The Standalone Streaming Service HBO Didn't Want To Offer Now Has 5 Million Users

from the innovation-trumps-math dept

You might recall that just a few years ago, HBO had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era. For years the company refused to offer a standalone streaming TV service, worried that it would jeopardize the company's cozy promotional relationship with existing cable providers (who often all but give away the channel in promotions). As recently as 2013 Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes was claiming that such an offering would make "no economic sense."

Why? Bewkes was worried that offering a standalone option would upset cable partners. At the time, those partners were already offering an HBO streaming app named HBO Go, but only if you signed up for traditional TV. This was art of the industry's walled garden "TV Everywhere" initiative, a misguided attempt at stopping cord cutters by only giving them innovative streaming services -- if they signed up for bloated, traditional television bundles. Bewkes was clearly worried at the time that being too damn innovative would upset industry executives and skew the company's balance sheets:

"And we would do it if we thought it was in our economic best interest. At this point we don’t think it makes sense. We don’t think the target market is sufficiently large to be attractive at this point. So what we’re doing, and we think this is working pretty well — we’re working with the [pay TV operators] to increase the penetration of HBO Go in a mutually beneficial way."

At the time we noted how HBO was letting fear trump innovation. The company was focusing so much on avoiding upsetting cable operators and worrying over the initial impact on the traditional cable TV cash cow, that it forgot that innovation often trumps the math. In reality, the math Bewkes was concerned about were performance and metrics built on a different, changing market that was on the way out. This kind of hesitation was initially great news for Netflix, whose CEO saw all of this coming long before HBO executives did:

"The goal," says Hastings, "is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us."

All the while, HBO and Time Warner's timidity and failure to listen to consumers resulted in many of its shows breaking piracy records. And while HBO couldn't be bothered to offer a legitimate standalone streaming alternative to piracy, it did spend a lot of time and money trying to derail these efforts, including "poisoning" seeded copies of HBO programs on BitTorrent and sending out oodles of nastygrams to ISPs. Other HBO executives, meanwhile, seemed to share the cable industry mindset that this whole cord cutting thing was just a temporary phenomenon that would blow over.

HBO finally did buckle to offering a standalone streaming service (dubbed HBO Now) in 2014. Just a few years later and the service has just breached 5 million subscribers. And oh, the numbers HBO was so worried about are looking solid too, with HBO Now generating $19 million in revenues for the two months it aired of Game of Thrones Season 7. In this case it all worked out well for HBO, but the company could have enjoyed a much healthier head start if it company executives hadn't let fear trump natural evolution.

Filed Under: a la carte, cable, hbo, ott, streaming, streaming tv, tv
Companies: hbo

ESPN Still Isn't Quite Getting The Message Cord Cutters Are Sending

from the more-of-the-same dept

We've noted repeatedly how ESPN has personified the cable and broadcast industry's tone deafness to cord cutting and TV market evolution. The company not only spent years downplaying the trend as something only poor people do, it sued companies that attempted to offer consumers greater flexibility in how video content was consumed. ESPN execs clearly believed cord cutting was little more than a fad that would simply stop once Millennials started procreating, and ignored surveys showing how 56% of consumers would ditch ESPN in a heartbeat if it meant saving the $8 per month subscribers pay for the channel.

As the data began to indicate the cord cutting trend was very real, insiders say ESPN was busy doubling down on bloated sports licensing deals and SportsCenter set redesigns. By the time ESPN had lost 10 million viewers in just a few years, the company was busy pretending they saw cord cutting coming all the while. ESPN subsequently decided the only solution was to fire hundreds of longstanding sports journalists and support personnel, but not the executives like John Skipper (since resigned) whose myopia made ESPN's problems that much worse.

Fast forward to this week, when Disney CEO Bob Iger suggested that Disney and ESPN had finally seen the error of their ways, and would be launching a $5 per month streaming service sometime this year. Apparently, Iger and other ESPN/Disney brass have finally realized that paying some of the least-liked companies in America $130 per month for endless channels of crap has somehow lost its luster in the streaming video era:

"There are signs that young people are coming into multi-channel television. People that were once called or thought to be cord-nevers are starting to adopt less expensive over-the-top packages," Iger said.

Who knew? Did you know? I certainly didn't know. Bloomberg, meanwhile, informs us that the company's new service is "Iger's bet on the future":

"If anything it points to what the future of ESPN looks like,” Iger said on a conference with investors. “It will be this app and the experience that it provides."

But will it? There's every indication that ESPN's still only paying lip service to innovation. What consumers say they want is the ability to either avoid ESPN entirely, or buy ESPN the channel on a standalone basis. But it's important to point out that's not what ESPN is actually offering here. The new streaming service won't provide access to ESPN's existing channel lineup unless you have a traditional cable subscription. Without a traditional cable TV subscription, users of the app will be directed to other content they may or may not actually want:

"The over-the-top service will roll out sometime in the spring, in tandem with a redesign of Disney's ESPN app. The over-the-top feature will be one part of that app, allowing users to watch live programming that will not otherwise be available on any of its channels. "The third feature is a plus service, we're calling it ESPN Plus, that will include an array of live programming that is not available — live sports, live sports events — not available on current channels," Iger said in an exclusive interview on CNBC's "Closing Bell."

This is something ESPN already tried once with the launch of ESPN 360 (ultimately renamed just ESPN 3) years ago. That channel offered access to streaming sports content, but not any of the content anybody was actually interested in (unless you're really crazy for men's professional hopscotch). What users want is either the option to buy ESPN as a standalone channel, or to avoid ESPN entirely. What ESPN's offering is a streaming channel retread filled with content viewers probably didn't ask for. All, again, because ESPN is afraid of cannibalizing its traditional viewership numbers by trying something new.

Admittedly ESPN is stuck between a rock and a hard place with no real easy options. ESPN currently makes $7.21 for each cable TV subscriber, many of whom pay for ESPN begrudgingly. Many industry insiders also have told me over the years that ESPN's contracts with many cable providers state that should ESPN offer its own streaming services, cable providers will no longer be bound by restrictions forcing them to include ESPN in their core lineups, which will only accelerate the number of skinny bundle options being offered without ESPN.

In short, if ESPN offers a standalone version of ESPN, it only encourages customers to cut the cord and move to less expensive (and less profitable) alternatives. If ESPN doesn't give customers what they want, they'll cut the cord out of frustration. But if ESPN actually wants to be ready for the future, getting out ahead of the inevitable shift to streaming is the only real solution. Nobody said evolution would be painless or the traditional cable TV cash cow would live forever. ESPN has the option of getting out ahead of the trend, or playing from behind later on when the cord cutting trend shifts from a trickle to a torrent.

Filed Under: cord cutting, espn, sports, standalone, streaming
Companies: disney, espn

Another Day, Another Flimsy Report Claiming TV Cord Cutting Won't Save You Money

from the denying-the-obvious dept

Once a month like clockwork, somebody in the tech press proudly decides to inform their readers that you can't save any money by cutting the traditional TV cord and going with cheaper, more flexible streaming alternatives. The logic in these reports almost always goes something like this: "Once I got done signing up for every damn streaming video service under the sun, I found that I wasn't really saving much money over traditional cable."

Writers leaning into this lazy hot take almost always tend to forget a few things.

One, the same broadcasters dictating cable TV rates dictate streaming video rates, so in some ways pricing will be lateral. Two, adding a dozen streaming services to exactly match your bloated, 300 channel cable subscription misses the entire point of cord cutting, which is about customization and flexibility. Three, if writers actually stopped and talked to real consumers (like in the cord cutting subreddit), they'd be told (repeatedly) how customers routinely save money each month by breaking free of the traditional, bloated cable TV bundle.

Last week it was Quartz's turn to prop up the flimsy narrative that "streaming’s live-TV bundles aren’t actually saving cord-cutters money." Their report was at least somewhat more scientific in nature, leaning heavily on data provided by a research firm by the name of M Science, which acknowledged that the average cord cutter saves around $20 per month by going with a streaming alternative. But the firm then tried to claim that this savings disappeared when you factored in cable company "triple play" bundles:

"When paired with the cost customers continued to pay their cable providers for things like internet, phone, or additional TV packages, the savings vanished altogether. The average virtual pay-TV subscriber paid about $15 more in aggregate than the average cable customer in 2017, based on M Science’s data.

That’s in part because customers can often get a better deal bundling two or three services from a cable provider, like TV, internet, and home phone service, than paying for internet alone. It’s marketed by cable operators as the double or triple play. “The cable companies will incentivize aggressively for bundling and penalize for unbundling,” said Corey Barrett, senior analyst for technology, media, and telecom at M Science. “They’ll have attractive rates for a double-play bundle and if you decide to go to broadband only, it’s going to cost more than broadband bundled with other services.”

The problem with this take is that while cable operators claim you're getting "savings" by bundling multiple services you may not even want (cable digital phone service, especially), these savings are often part of a temporary promotion. And when that promotion expires you're usually left paying a dramatically higher rate. While new customers tend to get offered promotions in order to get them to switch, existing customers who've been with the company for a while often have trouble getting a new, comparable promo when the contract expires.

In reality, ISPs like to artificially jack up the price of standalone broadband to make it as unpalatable as possible in the hopes of upselling you to additional services. That doesn't necessarily equate to saving money. The report is also likely relying on these companies' advertised prices, which isn't the actual price. Cable companies are facing all manner of lawsuits for using bogus fees to jack up the advertised rate post sale, a bit of creative marketing regulators from both parties have turned a blind eye to for decades. That's before you get to the broadband usage caps and overage fees used to punish cord cutters for leaving the cable walled garden.

Another tendency I've enjoyed observing in these reports is that they almost always ignore the fact that piracy exists and is aggressively common in the Plex and Kodi era. Countless consumers save money via piracy, but acknowledging this reality is seen by most news outlets and analysts as a tacit approval of it -- resulting in them comically omitting it from the discussion entirely. Because you don't approve of piracy doesn't change the fact that it routinely occurs as a cost-cutting measure among consumers. Piracy is, as Techdirt readers have long understood, something you have to compete with whether you like it or not. If you ignore it in your analysis of TV costs you're painting an incomplete picture.

All told, if you prefer a massive bundle of religious programming, horrible reality television, live sports and infomercials -- you may want to stick to paying an arm and a leg for cable. But if you spend even a small amount of time talking to those that have taken the leap and ditched traditional cable, you'll find absolutely no debate that cutting the traditional TV cord routinely saves you a significant chunk of change each and every month.

Filed Under: cable tv, cord cutting, money, silos, streaming

Charter, Disney Execs Pledge To Crack Down On Streaming Password Sharing 'Piracy'

from the missing-the-whole-point dept

For years now Netflix and HBO CEOs have stated that they see streaming service password sharing as little more than glorified advertising. These execs have long argued that once users realize they enjoy the product, they'll usually sign up for their own account (something particularly true of kids once they leave home and get a job). Even then, these companies already impose a limit on the number of simultaneous streams their services offer, and already charge more for a greater number of streams -- so it's not like these companies are giving away the farm for free anyway.

But for the last several years incumbent broadcast and cable executives have been engaging in breathless hysteria regarding such password sharing. Charter CEO Tom Rutledge has grown increasingly agitated over the practice, arguing that HBO and Netflix's tolerance of password sharing shows a "complete lack of control and understanding in the space," while going so far as to argue that a "lack of control over the content by content companies and authentication processes has reduced the demand for video because you don’t have to pay for it."

Of course you may have noticed that the "demand for video" is higher than ever before, based on Netflix's now 50 million monthly streaming subscribers and the massive rise in all manner of viewing options. And Netflix CEO Reed Hastings (who understands his own business pretty well at this point) has gone so far as to state he "loves" the practice:

"We love people sharing Netflix," CEO Reed Hastings said Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show here in Las Vegas. "That's a positive thing, not a negative thing."...A lot of the time, he said, household sharing leads to new customers because kids subscribe on their own as they start to earn income.

Yet some cable and broadcast executives continue their bizarre assault on a problem that isn't. At recent industry events both Rutledge and Disney exec Justin Connolly lamented what they call a rise in password sharing "piracy," hinting that they intend to crack down on the practice in the near future:

"Tom Rutledge has had enough. The chief executive officer of Charter Communications Inc., which sells cable TV under the Spectrum name, is leading an industrywide effort to crack down on password sharing. It’s a growing problem that could cost pay-TV companies millions of subscribers—and billions of dollars in revenue—when they can least afford it.

“There’s lots of extra streams, there’s lots of extra passwords, there’s lots of people who could get free service,” Rutledge said at an industry conference this month...“It’s piracy,” Connolly said. “It’s people consuming something they haven’t paid for. The more the practice is viewed with a shrug, the more it creates a dynamic where people believe it’s acceptable. And it’s not."

You'd think Rutledge, the highest paid executive in America last year, would have a slightly better grasp on the industry he works in and where it's headed. Again, Netflix and HBO impose simultaneous stream limits, so it's not like they're giving away the store. And again, these executives have clearly stated they see password sharing as advertising, so calling it piracy makes no coherent sense. It's a reflection of the hubris often seen in the traditional cable TV sector, where they believe every natural market evolution is an existential threat.

Of course Rutledge is the same CEO that just spearheaded a completely botched merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks that resulted in higher rates, fewer upgrades, and higher prices. Rutledge's company is also currently being sued for failing to deliver advertised broadband speeds and for using hidden fees to covertly jack up service costs. Disney's ESPN properties, meanwhile, were so blinded by the belief they could nurse the traditional cable cash cow forever, they failed to see the cord cutting trend coming and have lost tens of millions of viewers as a result.

In other words, these two execs have plenty of other problems they need to deal with before focusing all of their ire on a problem that isn't. And when looking for advice on the evolving video market, maybe you should steer clear of folks that pretty clearly have little to no understanding of adaptation or where the market is headed.

Filed Under: justin connolly, password sharing, reed hastings, streaming, tom rutledge
Companies: charter, disney, hbo, netflix

Epic Sues 14 Year Old It Accuses Of Cheating In Videogames After He Counternotices a DMCA On His YouTube Video

from the what-a-time-to-be-alive dept

We called it. When Blizzard decided several years ago to try to twist copyright law into one hell of a pretzel in the name of going after video game cheaters, we said it was going to open the the door to other developers and publishers abusing the law in the same way. Blizzard's theory is that using a cheat in its games, particularly in its multiplayer games, was a violation of the EULA and created a copyright violation when the cheater continued to play the game he or she only "licensed." A deep dive into the actual substance of the copyright claims reveals them to be laughable, except Blizzard is rarely joined in court by its defendants, so no challenge to its pretzel-theory of copyright is ever put forward. Shortly after all of this, Riot Games joined in on this fun, deciding to apply the well-salted pretzel copyright logic to groups making cheats for League of Legends.

And, since it's not a real party until you have a third, now Epic Games is getting in on the action. And Epic went big for its first go around, deciding to actually sue a fourteen year old child who didn't make a cheat for Epic's Fortnite, but simply used a cheat. The fourteen year old was swept up in lawsuits filed against several cheaters for copyright infringement and, by all accounts, this fourteen year old was something of a pain in the ass for Epic.

One of the accused is a young man, who was banned at least 14 times since he started playing. Every time Epic took action, he simply created new accounts under false names and continued to play and cheat at Fortnite. What Epic Games probably didn’t know is that the cheater in question is a minor. The company likely obtained his name via YouTube or elsewhere, without knowing his real age.

This is the danger of suing end users using illicit cheats rather than going after the groups and sites that make those cheats available: kids play games. Kids also, apparently, agree to the very EULA that Epic is asserting triggers copyright infringement through the use of the cheat. Kids also occasionally have awesome moms, who angrily inform the court of all the reasons that this copyright suit is bullshit. The whole letter from the fourteen year old's mother is worth a read, but here are the most relevant portions.

Please note parental consent was not issued to [my son] to play this free game produced by Epic Games, INC,” the mother writes in her letter.

Epic claims that cheaters cause the company to lose money, but the mother doesn’t buy this since it’s a free game. Instead, she believes that the company is trying to blame her son for its failure to curb cheaters.

“It is my belief that due to their lack of ability to curve cheat codes and others from modifying their game, they are using a 14-year-old child as a scape goat to make an example of him.”

On top of all of this, a lawsuit against a fourteen year old simply for using a cheat for a video game is a public relations nightmare. On the other hand, Epic is in a horrible position. It would look odd to simply drop the suit against the fourteen year old because he's fourteen and still pursue the suits against the non-minor parties. Either what was done was either copyright infringement or it wasn't (it wasn't, but that's besides the point). The whole thing just looks... petty.

Meanwhile, as pointed out first by Torrentfreak, Epic has responded to the Mom's letter, which you can read here. The key argument that Epic makes is that it did not violate the law against naming a minor because it didn't know the kid was only 14 -- but then says that the mother's letter waived the teen's privacy anyway -- and thus asks the court for guidance on whether to ask the court to seal the information (which is already widely distributed) or not.

We did not violate Rule 5.2(a) or Local Civil Rule 17.2 because we did not know when we filed the papers that Defendant was a minor. Although there is an argument that by submitting the Letter to the Court containing Defendant's name and address, Defendant's mother waived this protection.... we plan to include only Defendant's initials or redact his name entirely in all future filings with the Court, including this letter.

This letter is to request the Court's guidance on whether the Court would like us to file a motion to seal the papers currently on the docekt that include Defendant's full name, re-file versions of those papers with Defendant's name redacted, or take any other remedial action.

Of course, another option would be not to abuse copyright law this way. Then Epic wouldn't have this problem.

Filed Under: cheats, copyright, free to play, streaming, teenagers, video games, videos
Companies: epic

NFL Expands Streaming Even Further With New Deal With Verizon, Which Will Make Mobile Streaming Non-Exclusive

from the stream-dream dept

Long-time readers of Techdirt will know that for as long as I've written here, I've screamed for professional and college sports leagues to offer better streaming options. It has never made a lick of sense to me that an industry so reliant on eyeballs and advertising revenue would want to limit either by keeping people from watching their games. While we're not where I'd like to be, much has changed in the intervening years. Streaming from pro sports leagues has advanced considerably, both in terms of quality and availability. And, perhaps more importantly, this march has only gone in the direction of more and better streaming options.

A march that continues into the present, in fact, as the NFL appears to be on the verge of inking a new streaming deal with Verizon that is just as important for what it does not include as what it does. We'll start with what Verizon gets from the deal, which is an end to the hilarious limit on screen size for the NFL streaming product.

Verizon and the National Football League are in talks to sign another streaming rights deal. According to a Bloomberg report, the wireless provider and the NFL are close to finalizing a new deal that would let Verizon stream games to Internet-connected TVs, tablets, and phones. Verizon's previous deal only allowed it to stream games to devices with screens that are 7-inches or smaller, so the new deal would open up NFL games to Verizon customers who primarily consume TV content on smart TVs, tablets, and other large devices.

This tells us a number of things. First, it tells us that Verizon is betting relatively small phones aren't the only devices that NFL fans want to watch NFL games on. With the explosion of Smart TVs and mobile tablets with 4G connections, fans have never been more ready to stream an NFL game from so many places, whether it's on the go in transit or in front of a computer screen or tablet at home. Likewise, these deal terms tell us that the NFL too sees value in expanding streaming generally (more on that in a minute). No longer attempting to limit this deal specifically to smartphones, the NFL is knocking over the dam keeping streaming at bay. This, in case it wasn't obvious, should be shiver-inducing for terrestrial and cable TV networks that used to be the dominant players for sports broadcasts.

But what's not in the Verizon deal is what demonstrates just how big an opportunity the NFL sees in streaming.

According to people familiar with the matter, Verizon would also lose exclusive rights to air games on mobile devices as part of the deal. That means that while Verizon customers would have more device options for watching football, it may not be the only one to stream NFL games. Other wireless providers or streaming TV providers, such as Sling TV or DirecTV Now, may be able to strike their own deals with the NFL and provide streamed games to their subscribers through their own apps.

That's a big deal, particularly for a league that has operated with exclusivity deals essentially as a business mantra. Born of the era of network television, the NFL has long maintained these types of close broadcast partnerships, but now that is slipping away when it comes to streaming. And ultimately that's the only move that makes sense, as eyeballs and advertising revenue will be spread far and wide through the NFL's own network, making the real estate for ads on its broadcasts all the more valuable.

Streaming keeps expanding in pro sports. It's a great thing for everyone other than cable TV.

Filed Under: football, sports, streaming
Companies: nfl, verizon

Court To Guy Who Sued News Stations Over His Facebook Live Video: Pay Their Legal Fees... And Maybe Sue Your Lawyers

from the eyebrows-raised dept

If the name Kali Kanongataa doesn't ring a bell, he was the man who sued roughly all of the news for copyright infringement earlier this year. The whole episode stemmed from Kanongataa having put the birth of his child up on Facebook through the site's live streaming function in 2016. Many, many news organizations used snippets of the video in their reporting on the viral nature of the video, which had been viewed over 100,000 times. Kanongataa ultimately lost those suits on obvious Fair Use grounds and the various news organizations subsequently petitioned to be awarded attorney's fees, which the court ultimately granted.

Well, Kanongataa has since petitioned the court to vacate or reduce those attorney's fees awards on two grounds. First, Kanongataa claims his financial situation is such that these awards would bankrupt him. As the court notes however, denying the request, Kanongataa only claimed this and failed to provide any sort of evidence of his financial situation.

The difficulty here, however, is that the plaintiff has submitted no evidence at all as to his financial circumstances only an unsworn statement in a memorandum by his lawyer, which does not cut it. As Judge Chin illustrated in the Muller case, reductions in fee awards based on an unsuccessful party's limited means typically, or at least often, are made in response to evidence rather than airy claims.  And this is not unique to fees under the Copyright Act. A party resisting an award of costs under Rule 54 on the basis of inability to pay, for example, bears the burden of proving the extent of its financial resources.

While Kanongataa's subsequent claim that NBC specifically inflated the amount of time billed for its defense was also denied, the real gem in the court's written response is in a later portion on the matter of Kanongataa's financial situation. Where the court again highlights that Kanongataa submitted absolutely zero evidence for his financial situation, the court footnotes the following:

The Court expresses no view on whether and to what extent plaintiff may have recourse against his attorney for the attorneys' fees awarded here in View of any attorney advice to pursue this case and the failure to submit evidence of plaintiff's financial condition.

The court can preface this footnote any way it wants, but this sure reads like a heavy-handed hint to Kanongataa that he may want to look into recouping costs through his attorney for even bringing this case before the court in the first place, never mind failing to properly advise him on his claims of financial strife. This pretty clearly reads like a court that knows this is a case that never should have made it past the idea stage in Kanongataa's head, with clear implications that his attorney should have advised him against, or refused to even assist him with, putting any of this in motion.

One wonders exactly what sort of faces Kanongataa's attorney made upon reading this.

Filed Under: attorneys' fees, birth, copyright, facebook live, fair use, kali kanongataa, streaming
Companies: facebook

As 'Star Trek: Discovery' Shows, The Streaming Exclusivity Wars Risk Driving Users Back To Piracy

from the full-circle dept

On one hand, the growing number of streaming services has been a boon for users looking for a less expensive, more flexible alternative to the bloated cable bundle. On the flip side, as a growing number of streaming services emerge and broadcasters begin launching their own services to bypass the middleman (Amazon, Apple, Netflix), we're seeing a rush toward more and more exclusive content deals. Forcing the consumer to hunt and peck through an ocean of ever-shifting licensing windows is already confusing, but siloing content across numerous, cumulatively-pricey services also risks driving consumers back to piracy.

Case in point: CBS recently launched its own streaming platform: CBS All Access. The service, which costs $6/month with ads and $10/month without, provides access to CBS' full roster of shows, but saw fairly tepid growth initially. But CBS recently announced that the new Trek series, "Star Trek: Discovery" will be exclusively available early to members of the service moving forward. This move did, rather unsurprisingly, result in a single day sign up record for the service, at least according to CBS:

"Tonight’s premiere of Star Trek: Discovery on CBS All Access drove a record number of single day signups at CBS’ digital streaming subscription service. No specific numbers were reported, but the network claims today’s stats outstrip the previous record spurred by the 2017 Grammy Awards in February."

And while that's all well and good for CBS, many consumers already subscribe to numerous streaming platforms, and may find shelling out another $6 to $10 a month just to catch one show a poor value proposition. As a result, fairly non-surprisingly, the new Trek series wound up being heavily pirated on BitTorrent networks (and that was with the first two episodes being aired on broadcast before the real exclusivity period kicks in):

"While the premiere of Discovery was broadcast on CBS' free over-the-air network, later episodes in the first season will be offered exclusively on CBS' streaming video service. CBS hopes this will help the network build CBS All Access into a top-tier streaming service. But there's a risk that it will simply encourage more people to pirate CBS' flagship show—especially since some users who signed up for the service have been reporting reliability problems on social media."

Over time, CBS may feel it makes sense to pull all of its content and programs off of widely available existing services and central repositories, locking them behind their own exclusivity paywall. That's effectively what Disney just announced; the company will be pulling all of its content from Netflix so it can offer Pixar, Star Wars and other popular titles exclusively through its own platform. Comcast NBC Universal similarly decided to pull all NBC content from Netflix to house it exclusively on Comcast owned Hulu. Begun, the streaming exclusivity wars have.

Many executives will proudly believe that this kind of direct to consumer offering only makes sense. And for outfits like ESPN that were blindsided by cord cutting the logic makes sense to some degree. But in forcing consumers to sign up to too many disparate services (at $6 to $20 each) just to get the content they're looking for, there's a real risk that millions of consumers will once again find piracy the simpler, less expensive option. A shame after the better part of a decade it took to drive users to these alternative, "legitimate" options.

Many broadcast executives are the type to subsequently learn few if any any lessons from this likely spike in piracy, and will likely lament how they "gave consumers what they wanted and they still pirated content anyway." To be clear the rise in streaming alternatives is a good thing, but the same hard lessons being learned by the legacy cable sector still apply here: users are looking for simplicity and value, and by forcing users to sign up to more than a dozen fractured services just to get the content they want, the industry risks providing neither.

Filed Under: copyright, exclusivity, piracy, silos, star trek, streaming
Companies: cbs

Music Industry Is Painting A Target On YouTube Ripping Sites, Despite Their Many Non-Infringing Uses

from the targeting-tools-instead-of-infringement dept

Concentrated attacks on technology tools that can sometimes, but not always, be used for nefarious purposes have quite a long history, from Google and Wikipedia, to suing online sites like Craigslist over how users use the service. Even torrent technology itself, having become a four-letter-word that the content industry has managed to tether to copyright infringement, is nothing more than a tool with plenty of legitimate uses.

Well, it appears that the latest target in the music industry's crosshairs are sites that rip YouTube videos into MP3 format.

Last week the major record labels managed to take out YouTube-MP3, the largest ripping site of all. Still, there are many like it that continue business as usual. For many music industry insiders, who see streamripping as one of the largest piracy threats, this is a constant source of frustration.

In the UK, music industry group BPI worked hard to tackle the issue proactively. Last year the organization already signed an agreement with YouTube-MP3 to block UK traffic. This limited the availability of the site locally, but the group believes that YouTube itself should take responsibility as well.

The crux of the plan, according to industry insiders, appears to be to get YouTube involved to block these sites from ripping its content into audio format. Between complaining that YouTube hasn't threatened enough legal action of its own and some rather silly complaints revolving around Google "steering" traffic to ripping sites via autocomplete on Google searches of all things, something of a full court press appears to be on. And, in one sense, it's understandable. Music groups that allow their music to be on YouTube look for the advertising revenue that comes along with it. One imagines that running a video through these ripping sites doesn't trigger that same ad revenue, otherwise nobody would be complaining.

But here's the thing: there are a ton of legitimate uses outside of the music business to use these sites. I use them all the time. I primarily use them for videos that are essentially speech-based content so I can listen to them on the go. History lectures, public debates, reviews: they're all on YouTube, they're all perfectly listenable in audio format, and none of the makers of that content are shouting about YouTube MP3 rips.

So what we're left with again is the content industries attacking a tool with legitimate uses simply because some percentage of the public uses it in a way they don't like.

Filed Under: copyright, ripping, streaming
Companies: bpi, youtube

The Crackdown On Torrent Sites Has Produced Many More Moles To Whac

from the getting-creative dept

If the ongoing battle between copyright infringers and copyright holders could be described in any simple term, that term would have to be whac-a-mole. Since the early days of piracy on the internet, the copyright industries have used their legal mallets to smack down any site or service whose head managed to rise out of obscurity. Napster was pushed into irrelevance, as were other similar apps. Then websites that hosted infringing files were slammed. At present, we are in the midst of a crackdown on torrent sites, with the copyright industries blaming them for widespread infringement.

However, those who are dedicated to sharing content illicitly are indeed dedicated. And so the game will continue into avenues of piracy that are fairly creative.

As crackdown on torrent sites continues around the world, people who are pirating TV shows and movies are having to get a little more creative. Cloud storage services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Kim Dotcom's Mega are some of the popular ones that are being used to distribute copyrighted content, according to DMCA takedown requests reviewed by Gadgets 360.

Google Drive seems most popular among such users, with nearly five thousand DMCA takedown requests filed by Hollywood studios and other copyright holders just last month. Each DMCA requests had listed a few hundred Google Drive links that the content owners wanted pulled.

But what's notable about many of these DMCA takedown requests is that they target Google Drive links that don't actually host any content themselves, but instead have embedded YouTube videos within them. YouTube has long been accused of hosting copyright infringing content, but few people consider it a serious vector for pirating movies or television shows. That's because YouTube cracks down on piracy itself, and it is easily searchable, meaning that copyright holders can find their content and send takedown requests. Most infringing content is taken down quickly because of this, so what would be the point of these embedded videos?

It turns out that the pirates found a simple workaround - the videos are simply uploaded as unlisted, so they don't turn up in search results. The links to these videos are then shared as Google Drive links through discussion forums and other channels so it's difficult for the content owners to find the videos and get them taken down.

Popular video sites YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion are also being abused by distributing and hosting illicit content, DMCA takedown requests reveal, but the volume of such requests again implies that they are not being as widely used. Some pirates, getting creative, also turned to another streaming venue which is not used as widely - porn sites. For example, last year, news outlets reported an instance where all the songs of Kanye West's The Life of Pablo album were uploaded as a video to the popular website PornHub. You can still find a number of movies on the site, and oddly enough, also things like game trailers and music videos that could safely be posted on other sites as well.

While nobody would want to cheer this sort of infringement on, there is a certain aspect of creativity to it. That creativity nicely demonstrates the axiom: the internet is designed to route around obstructions. So too, it seems, are the communities dedicated to sharing copyrighted content. It seems that this war on piracy is whac-a-mole by nature, but it's actually worse than that.

What if the moles were hydras and every time you hit one on the head, two or more heads sprouted out as a result? Because it should be noted that the above strategy using Google Drive and YouTube to distribute infringing content isn't the only creative strategy that's sprouted out of the crackdown on torrent sites.

The most unusual service that is being abused for distributing content that we came across is My Maps. It's a feature Google introduced in 2007 to enable users to create custom maps. Anyone can visit the My Maps website, and create a custom map by pointing to a location on the map, adding a title, and filling up a description box. Google doesn't verify what kind of information users are sharing in description, so you can again easily share links to unlisted YouTube streams, or Google Drive files to download. What this means is that people can then share locations on maps, which lead to the pirated movies.

While Google's services are only the most abused of many for this sort of thing, you can already hear the content industries warming up their voices to sing a tune of how Evil Google is the pirate's tool of choice for copyright infringement. It's worth noting that all of this, however, has emerged despite Google's efforts at complying with copyright laws. It's also emerged as a result of this ongoing arms race waged primarily by the content industries, who could have expended this effort in figuring out new business models on which to make money from their content. Instead, we can mark time in the modern era by what the "piracy threat vector" du jour is. It seems tomorrow it may become Google Drive. Or My Maps. More years on it will be something we haven't even thought of yet.

Them moles keep coming, after all.

Filed Under: cloud, copyright, google drive, hosting sites, piracy, streaming, torrent sites