More on TV show piracy
From Jens Ayton via Twitter, regarding Stephen Garrett’s claims:
Swedish TV stations’ programme buyers claim the opposite, but their lawyers don’t agree.
Mind you, in the long term the advert break revenue model seems pretty doomed. Hello, even more product placement.
BTW, the argument I’ve seen from Swedish show buyers is that the fewish who download stuff that hasn’t aired yet generate disproportionate word-of-mouth and often watch again on TV.
It’s hard to argue with most of that—my experience certainly bears that out.
It’s interesting to bear in mind that other countries have quite different rules about things like publicly-funded TV, and somehow we all manage to survive. Some even distribute their shows via BitTorrent themselves (because it’s cheaper than doing something like iPlayer).
I think advert breaks probably are doomed in the long term, though perhaps product placement is probably too far in the other direction. We’ll see, though.
