Making me turn on the TV at a specific time and date to watch something is such alien notion to me at this point. All of these shows worry about schedules and what's on other networks, but that's eventually not going to matter at all.
And that's not all! Insane copyright prevents a lot of people from legally watching popular series. I am in Europe and there is no legal way for me to watch say "The Walking Dead" or any other series.
So what do I do when I don't get proper service? Piracy - it gives me on demand HQ content.
I wonder when TV networks will move into the 21st century. The next network delivers cheap, on demand HD content worldwide will make a ton of money :)
A lot of it isn't exactly copyright, it's contractual obligation, I suspect. In America, the "old guard" networks are still tied to local affiliate stations, which are increasingly anchors rather than efficient distribution points. International distribution has always been a maze of weird contractual obligations, but just like the American local affiliate problem, it's a case of "it made sense at the time." The problem now is that there are still people making money from the way things are and they're going to fight tooth and nail to keep the status quo.
> I wonder when TV networks will move into the 21st century.
2016. That sounds glib, but that's my real prediction: my suspicion is that a lot of contracts are going to be coming up for renewal over the next 3-5 years and either they're not going to be renewed or they're going to take vastly different forms.
The big problem is figuring out what "cheap" actually means, of course. Internet users sometimes seem to have kind of unrealistic expectations about pricing.
Good luck getting a contract that bars the other person from showing your content when you don't have the copyright.
It's true there's nothing about "copyright", the legal concept, that implies that there should be no legal way to watch The Walking Dead in Europe... but it's also true that setting up that sort of circumstance is the point of copyright law. Copyright law is what enables the contract clauses you're talking about.
There is a growing chorus saying that piracy is at fault for degrading the services we get in media.
If piracy never existed at all, imagine how insane those restrictions would be now. They would charge per minute, they would charge for pausing, they would charge for recording. It would be state by state, province by province by province, town by town.
>> "I am in Europe and there is no legal way for me to watch say "The Walking Dead" or any other series."
You can't buy the box set anywhere? You can download it from iTunes or another legal service? I'm in Europe too (UK to be specific and can do both of those things).
I'm guessing what you really mean is you can't watch it when you want to, you have to wait a little while longer.
> I'm guessing what you really mean is you can't watch it when you want to, you have to wait a little while longer.
This is a pedantic restatement of the original point. It's still the fact that there are many cases where the copyright holders choose not to make something available in any form for people who don't live within a certain region or use a specific technology. They might change their minds in the future but until that happens, the only intellectually honest description is “no legal way”.
In Germany the major problem with on-demand and streaming services is that a lot of content is only available in dubbed versions, of course you don't have the problem with Hollywood content in the UK.
If you're like me and don't like dubbed content and have already phased out physical media, there often really is no way of getting the content legally in at least a semi-comfortable way.
>> "If you're like me and don't like dubbed content and have already phased out physical media, there often really is no way of getting the content legally in at least a semi-comfortable way."
I guess this is my point. If it's available on physical media that seems convenient enough to make it morally wrong to pirate. There is a moral argument for piracy when content isn't made available but when it is available in several versions and someone still chooses to pirate it because it isn't available in the version they prefer that seems indefensible to me.
"I wonder when TV networks will move into the 21st century. The next network delivers cheap, on demand HD content worldwide will make a ton of money :)"
Direct, worldwide on demand content models will start as soon as they think they will make more money from those models than the current double-dealing, relicensing, government subsidies models they currently use.
>> I wonder when TV networks will move into the 21st century. The next network delivers cheap, on demand HD content worldwide will make a ton of money :)
The kids of today not tomorrow. At least mine. They are absolutely mystified in the rare event we watch something "live" that Dad can't just fast forward thru the commercials.
The article doesn't break it down by demographics, but everything I've read on the subject shows an enormous generational split. The kids have already abandoned cable, so unless they somehow change their habits the clock is ticking on broadcast television.
Sports are ridiculously sensitive to lag, though. In my former office we tried once to stream the World Cup in our internal network, and it worked fairly well... except for a 1-2 second delay.
The result? You'd hear the screams from the neighboring offices (and it was very easy to differentiate whether the team scored or missed based on those), but in your version the ball was still in play, so the emotion was gone.
Used to have much fun with an ex-neighbor. He was a massive football(the one you play with feet) fan, and when his beloved Liverpool played, I could literally follow the game via his excited, or gutted, out bursts from next door. He watched on Sky Sports. I, however, had the radio on. Sky was delayed by seconds compared to the radio broadcast. So, we realised that we could mess with him knowing that we knew what was happening 2-5 secs before he did, by cheering or groaning at the wrong bits!!!
Turns out, Scousers actually don't have the best sense of humor in the UK.
