BANFF, Alta. - From the creators of prime-time hits to behind-the-scenes executives attending this year's Banff World Television Festival, it was an ongoing concern as deals were made and success stories were celebrated: how to protect TV content from being pirated amid rapidly changing viewing habits.
"The collective community over the glowing campfire of TV is gone," John Saade, senior vice-president of ABC Entertainment, said Wednesday, the final day of the Banff festival.
Audiences now want to access shows whenever and wherever they want, Saade said. That often means surfing onto YouTube.com to watch pirated clips of shows, or even entire episodes of their favourites.
"It's scary," Doug Ellin, the creator of the HBO hit series "Entourage," said in an interview at the festival earlier this week. "You spend a lot of money producing these shows and producing content and if people are stealing the content, you're not going to be able to produce it for much longer."
Like the music business before it, the television industry is grappling with what to do about piracy. Not only that, it's trying to determine how to gauge viewers - and thereby attract advertisers - when so many people are no longer watching TV the old-fashioned way and traditional ratings measurements are being viewed with skepticism.
"The networks and advertisers are really struggling right now and trying to figure out how to measure ratings because clearly just measuring Nielsen boxes doesn't work anymore - people are watching TV in too many different ways," said the Ottawa-born Stephanie Savage, one of the co-creators of the hit show "Gossip Girl."
"They are watching it on PVR and playing it back when they want to see it, they're downloading shows from iTunes, they're watching shows streaming online, they're sharing shows with their friends, they're watching on iPods in subways - it's not as simple anymore."
In his book "The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Reinvented Capitalism," British author Matt Mason points out the allegations of piracy are as old as technology itself, adding it's actually a sign of innovation, not thievery.
"Some of America's greatest innovators were thought of as pirates," he writes. "When Thomas Edison invented the phonographic record player, musicians branded him a pirate out to steal their work and destroy the live music business, until a system was established so everyone could be paid royalties."
Edison, he points out, went on to invent filmmaking and demanded licensing fees from anyone making movies with his technology. This led to the creation of a band of filmmaking pirates, including William Fox - the founder of 20th Century Fox - who headed to the wild frontier of Hollywood in the early 1900s to become the movie moguls of their day.
Piracy is not going away, Saade said, adding that the television industry can adapt to rapidly changing viewing habits if it avoids making the colossal mistakes made by the music industry.
"What you have to do is make sure that you are ahead of the curve - making your content available at any time, at any place, for anyone who wants it, and you don't put so many restrictions in that you go the way of the music industry, which was basically criminalizing its own audience," he said.
Instead, networks and broadcasters have to give technologically savvy viewers what they want.
"So what you do in the digital space is ensure that if you want to see one of our shows, we're going to give you an extremely high-quality version of that show," he said.
"You may have to sacrifice about 30 seconds of commercials here and there, certainly not the kind of commercials you'd see on broadcast, but if you want to watch it on your iPod, if you want to watch it on your cellphone, your computer - we've got to make it available. That's the only way we can get ahead of pirating."
News from �The Canadian Press, 2008
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