How to Avoid Piracy?

Release It, Legally and Soon -- at least that would be one simple message coming out of our work on Piracy. But it's far from a complete answer, for some content is not particularly prone to piracy.


And anyway, Piracy is simply a secondary consequence of a technology that enables  simultaneous global access to new content. (Each new distribution technology offered new opportunities for piracy: rogue employees at Hollywood studios have been stealing DVD masters and duplicating them for years).


But our clients, some of whom are global companies, are people with property to protect, and they need a proper plan for their releases. No industry can flourish if property rights can be stolen.


The critical choice for media companies is to determine the best release pattern, taking  piracy into account.


As above, not every type of content is equally vulnerable. A series like Lost is pirated if it's not made available shortly after release. On the other hand, German viewers enjoy watching science programmes of indeterminate age and pay for them.


Simultaneous online release is therefore one way to stem piracy. But the key question will always be: what impact does that have on other potentially profitable windows? For simultaneous release may limit sales down more traditional paths to channels with well-established audiences and solid revenues. (Then again, an early online release can create further buzz for the show. That’s why Warner Bros. released Vampire Diaries on iTunes for UK users prior to its ITV2 airing.)

Culture and Evolution; some new thinking.



Not by genes alone: The PowerPoint is available on request

This will be my last post of 2010.  I'm going to look at something absolutely basic to what we do.  We are all in the culture business. 

But what is culture?

A wide definition is preferable. Culture is simply the way we behave in a certain place at a certain time. Breakfast in Japan is different from breakfast in Britain.

Something as deeply embedded as culture must be instinctive. We acquire a large part of it without thinking about it. But then, like all instincts, it must have a use, be, as they say, adaptive.

Do other animals have cultures?  In some chimpanzee bands one member may find a new way of doing something useful, like extracting termites with a stick, and others copy him or her.  But it doesn’t seem to go much further than that. 

Yet that, according to the latest thinking on culture, we have an instinct to watch others in order to learn things, determine how best to behave.  The two academics who have articulated this viewpoint most clearly, Boyd and Richardson, use the term "fast and frugal heuristics" which simply means that a quick way to decide what to do in a given situation is to copy others. This appears in a book called Not by Genes Alone.

How Hollywood Did It (Part 2)

In my post on November 23rd, I wrote about the way Hollywood studios had coped with both the recession and a collapse in DVD sales in 2009. They did it by boosting international sales.

For the Westminster Media Forum on Monday Nov 23, I tried to think about what we could learn from this. It was especially useful to hear from David Moody, Head of Strategy at BBC Worldwide, before I spoke. BBC Worldwide is the nearest thing we have to a Hollywood studio. 

(Where the Hollywood studios are concerned, we are talking about the big-selling international genres of Drama and Comedy. We are very good, in the UK, at natural history and other high-end factual content. And of course we have been very successful at creating reality formats, but drama remains the most valuable item  in a distributor’s catalogue.)

What are the lessons?

Compared with the UK, the US has found more funding sources for valuable new content. In the UK most commissioning comes from the four traditional broadcasters, BBC, ITV, C4 and Five. In the US it is coming from the networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox (Desperate Housewives, House), basic cable like AMC (Mad Men, Breaking Bad) and premium cable, like HBO or Starz (Spartacus, The Wire). We need more diversity in the commissioning base.

Second, in the US, subscription revenue is funding a lot of new content. In Europe, too, subscription is TV's fastest growing revenue stream. But in the UK  it is not, yet, driving very much content production -- though it is growing on Sky.

Again, more diversity needed. 

Apologies

Sorry. I have always tried to post on Tuesdays recently. This week I just could no make it happen. David.

TV Viewing on the Internet: some real numbers at last

Source: BARB/comScore/Attentional

Anyone running a serious TV business will want to know precisely how much time people are spending watching traditional TV content on the Internet.

The figures in this chart are, we think, the first accurate figures for the viewing of TV on the Internet in the UK. I will explain why later.

They tell us that the average viewer spends just three minutes and twenty seconds a week watching BBC content on the Internet.

You may be surprised at this low number. The Internet is a world of large numbers. Streams, downloads, requests, hits measured in millions.


So what is going on?

We think the figures in the chart are reasonably accurate because they are based on a large panel of viewers and because they measure durations of viewing, not just hits on sites or pages. That means they can be aligned with traditional TV measurement systems like BARB in the UK.

Does this mean producers can now find out – objectively – how long people spend watching their shows on the Internet?

Not yet, but we are getting there.

Up till now there has been a surprising lack of hard data about Internet video viewing in the UK. Published figures almost invariably relate to the BBC iPlayer. For example, a BBC press release from February this year read: “This month BBC iPlayer has doubled its requests from 61.5 million in January 2009 to 120.3 million in January 2010.” Other than telling us that the iPlayer is doing much better in Jan-2010 than it did in Jan-2009, it does not allow us to gauge the iPlayer’s overall contribution to the viewing of BBC content. How, for example, did 120.3 million iPlayer requests compare with viewing to BBC! in January 2010?

Research by BARB in the UK, using a relatively small sample, estimated that the average person spends about 14 minutes per week watching TV programmes on the Internet via a PC or laptop. Since average adult viewing via standard TV sets in the UK is 27 hours per week, this suggests that only about 1% of TV content viewing takes place online. Naturally, the figures were higher for 15-34s, who spent, on average, 26 minutes watching TV programmes on the Internet. Nevertheless, since they too spend more than 20 hours a week watching TV on standard sets, this still only represents 2% of their TV viewing.

Now comScore, the Internet measurement company, has taken things a step forward. ComScore has large Internet panels in a number of key territories that can provide demographic level information. Where broadcasters have allowed their content to be tagged, comScore can even add title level viewing data.

We may be seeing the beginnings of a systematic attempt to capture viewing on the Internet. What everyone is waiting for, though, is a way of measuring the viewing of particular titles. But unfortunately here in the UK we are not able to touch the real motherlode of title level data yet, though we have been told by comScore that they’re working on it.

Here’s what we can tell you. Let’s start with all Internet video consumption (both streamed and downloaded) via PCs and Laptops, not just the viewing of TV content. That means everything from music videos to user generated content to pornography. Using the comScore figures we can work out that the average person in the UK spent 2 hours and 17 minutes a week watching video content on the Internet in September 2010. (That compares with 26 hours and 13 minutes of watching a TV set. So the total Internet video audience is still quite small relative to TV, only 8.7% the total TV audience.)

YouTube is by far the biggest player here, accounting for 34 minutes of weekly Internet viewing, 25% of the total. The BBC sites, which come next, account for 3 minutes and 20 seconds of weekly Internet viewing, which, as shown in our chart, is just 2.4% of the total. Clearly the bulk of the Internet video content watched in the UK is still a mix of music videos, user-generated content, pornography and, no doubt, pirated stuff. It’s certainly not traditional TV.

The BBC’s 3 minutes and 20 seconds of Internet viewing per week in fact makes only 1% of the 5 hours and 2 minutes a week the average person in the UK spends watching BBC1.

Connected TV’s may one day change everything. But right now what we are watching on the Internet is only – occasionally -- traditional TV.

A year or so ago one couldn’t attend a new media conference without speakers and delegates talking about how we were nearly at the tipping point when traditional television viewing would collapse. The evidence to date suggests something different: it seems that many of the traditional TV broadcasters are simply seeing the Internet as another useful way of distributing their content and tying people in to their brands, just another platform through which content can be distributed for the benefit and convenience of the viewers.

(Thanks to Farid el-Husseini who did the calculations and corrected my draft)