Apr 29th 2010
Television piracy gets less attention than film or music piracy, but it is no less widespread.--
When Napster emerged ten years ago, music CDs containing two or three good tracks and a lot of padding were sold in shops for $14.99, and often more outside America. Singles were few and cost almost as much as albums. Compressed digital files such as MP3s were not on offer yet. And music piracy was widely tolerated: even respectable folk had their own sneaky collections of C90 tapes. Dissatisfied customers and a culture of copying created an ideal environment for file-sharing to grow.
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By contrast, television's unit of output is already the size people want it. They like to watch whole episodes of “Desperate Housewives”, not extract the best ten minutes of an episode, as music fans like to extract the best tracks from an album. Much free television can already be watched legally on computers and mobile phones. And TV-watching couch potatoes tend to be lazy. Trawling virus-addled websites in search of programmes seems too much like hard work.
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Unlike music and film, nearly all television is free at the margin: once a household has paid its subscription, it costs nothing to watch another show.
The real threat posed by piracy is not that it threatens television's current business model but that it makes building a new one more difficult.
http://www.economist.com/node/15980829
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