Shots Across The Bow

Hollywood: Not as Stupid as The RIAA

Warner Brothers is releasing movies and TV shows as bittorrent files for sale on the internet.

Warner Brothers plans to announce today that it will make hundreds of movies and television shows available for purchase over the Internet using BitTorrent software, which is widely used to download movies and other copyrighted material illegally.

The agreement between Warner Brothers and BitTorrent is an unusual deal between a major Hollywood studio and a company whose file-sharing technology has raised the ire of the movie industry.

For its part, Warner Brothers says it is trying to stem the piracy of movies on the Internet by offering consumers an easy and fast way to download movies legally.

I've been using bittorrent as a time shifting mechanism for quite a while now, especially since it makes it very easy to skip the annoying commercials. I just download the files, unzip, and then watch at my convenience, without having to sit through the comercials.

I'm betting that the WB rips will include the commercials, but the fast forward button will take care of that.

But I was thinking about this after hearing the announcement, and it's becoming more and more clear that traditional TV marketing is dead; the advertisers and networks just haven't fully realized it yet. Most of the networks and studios are trying to cling to the old world, using the courts to try and prevent the new technologies from flourishing. Just like during the home video explosion, when studios tried to legislate a tax on blank tapes to make money off of people taping shows off TV, the old guard is trying to hold back development of new technologies, instead of riding the wave and finding new ways to deliver their products and serving their customers better.

That was the whole impetus behind the DMCA.

While it's nice to see WB actually trying to embrace the future instead of avoid it, I wonder if they fully realize how things are changing. Think about it; how many companies are going to sponsor programming when they know that most of the audience will either delete or fast forward past the commercials? And if the sponsors dry up, who is going to pay for the content?

The viewer will.

Cable premium channels have already shown the way. People will pay directly for content if the price is right and the quality is high. They'll even put up with things unheard of in the past, like waiting 2 years between seasons, or watching even if the season is only 11 shows long.

It seems to me that this gives the content creators tremendous freedom to tell much better stories. First, they no longer have to shoehorn a story into 52 minutes, with spaces for commercials at regular intervals. If this weeks story takes 75 minutes instead, no worries. If act 1 takes 13 minutes instead of 18, no need to find filler material to stretch it to the first commercial.

And content! The sky will truly be the limit when subscription based TV becomes the norm. TV has always had an advantage over movies in the ability to really tell a good story, although it took them a long time to figure it out. For decades, TV relied on formulaic shows that reduced characters to caricatures and serious issues to punchlines. The golden rule of television was that nothing ever changed, and if it did change, we weren't supposed to mention it. Heck, they swapped Darrens on us and went on like we wouldn't even notice that there was a new guy. And whatever happened to Chuck Cunningham?

Eventually though, TV realized that, unlike a movie that's limited to about 2 hours, a TV show had 20+ hours per season to build characters and explore issues and tell real stories. It's no big surprise to me that some of Hollywood's biggest names are now gravitating to TV, because that's where the best stories are. Shows like Oz, Sopranos, Babylon 5, and others have shown that TV can tell a much richer, deeper story than any movie can hope to fit in 2 hours. Yeah, the big paycheck is still on the big screen, but the best work is on the small screen. This is a trend that I expect to accelerate as subscription TV becomes the norm.

So, breaking the old studio and network system should result in better content, delivered in a much more user friendly format.

It's a win win situation. That's why I'm certain that somebody will do their level best to screw it up.

Posted by Rich at May 10, 2006 12:05 AM | TrackBack