More about telly
Why don't people watch TV properly any more?
I was chatting in the office about Lost, the American drama serial currently being shown in the UK on Channel 4. One of my work mates had just bought the whole first season on Region 1 DVD, and another guy had downloaded the entire series off the internet.
So, basically, we couldn't actually talk about the program at all. One of us had watched the whole thing already, the other one hadn't started yet, and I was in the middle having watched the episodes shown so far on Channel 4. The nature of the programme (with it's slow-build secrets and plot twists that ruin the show if you find out too soon) meant that our conversation mainly consisted of people sticking their fingers in their ears and going "laalaalaalaalaalaalaa".
I tried to explain to them that a lot of the pleasure of a TV series like Lost is, well, lost if you don't watch it slowly, at a pace dictated by the broadcaster. I don't watch much TV, but the programmes I do watch I like to share with someone else. I live alone, so normally it consists of texting mates who are watching to with pithy comments during the show. As a kid one of the things I used to love doing with my Dad was sitting down in front of a bad sci-fi show and joyously ripping the plot to pieces. At the weekend I spent a pleasurable few hours watching The Ultimate Film list with Jane. It was a repeat, but discussing the shortlisted movies with another film fan made it a whole new experience.
The point is that TV programmes are best experienced communally, but the trouble is we live in a time-shifted world where broadcast television has become an anachronism. Even I often end up watching Lost about 5 minutes behind everyone else because I missed the start, and rely on Sky Plus to catch the beginning for me.
Everyone wants to do things when they get the time, not when the broadcasters want us to watch. As a consequence we've losing out on that great social bonding exercise of "talking about the telly around the water cooler", which in turn was a replacement for the lost art of "talking about the village tart while at the well".
With DVDs, thousands of satellite channels, the internet, digital recording and so forth, everyone's started making their own entertainment, when they want it, how they want it. It makes me nostalgic for the Golden Age of Television when half the population of the UK sat down to find out Who Shot JR, and VCRs were the size of trucks and only programmable by NASA engineers.
Eee... we didn't have any of this "making your own entertainment" in my day, we watched television!
I was chatting in the office about Lost, the American drama serial currently being shown in the UK on Channel 4. One of my work mates had just bought the whole first season on Region 1 DVD, and another guy had downloaded the entire series off the internet.
So, basically, we couldn't actually talk about the program at all. One of us had watched the whole thing already, the other one hadn't started yet, and I was in the middle having watched the episodes shown so far on Channel 4. The nature of the programme (with it's slow-build secrets and plot twists that ruin the show if you find out too soon) meant that our conversation mainly consisted of people sticking their fingers in their ears and going "laalaalaalaalaalaalaa".
I tried to explain to them that a lot of the pleasure of a TV series like Lost is, well, lost if you don't watch it slowly, at a pace dictated by the broadcaster. I don't watch much TV, but the programmes I do watch I like to share with someone else. I live alone, so normally it consists of texting mates who are watching to with pithy comments during the show. As a kid one of the things I used to love doing with my Dad was sitting down in front of a bad sci-fi show and joyously ripping the plot to pieces. At the weekend I spent a pleasurable few hours watching The Ultimate Film list with Jane. It was a repeat, but discussing the shortlisted movies with another film fan made it a whole new experience.
The point is that TV programmes are best experienced communally, but the trouble is we live in a time-shifted world where broadcast television has become an anachronism. Even I often end up watching Lost about 5 minutes behind everyone else because I missed the start, and rely on Sky Plus to catch the beginning for me.
Everyone wants to do things when they get the time, not when the broadcasters want us to watch. As a consequence we've losing out on that great social bonding exercise of "talking about the telly around the water cooler", which in turn was a replacement for the lost art of "talking about the village tart while at the well".
With DVDs, thousands of satellite channels, the internet, digital recording and so forth, everyone's started making their own entertainment, when they want it, how they want it. It makes me nostalgic for the Golden Age of Television when half the population of the UK sat down to find out Who Shot JR, and VCRs were the size of trucks and only programmable by NASA engineers.
Eee... we didn't have any of this "making your own entertainment" in my day, we watched television!
See the thing is people like me are still going to be able to enjoy it on a weekly basis as the broadcasters intended, as the second series starts in the States on 21st September - I'm guessing it'll take about an hour or so to appear on Limewire.
So anyway, in a few weeks the will be lots of very smug people jumping and dancing around all the luddite series oners, singing, "I know what's in the hatch! I know what's in the hatch!!!"
The hatch???
Confused...
/me smugly waiting for a smack...
WRT "Lost", I'd rather watch the alternative reality version where a plane full of ugly people crash, eat each other in one blood laden episode, and don't spend five seasons discovering thei "backstories" through laboured, psychobabble laden flashbacks, where "life changing moments" define their "story arcs" in sleep inducing "expository" scenarios. But that's just me.
It's her father!!! Possessed by a demonic spirit called Bob - It's obvious! Duh... Can't you work it out. The dancin' dwarf, it's erm.. er.. symbolism or summinc'...dffdjnkknjb
Hmm, my verification word for this entry is "mmmcrap", who do I complain to at Blogger?
as an obsessive film collector im never happy unless i have watched -real time- and later bought the real thing im afraid.
its like why spend a fortune on hi-fi then play inferior mp3's through it....another argument perhaps?
hanna x
I download loads of US shows, and at the moment am loving the new season of Stargate Atlantis, SG1 and Battlestar Galactica. I will still watch thme when they air on Sky on the big telly, but I want to see them before I get spoilered about what's going on.
But apart from big events, which I think most people would admit Dr Who, was there is very little communality in entertainment now.
I found when I read the radio times, because they do quick jokey trailers for the soaps I could talk about East Enders and Corrie fairly easily without having to watch the programme.
Now if only I could find someone to talk about The Archers with that would be cool.
ulmhp - the sound you make when you realise absolutely no one at worked watched that really good film last night.
You're right to point out the damage of file sharing and so forth... Give it a few years and I'm sure Apple will have paid-for television downloads iTunes style, although whether they'll be able to get away with calling the service ITV is anyone's guess.
As an example the new Battlestar Galactica.
Was first shown here as Sky helped fund it.
Lots of yanks downloaded it, BUT still watched it when it aires.
Result was a huge buzz and the show had incredible viewing figures for a cable sci-fi show.
Sky get my subscription whether I download or not. And being able to watch these shows on a Playstation Portable is just a very handy way of passing the commute.
Although I completely agree with them, let's face it the arguments in favour of filesharing are just thinly vieled attempts to justify our crimes and ease our guilty consciences.
We need to stop pretending and be proud of our sins!
hanna x
The idiot box has destroyed many things in society, particularly community action and activities.
(right I crawl back under my stone, utopian liberal I am).
A fair point, but misleading because the example only makes sense if you assume that absolutely everyone that downloads the book is a lousy thief and has no intention of ever buying it in any form printed or otherwise. There is also likely to be a number of people that even if they don't buy the book, may be so impressed that they check out that author's other books. Aditionally, a small proportion may already own the book in paper form, but want to be able to read it on their laptop or PDA - why should they have to pay for it all over again, especially in a format that has absolutely no manufacturing costs?
There are plenty of examples of authors giving away their entire books in electronic form both as a promotional tool for selling the book in printed form and as an accompaniment to the printed version. The best example of this is Lawrence Lessig's 'Free Culture' available from www.lessig.org. In fact, the arguments in this book are highly relevant to this topic and most of my opinions here are completely ripped off (pun not intended). How's that for meme marketing, Becky? ;)
Although I don't go along with the argument that filesharing is no different to home taping or that it doesn't have any negative effect on sales, I think people are getting overly paranoid about filesharing. Short of a *major* crackdown on piracy (some kind of uncrackable digital rights management, perhaps massive taxation on any form of recordable media and maybe even the death sentence for anyone caught using Limewire or Bittorrent), some piracy is inevitable when the tools of production are so cheap that even us lowly consumers can afford them and it is easier to copy something than to walk down the shops and splash out a tenner. The trick for the culture industry in persuading us to part with our cash, is to make it easier to take the honest route. Part of this involves changing the way things are sold and legally protected. It is now arguably easier to find the music you want on iTunes than on Bittorrent or Limewire unless you're searching for something popular. Likewise, Creative Commons has given all sorts of artists an easy legal framework to give up *some* of their rights for promotional and other purposes. As more people use legal download sites, less people will be sharing their music on Limewire et al as it is DRM protected (yes there are all sorts of ways to get round that, but the point is it is a pain in the arse). The amount of Creative Commons and Open Source media will swamp illegally shared commercial material. Result: it will be even more of a pain in the arse to find what you want, more people will turn to legal sites and less people will be sharing and so on.
My point is in time there will be legal sites for film and television too. The free lunch will not last for ever and there is no need for the creatives amongst us to panic, so get fat whilst you can.
END OF RANT.
(PS sorry for the length Becky - please delete it if it peeves you off)
The "evils" of downloading are more to do with media owners' inability to come up with creative solutions for dealing with the attributes of digital networks that make it so easy to digitise and share all types of content.
Marcia is completely right that if people find an easy way to buy content digitally at a fair rate and in a way that feels like it allows "fair use" (and I'm sorry, iTunes, no matter how lovely it is, has DRM that is *not* fair to the purchaser), then people will generally use that method to buy their content.
Even the notion that downloading is inherently bad and damages creators' access to their dues is not totally true. As this study and many more have shown, downloaders can also lead to people becoming more prolific paying consumers.
To do that, I'm afraid that record companies and other media owners are going to have to stop behaving like huge, evil, block-voting dinosaurs who care as little for artists' rights as they do consumers and begin instead to embrace the agile and different distributive qualities of the Internet. I fear that is beyond the current generation of music and media executives.
This is why my band has just re-released all our released music to date for a nominal fee on a download site that contains no DRM. If someone buys a track and wants to share it, we're happy for that to happen as it increases our listener base - in a real sense, it's free marketing, something that usually costs a fortune in the exploitative record industry. It's also why our record label (one of the good ones) has a page full of totally free downloads of their bands and also tracks donated by bands from other labels.
In summary, now that I've bored you to death, blandly condemning downloading using an old fashioned pre-digital copyright argument doesn't work. Not for consumers, not for artists.
There. And I didn't even mention Creative Commons or "the long tail".
Now personally I do like to catch TV on DVD. Sometimes it is nice to revisit a series that you loved, or in a few cases it is nice to catch missed episodes. I do timeshift from time to time, but not on a regular basis. Maybe if I had TiVo, but I don't need an excuse to watch more TV.
As for downloading files - personally I figure if you are willing to watch a TV show you should be willing to at least pay to rent the DVD. The ONLY possible exception to this is if you missed the most recent episode of a show, but that is a VERY thin excuse for downloading TV (and no excuse for a movie).
Music is tougher to deal with, and 30 second clips are usually not enough to decide if you want a song. Still though, I feel you should pay for anything you want to keep. Every now and then some bloggers will put up a song that I may download and listen to. So far I have found nothing that I want to keep so I just kill the file.
The only even close to legitimate excuse I have heard for music downloads is back catalog that is no longer available for purchase in any form. Slim, and I would think with places like iTunes that back catalog is going to become more and more available cutting even this excuse off.
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