Entertainment industry fails to grasp downloaders' needs

Analysis: Prefers to milk the diminishing masses instead.

The media Mafiaa has seemingly missed the boat with its latest attempt to curb distribution of TV shows across the Internet.

According to Torrentfreak, the finale of Lost broke previous Bittorrent download records despite being available in 59 countries within 48 hours of initial airplay. This lays to waste one of the points put forward by downloaders to justify hitting alternative sources to acquire television shows.

Assuming the site, which failed to disclose how it reached the figure of 900,000 downloads over a 20 hour period, is not embellishing its figures, it paints an impressive account of Bittorrent as a content distribution network. It also shows that the media firms should reconsider what it is that leads users to spend time and money to download content.

However the figures could merely serve to affirm the blinkered view of media executives who think of downloaders as punks and nothing more. They don't consider that those who download shows go to far greater trouble than those who prefer to slump in front of the telly and channel surf once the adverts are on. Downloaders are people who go out of their way to watch shows, that is, to get what the media cartels want to sell and who, in any other industry would be treated as the most loyal customers. Think about it.

So if it isn't the lag in global transmission of TV shows that motivates downloaders, what causes people to hit Bittorrent and Usenet servers to acquire the shows? Simply, downloading TV shows offers a better playback experience, and it isn't just due to the lack of advertising breaks.

Having adverts in a show isn't the problem. When tastefully done, such as on Hulu, the majority of viewers are perfectly willing to have a couple of minutes per half hour devoted to adverts, particularly if they are entertaining. No, the problem is something far more fundamental - sound and picture quality.

With high definition televisions almost reaching ubiquity, having to pay a considerable extra fee just to see a high quality version of a show is not on. At this stage of maturity, the term 'high definition' should be resigned to the dustbin, with the resolutions of 720p and 1080p deemed as standard. But of course that won't allow Sky and Virgin to milk consumers for every last penny.

Blaming show producers and channels isn't completely fair either. One doubts that a TV producer who actually cares about the viewers' experience can bear to stand for the levels of stream compression that television channels are forced to use. Compression occurs because existing delivery systems such as Sky charge channels on the amount of bandwidth a stream consumes, much like how Internet service providers charge for bandwidth to servers. For that reason channels have to compress video and audio in order to keep costs manageable.