TV's Present World Reality

TorrentFreak has an interesting little interview with Jesse Alexander who has worked on Lost and Heroes, two of the most popular downloads of all time.  “People watching shows such as Lost and Heroes on BitTorrent is the present world reality.  TV networks have to recognize this, give their viewers more ways to interact with the shows, and find ways to generate revenue from every member of the global audience.  It’s the same for music artists. The reality is, people share music. Artists now make money by driving people to concerts, through community websites, and by offering exclusive events. TV networks are focusing too much on one exclusive product, instead of building a community. This is a mistake I think.”

Comments

[Linvin De Past]

Deep Packet Inspection at the ISP level, that's what I say. Seek out all these content thieving schweine and sue them all. Cut off their connections, that's how you endear yourself to a loyal fanbase. "Community", Pwawf!! My content belongs to me even if I do digitise it and stick it out on the Internet. The Internet is just another broadcast mechanism.

[James Cherkoff]

Mr Livin De Past, I am greatly disturbed by the imagery of Deep Packet Inspection and the cutting off of connections. I know, that you know, that really your soul and your IP wishes to be free. The sooner you admit to yourself what is so obvious to everyone else, the better we will all shall be.

More seriously, I think this is about far more than just the right to share material freely using BitTorrent.

I actually feel quite sorry for artists who find it difficult to cope and make money in the new paradigm, but it is a reality, so deal with it.

What I think is the crucial point here is the ability to sample and remix: Music, art, literature and film. Taking music as the easiest example, it has always been an evolutionary process, with each generation taking what has come before and remixing it.

Holding too tight a copyright on your work destroys this process.

I think the article which Brad highlighted the other day really puts this in perspective:
http://www.alternet.org/story/18830/

[Rory]

I believe that this is what Mr De Past was referring to:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7495085.stm

It would be worrying of the companies and authorities weren't such a bunch of utter muppets.
Free Culture is too fast to be held back. Put in place a regulation, there will be a work around in days. Look at the 'unhackable' DRM on the HD formats, that one took about 2 weeks as I remember.

You can make DRM stronger but the result is ever more resource hungry operating systems which burn up 10x as many processor cycles as necessary (Hmmmm - Vista is popular isn't it).

So you get to destroy the environment and cost your customers unnecessary amounts of cash on hardware and power bills, in order that the behemoths can protect their precious IP.