That mildly-embarrassing-but-occasionally-throws-good-parties geek neighbour, Slashdot, notes in passing that Australians are the second most prolific downloaders of TV shows. Not a bad effort for a country of 20 million inhabitants (150 million if you include the sheep, which are the only species I can believe are voluntarily downloading episodes of Enterprise)
There are two factors that put Australia up in the big league for downloading. The first is that Australian television sucks. No really, it does. Occasionally a halfway decent show will come out of an independant production or our public broadcaster (which doesn't have to worry about commercial viability), but for the most part our small population and relative isolation makes it impossible to even approach the production values of the shows we can import.
We're not bad at sketch comedy, and occasionally we'll luck out and find the right mix of writers, actors, and a concept that doesn't suffer from being shot on a shoestring, But mostly we just fill our mandatory local content quotas with endless soaps, painfully bad sitcoms and recycled American reality-TV concepts. Badly recycled. America's Next Top Model put their contestants up in a five star hotel, jetted them to Paris and Tokyo, and knocked down participants for being "too cheap". Australia's Next Top Model bunks them up in a suburban Sydney townhouse, and sends them out to take pole-dancing lessons.
So us Aussies know the best TV comes from overseas. We also know that we're getting it two to five years after everyone else, if at all. Once again, thanks to the size of the market, Australian networks can't take risks on unproven shows. Instead, they must wait a few years until a show has some success before buying the rights.
If a show is successful but still plays to a niche audience, the networks will carefully sabotage any success it might have by continually moving it to different timeslots, knowing that dedicated fans will follow the show wherever it goes, and not really caring about anyone else. (Star Trek nerds from the 1990's still curse Eddie McGuire for his habit of consistently over-running The Footy Show fifteen minutes into The Next Generation's timeslot).
The Internet isn't good for the networks, either. Everybody now has access to up-to-date information about their favourite shows. Worse, the statute of limitations on spoilers tends to last only a few weeks beyond its first run in its home country, so foreigners are doomed to a life of knowing too much, being totally unsurprised by each plot twist that has already been telegraphed across the global ether a thousand times.
One of the cable networks here has been hyping the première of Dead Like Me. From the promos this looked like a decent enough show, so I hopped over to Television Without Pity for a second opinion. The opinion was that it was a good show, until it was cancelled after two seasons. I don't feel like investing the kind of emotional energy required for weekly viewing into a show I already know has (ironically) met an untimely demise.
If I were willing to bother finding out what's happening in P2P TV show sharing (I'm not), I'd just download the episodes, watch them over a weekend and be done with it. And it seems a lot of Aussies are doing just this, with a lot of shows. A friend of mine from IRC used to run a pretty high-profile Charmed fan-site (there's no accounting for taste), and she pretty much had to download the episodes to stay relevant.
It's another case of the Internet making an established business-model obselete overnight. The reaction of the industry will be the same as it was with music: unleash the lawyers and bunker down, until someone comes up with a business model that exploits the new way of doing things, that actually caters to the consumer's desire to get their shows on time, when they want them.
I wonder if someone at Apple is planning "Quicktime TV".
Not that we get the iTunes music store over in Australia either. I vaguely remember an article in the Sydney Morning Herald a few weeks back that suggested the sticking-point was Apple's desire to price songs at 99c. Apple know that this is the magic number -- the record companies don't get it. CD-singles cost AU$5 - is it any wonder nobody is buying them any more?
It's typical of Australia, though. Take an idea from overseas, launch it here at double the price, and wonder why nobody takes it up. Foxtel digital cable offers pay-per-view movies at $7 each. That's more than it costs to rent a first-run DVD. And the DVD store has better selection, the movies start whenever you want them to, and come with all the requisite DVD bonus materials.
Actually its nice to know they'res something us Brits CAN do better than you Aussies. The original pirates and still the best! Arrrrrrrgh!
You're forgetting about that Aussie soap-series export product which definitely turned up to be a big hit abroad (at least here in Belgium): "Neighbours". Kylie, The Young Years. ;-)
I'd agree with you that Australian TV is terrible - but what are you comparing it against? I lived in the US for 2.5 years and my experience of TV there was that it was 99% unwatchable also.
I agree with everything you said except the Next Top Model part.
The American one suffered because Americans are generally more media savvy -- its like they're all brought up with the idea that they will one day be on television.
But while the Australian one may have been made on a budget, the participants (contestants and judges) are just so unguarded and clueless about the whole television process, it is simply hilarious to watch. And that's entertainment.
And let's not forget FoxtelIQ (http://www.foxteliq.com.au/) launched with great fanfare today, unless you actually know how to use the internet where all of the details were available last week.
This was available in the UK in 2001. Why has it taken the lovely people from Pyrmont this long to roll it out down under? And let's not even talk about the price. I paid £200 for my Sky+ box when I was in the UK and no monthly subscription.
Not that I condone downloading copyrighted material, obviously, but how else would one (theoretically) get to watch shows which aren't broadcast locally?
Say, for instance, that I'm rather taken with the BBC's Top Gear and Comedy Central's The Daily Show, neither of which graces our screens here in the TV wasteland. If I download and watch the odd episode does that make me a bad person? I'd rather hope not.
Back when we were watching more television, we relied on physical VHS tape delivery for much of our programming. We have a friend in New Jersey who watches a lot more television than we do because it's part of his job. He follows a fantastic number of soap operas and serials because he runs a small comic book publishing house and he has to do a lot of writing as well as drawing and shoving things into Federal Express packets so they can get inked in Argentina.
One week our Babylon V supplier in New Hampshire got sold, and the new owner rented the channel out as a home shopping network. Luckily, US television is balkanized, so our friend taped the episodes and mailed them to us, wrapped in aluminum foil so that none of the plot elements would leak out. He has the same wretched taste in programming we have, so we often borrow an episode or two. Now and then he'll miss an episode due to a power outage or one of his cats, so we often tape a catch up and send it to him.
Actually, the data transfer rate on physical mail isn't all that bad.
The media companies may be worrying about the internet, but that just cuts the lag time. Australia is only a week or so away from the US by international mail. Just mark the package, Gift - Pirated Copyrighted Material and it comes right through.
Of course, we are just amateurs. New York City has an entire district south of the Empire State Building where you can buy World Wide Television Format converters for dubbing tapes, broadcast or commercial, into whatever format is used by the folks back home, where home might be anywhere on earth. (In my old neighborhood we learned geography by watching hybrid Chinese-XXX restaurants open and looking up XXX in the atlas). They'll even ship converters, international VCRs, and wide screen home projection systems anywhere in the world for you. I suppose they mark them Gift - Equipment for Creating and Viewing Pirated Copyrighted Material and it comes right through. I gather it works both ways.
As for piracy. The war is over. When the Ladies' Home Journal runs a heart warming article that suggests spending some quality family time with your kids pirating music for Christmas presents, you can get a sense of what the RIAA is up against. The sooner they wise up and realize that once you own 1,000 plus songs, you don't have the slightest of idea of what you own, and will buy the same song over and over again, even if it's right there on you iPod. They shouldn't be demanding DRM, they should be demanding that Microsoft design the interface to the search function.
I don't suppose this note is much help. We almost never watch television anymore now that our cable box has a digital VCR built in. We just type in the name of the show, and the box watches it for us. It's been cranking through the OC, Lost, Alias and a couple of others. At least we think it has. We haven't checked. It's a great little machine. It works just like the copying machine that we use to copy articles that we are never going to read!
We just love high tech labor saving devices.
"Actually, the data transfer rate on physical mail isn't all that bad."
I believe the canonical quote is: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes hurtling down the highway." -- Andrew S. Tannenbaum