus­tralia, if I recall cor­rectly – some­one might care to clar­ify as a mat­ter of trivia?) watch­ing a pro­gramme they enjoy, even if it makes lit­tle to no dif­fer­ence to them in terms of plot revelation.

The more sig­nif­i­cant part of this com­ment is of course that this per­son had actu­ally seen these episodes, and con­text which direct quo­ta­tion can’t con­vey – this per­son is a TV addict, but they’re hardly a “geek extra­or­di­naire”, which is impor­tant in crit­i­cis­ing this executive’s state­ments. The per­son who’d seen the episode was hardly the only one, either, although the only instance that imme­di­ately springs to mind as being noteworthy.

A slightly more removed exam­ple from this is from a few months back, relat­ing to those piratical-problem-children, uni­ver­sity stu­dents from an insti­tu­tion that shall remain unnamed. Episodes from the entire first sea­son of The OC, long before we were too far into it here in Aus­tralia. On a lap­top, down­loaded from Peer-to-Peer, by an arts stu­dent with a mod­er­ate (and I mean very mod­er­ate!) IT bent… nobody ever try and say that using peer-to-peer is beyond the scope of any aver­age teenager or uni­ver­sity student!

Which is, of course, exactly what this exec­u­tive was sug­gest­ing – that down­load­ing con­tent that isn’t avail­able by other means is some­thing solely restricted to geeky peo­ple. It’s not. And until this fact is recog­nised by net­works, they can enjoy watch­ing their adver­tis­ing rev­enue fall as view­ers enjoy ad-free down­loaded cap­tures of pro­grammes not yet even released in this coun­try – all of which could be cir­cum­vented through stu­dios per­mit­ting and sup­port­ing simul­ta­ne­ous Inter­na­tional con­tent release, because real­is­ti­cally “global pre­miere rights” don’t offer any­thing aside from mar­ket­ing appeal, as the audi­ence can’t just hop con­ti­nents in order to view it on a com­pet­ing net­work (that’s an issue for another decade, when real-time video stream­ing becomes as pro­lific as audio streams are today… although com­pe­ti­tion with tra­di­tional radio net­works is only just begin­ning to become appar­ent in the US, with the advent of ded­i­cated wire­less stream­ing ser­vices), but they CAN wait 24 hours to view an ad-free cap­ture of the same pro­gramme via the Inter­net if they’re patient, or if the pro­gramme isn’t avail­able in their locale.

The exec­u­tive wasn’t com­pletely wrong. Peo­ple are happy to watch things on TV. The only issue with that is that TV must be show­ing the con­tent that peo­ple want to watch – that’s long been a recog­nised fact, but per­haps not so much in the tim­ing of this con­tent deliv­ery… now, it has to be on a sched­ule which leaves the audi­ence no alter­na­tive which is desir­able (because TV itself is eas­ier to use than peer-to-peer downloading).