The NBA is a great example of how individual consumers are not their customer. You want to pay money to watch NBA games, but you can't. The owners want money through ticket sales, so if you live in the "home market", you don't get to watch the game on TV. But, the owners also want money from TV deals. But they don't want your $20 to watch the game on TV, they want ABC's $3 billion (or whatever) for the right to charge you whatever ("watch these ads") to see the game. So there is no actual incentive to give you what you want; there is only incentive to sell games to networks at as high a price as possible. (Also, sell advertising, and modify the game's rules to ensure that there is extra advertising at the 7 minute and 3 minute mark.)
Basically, at one end of the equation is some dudes passing a ball around. At the other end of the equation, is you watching that. In the middle, of course, there are the middlemen, and they all want a huge cut for doing absolutely nothing. Anti-piracy legislation is all about protecting the middlemen who realize that they do nothing and they need the government to bail them out.
>Anti-piracy legislation is all about protecting the middlemen who realize that they do nothing and they need the government to bail them out.
Beautifully said. That, my fellow hackers, is copyright and anti-piracy legislation in a nutshell - to serve and protect that which provides no value at the cost of depriving everyone else of their rights.
To slightly derive from a well known quote[1] from Henry Ford: If people understood this simple fact about copyright, it would be dead and forgotten before tomorrow morning.
[1] "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
I paid NBA.com for their "broadband/league pass" package once. Never again.
Literally 50% of the games during the first and only week that I tried it were blacked out. I called them up and they refunded me immediately, they knew it was a crap deal.
Now I have resorted to using sites like chanfeed.com and myp2p.pe - the quality lags a bit, but I can get any and every game, for free, all on one screen. No blackouts, ever.
It's time for the NBA to get with the game.
Notice how I started out this comment by saying "I paid..."
and they all want a huge cut for doing absolutely nothing
That's silly. Acquisition and broadcast systems do not run themselves. I think the whole sports business model is exploitative and stupid, but hyperbole like the above doesn't help. Market segmentation is a time-honored business practice, but I get the sense that if the FTC forced the teams/broadcasters to adopt an open-access content model then people would be howling about government interference with private enterprise.
> You want to pay money to watch NBA games, but you can't.
This is what frustrates the shit out of me about EVERYTHING related to TV/Cable. I HAVE MONEY THAT I WANT TO GIVE YOU FOR A GREAT PRODUCT. I know I'm not the only one. WE have money we want to fork over, PLEASE take it. You know it just blows my mind. Everything I've ever heard about capitalism/business/economics/etc. that if there is demand, someone is supposed to step in and provide. Why is it taking SO long for this to happen in this particular space?
Slight rant, I know, but goddamn does it make my blood boil thinking about this stuff.
In the middle, of course, there are the middlemen, and they all want a huge cut for doing absolutely nothing.
Yes, because all of that cable and fiber that was run around the city so that you could watch "some dudes passing a ball around" while you are sitting at home didn't cost anything. Or the cameras that record it, or the directors that choose the best angles, or the commentators, etc...
This is a big game a chicken between MSG and Time Warner, and unfortunately the viewer is just an indirect participant. It happens all the time. It's not about middlemen... this is about content producers vs. content distributors. Earlier this year, there was a spat between Fox and DirecTV that got signed just before the deadline. Hell, there was/is a problem with the Indianapolis NBC affiliate and the local cable company.
I think you're pretty much spot-on here. The one thing I would add is that while everyone is talking about the cable/media companies' business models being obsolete, we could also make the same argument for the team owners. That is, when I have a 50" big screen and digital theater sound at home, and can buy a 6-pack of beer for $8 rather than a single beer, I'm much more likely to watch the game at home for (ostensibly) free, rather than pay $30 or more for a single ticket.
The atmosphere and ambiance of a live sporting event still trumps the home theater experience, but as technology improves, and ticket and concession prices rise, that gap narrows. The reflexive response to protecting ticket revenue since broadcasts of sporting events began has been the blackout. As technology improves, and technical know-how is more widely disseminated, blackouts are becoming less and less effective, as more and more people understand how to get around them.
>But they don't want your $20 to watch the game on TV, they want ABC's $3 billion (or whatever) for the right to charge you whatever ("watch these ads") to see the game.
I had to look this up, but it appears that the price per year for NBA television rights was well under $1 billion/year(http://www.insidehoops.com/nba-tv-contracts.shtml). From 2002 to 2007, TNT paid about 2.2 billion in total. ESPN/ABC paid around 2.4 billion for the same time period. Per year, that's around $300 million each. Even assuming a 50% increase in cost, that comes out to around $450 million/year per network for 2012.
The biggest irony is that the NBA could be making an absolutely insane amount of money selling directly to the consumer. At $30 per month for a 6 month season, all they need to do is sell around 5 million total subscriptions to equal the net income from the television contracts. I'm positive that the NBA could get those kinds of numbers, especially with European or Chinese basketball fans who might not be able to see the games any other way.
All the NBA needs to do is actually make the service work, and provide the games that are already being televised.
As a non-cable subscriber and a big NBA fan, I find blackouts unbelievably frustrating. There is simply no legal way to watch some live NBA games unless you pay for cable. I'm constantly having to route my NBA broadband league pass through a proxy to watch my home team, and the only workaround for nationally televised games is to pirate them from sites like sportlemon.tv.
It's a classic case of frustrating customer experiences pushing users to piracy. If the NBA provided a way for me to legally pay to watch every game over the internet, I would gladly do so. In order to legally do this I have to have both a cable or satellite service in addition to a league pass subscription.
I understand that a fair amount of revenue for the NBA is probably coming from the deals it made with TNT, EPSN, and Fox, but a viewer is a viewer, whether they're watching from the net or through traditional venues - why do they care, so long as their advertisers are getting enough eyeballs?
I understand that a fair amount of revenue for the NBA is probably coming from the deals it made with TNT, EPSN, and Fox, but a viewer is a viewer, whether they're watching from the net or through traditional venues - why do they care, so long as their advertisers are getting enough eyeballs?
Not "some" all of NBA's TV Revenues come from selling the rights to networks. The networks sell the ads, and they're the ones that care about eyeballs. So the networks care if you start streaming local market games and they're going to try to prevent that. If the NBA allowed you to get your local market games via streaming it would undercut the product they sell to the various networks which is their primary source of revenue.
I actually have more respect for people who pirate to get things for free than people who pirate and claim that they're only doing it because X condition isn't met. X could be that it's not in the format you want, that it's not at the price point you want, or any number of other things. The publishers business model is their business model, good or bad. Own up to your decision to pirate.
My guess is that they're trying to maximize "butts in seats" at the event itself. If people were given the option, they might choose to stay home and avoid the inevitable annoyances of crowded events (like, you know, other people), and that would cut down on revenue for the venue itself.
There is also the psychological effect of a large crowd in a venue showing enthusiasm for the sport. How much fun would a basketball game actually be if there were no crowd cheering and no people present? Athletes might live for the sport, but they get a boost from crowd enthusiasm. This follows on into the remote audience as well.
It would be an interesting (though costly) experiment to see just what happens, on many levels, if you do away with the crowds and just have teams playing in an empty venue, with only online and/or video spectators. I think most people would tune it out and stop watching completely, if not the first time, then soon after.
The best solution I have found is to use a non-US (UK, France, whatever) VPN service and sign up for the NBA International League Pass Broadband (http://ilp.nba.com/).
The International Pass has no blackouts and you can watch the All Star game, playoffs, and Finals. The US Broadband League Pass does not give you access to playoffs or the finals.
There's no question that Cablevision is acting like a bunch of jerks because they own the Knicks, Rangers and MSG. They have drastically increased their fees over the past decade like every other cable company has.
That said, Fred Wilson is not paying for MSG technically so it is piracy if he doesn't get it from the MSG network.
I've had to deal with many years of Cablevision fighting higher fees and blackouts from networks in which the fees are later passed onto the consumer. Frankly I have no sympathy.
A few people here seem to be positing that the point of local blackouts online is to increase attendance at games, but it's not. It's to maximize the value of the local TV rights deal, a twenty-year version of which recently netted the LA Lakers $5 billion: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/lakers-329235-billion-new...
Regional sports networks, especially those owned by local cable companies, love these deals because of the recurring revenue they get from people like me who would otherwise not have cable at all. Comcast Sportsnet in Philadelphia is the only local outlet for watching the Phillies, so I have Comcast cable.
Two options for getting around the MLB local area blackout regulations. Both require the MLB.tv subscription, which is $25 / month for high def. (BTW, if you haven't tried MLB.tv, it's really a great product. Many PS3/BlueRay type players have an app for it, too)
1) MLB.tv experimented with a local area only package here in San Diego last year. $20 / mo for just the Padres.
2) Rather than that, I simply used one of my VPS' in another region to create an SSH tunnel through which to route the MLB.tv signal. They use your IP, not your billing address, to determine access.
About a year or two ago, I still had cable (I don't anymore), and I had the premium package with all the movie channels. At the time, a new season of Entourage was starting and I wanted to catch my wife up on the previous season. This previous season was not available via HBO On-Demand, they were not showing any re-runs on HBO that I could find, and the DVD of this season was not available in stores yet. There was literally no way I could legally let my wife watch this content (even though I had watched it, legally, the previous year on our HBO subscription, and via on-demand).
So, I downloaded it. And I got caught (via a warning letter from our ISP). Shortly thereafter we canceled our cable subscription.
I cannot fathom why, as a company, you would make it so hard for someone who is willing to pay you for content to get it. I wouldn't have been happy about having to buy it on DVD since I already have a subscription to HBO (and in my humble opinion, their previous original content should be available via on-demand all the time, although I realize that's a pipe dream), but I would have. Instead, they alienated a customer and lost all my money. That was around two years ago, so at $15/mo. (not sure how much of that goes directly to HBO) $360 has now been lost by them/my cable company for that part of my subscription alone.
If they ever allow you to buy into HBO Go (or whatever their online streaming option is called) by itself without a cable subscription I would consider it, but as long as they are stuck in their old-school ways they can forget having me (or most of my friends) as customers.
I know this article isn't about HBO, but I just thought I would point out another example of the way that content producers continue to alienate the people who should matter most: the consumer.
HBO spends a lot of money on creating truly premium content. For that reason I would pay for HBO Go. But I can't because I refuse to pay for cable just to get HBO. What would I watch on cable? A bunch of crappy reality tv? No thanks, Netflix has more than enough content to keep me satisfied.
This is, like, the 4th Betabeat story I've seen that tried to spin a whole epic news event out of something as insignificant as a single Twitter message. It seems to be their M.O.
HN used to block bait sites like this with a much heavier hand.
Disagree. Their stories may suck in general, but I find this one highly relevant to the HN audience. This issue infuriates me as a consumer and a tech person.
As a non-sports fan, I find it depressing that it takes this level of stupidity to get the masses angry with the cable companies.
I voted with my wallet (the cable companies don't get a dime of my money) years ago. Perhaps this level of stupidity on the part of the broadcasters is what it will take to convince the average congressman that SOPA is wrong.
As a rational adult, I find the moral outrage expressed over GoDaddy's stance in regards to SOPA misplaced when one considers the willingness of so many people to write checks every month to the media companies who are behind it as part and parcel of their cable subscriptions.
It is an interesting question. For example: is it wrong to download MP3s of songs you already own on CD? I don't believe so, but I bet you the RIAA would consider it so, even though they got paid.
In this case, someone wanted to watch the Knicks. However, he had no way to do so, regardless of how much he paid Time Warner. TW didn't pay MSG, so TW doesn't have a right to show the game. NBA League pass doesn't cover home games, so that option was out too. The only way he could have watched the game legally was to either A) go to the game, or B) figure out some way to hook up a satellite dish with DirecTV (who I think does pay MSG rates for some tiers), or C) rent an apartment in a different cable company's market and hook up a Slingbox (it would have to be his Slingbox and cable sub, not a friends for it to be legit).
With the CD, you have a license to listen to the music. If you download MP3s of the music (assuming the source was identical to yours), all you have done is outsourced the conversion of the CD to MP3 format. The other person may not have the right to distribute those MP3s, but you should have the right to listen to them (however you obtain them).
(The RIAA has argued otherwise - that you just get the physical media with no rights, but I thought they were found to be wrong in court, but I can't remember the case)
>I don't believe so, but I bet you the RIAA would consider it so, even though they got paid.
If the RIAA had it their way, you'd probably be forced to pay every single time you play a track on your computer or hit the Copy command to put it on your PMP or phone.
The Daily Show and the Colbert Report somehow manage to get all my friends to watch every single night, commercials and all.
That's because they type www.thedailyshow.com and then they can instantly watch the entire week of episodes for free, with Comedy-Central's advertising revenue still intact. The way forward seems pretty clear to me.
That works for timely shows totally owned by the network that broadcasts them.
It falls down when there is more than one party involved - for example, shows that are destined for syndication or DVD sales.
One example of this is the SyFy channel - they've basically cancelled or let expire all the programs that were being produced by 3rd parties (Universal's "Stargate" franchise, for example) as they paid top dollar for first showing rights, but the 3rd party made all the rebroadcast, serialization, etc. profits.
See also how Netflix is starting to produce their own shows they can totally own and sell direct to customers.
The future has no middlemen, just people making unique products (art, video, web apps, software, etc.) or money of of standardized interchangeable services (distribution, hosting, connectivity, etc.).
>"Mr. Wilson was unintentionally giving ammunition to the media companies behind the draconian Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), legislation that Mr. Wilson has been fighting so hard against."
It's hard to see why this would be a big deal. Mr. Wilson has been giving money to the companies behind SOPA every month as a cable subscriber, and even more money by purchasing the NBA tier. Indeed, his financial support of Copyright Alliance member and a campaign contributor to SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith, Time Warner Cable, is significant.
If the game was on NBA League pass, why couldn't he have watched the Raptors (vistors) feed? Even though it was broadcast locally on MSG, couldn't he have viewed the visiting teams broadcast online? Or do they check your IP address/cable provider in order to see NBA League pass (and thus blackout local games)? What about routing the game though a VPN?
The only legal solutions I see would be: a) go to the game, or b) dump Time Warner and get a dish (not an easy prospect in NYC).
They decided not to air it for political reasons - Jeremy Clarkson was on the panel and they wanted to keep him off the air during a row about something offensive he had said on another show.
So I got a copy from an illegal source. I still do not see this as stealing as I had already paid for it (via the UK TV License.)
One of the big reasons you don't see overnight change/disruption in the cable media companies, is because they continue to sign multi-decade contracts...like this:
From[1]: But, um, how much are the Lakers – all by themselves – getting from Time Warner Cable for its new regional sports networks? $5 billion.
I don't think anyone was 'forced' to pirate. It's just one basketball game, I'm pretty sure he could have lived a fruitful and satisfying life without seeing it.
I don't understand these blackouts. I would think that televising an event will get people excited and make them want to buy tickets so they can see the action in person.
[+] [-] jrockway|14 years ago|reply
Basically, at one end of the equation is some dudes passing a ball around. At the other end of the equation, is you watching that. In the middle, of course, there are the middlemen, and they all want a huge cut for doing absolutely nothing. Anti-piracy legislation is all about protecting the middlemen who realize that they do nothing and they need the government to bail them out.
[+] [-] slowpoke|14 years ago|reply
Beautifully said. That, my fellow hackers, is copyright and anti-piracy legislation in a nutshell - to serve and protect that which provides no value at the cost of depriving everyone else of their rights.
To slightly derive from a well known quote[1] from Henry Ford: If people understood this simple fact about copyright, it would be dead and forgotten before tomorrow morning.
[1] "It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning."
[+] [-] GigabyteCoin|14 years ago|reply
I paid NBA.com for their "broadband/league pass" package once. Never again.
Literally 50% of the games during the first and only week that I tried it were blacked out. I called them up and they refunded me immediately, they knew it was a crap deal.
Now I have resorted to using sites like chanfeed.com and myp2p.pe - the quality lags a bit, but I can get any and every game, for free, all on one screen. No blackouts, ever.
It's time for the NBA to get with the game.
Notice how I started out this comment by saying "I paid..."
[+] [-] anigbrowl|14 years ago|reply
That's silly. Acquisition and broadcast systems do not run themselves. I think the whole sports business model is exploitative and stupid, but hyperbole like the above doesn't help. Market segmentation is a time-honored business practice, but I get the sense that if the FTC forced the teams/broadcasters to adopt an open-access content model then people would be howling about government interference with private enterprise.
[+] [-] 198d|14 years ago|reply
This is what frustrates the shit out of me about EVERYTHING related to TV/Cable. I HAVE MONEY THAT I WANT TO GIVE YOU FOR A GREAT PRODUCT. I know I'm not the only one. WE have money we want to fork over, PLEASE take it. You know it just blows my mind. Everything I've ever heard about capitalism/business/economics/etc. that if there is demand, someone is supposed to step in and provide. Why is it taking SO long for this to happen in this particular space?
Slight rant, I know, but goddamn does it make my blood boil thinking about this stuff.
[+] [-] mbreese|14 years ago|reply
Yes, because all of that cable and fiber that was run around the city so that you could watch "some dudes passing a ball around" while you are sitting at home didn't cost anything. Or the cameras that record it, or the directors that choose the best angles, or the commentators, etc...
This is a big game a chicken between MSG and Time Warner, and unfortunately the viewer is just an indirect participant. It happens all the time. It's not about middlemen... this is about content producers vs. content distributors. Earlier this year, there was a spat between Fox and DirecTV that got signed just before the deadline. Hell, there was/is a problem with the Indianapolis NBC affiliate and the local cable company.
[+] [-] jordan0day|14 years ago|reply
The atmosphere and ambiance of a live sporting event still trumps the home theater experience, but as technology improves, and ticket and concession prices rise, that gap narrows. The reflexive response to protecting ticket revenue since broadcasts of sporting events began has been the blackout. As technology improves, and technical know-how is more widely disseminated, blackouts are becoming less and less effective, as more and more people understand how to get around them.
[+] [-] cube13|14 years ago|reply
I had to look this up, but it appears that the price per year for NBA television rights was well under $1 billion/year(http://www.insidehoops.com/nba-tv-contracts.shtml). From 2002 to 2007, TNT paid about 2.2 billion in total. ESPN/ABC paid around 2.4 billion for the same time period. Per year, that's around $300 million each. Even assuming a 50% increase in cost, that comes out to around $450 million/year per network for 2012.
The biggest irony is that the NBA could be making an absolutely insane amount of money selling directly to the consumer. At $30 per month for a 6 month season, all they need to do is sell around 5 million total subscriptions to equal the net income from the television contracts. I'm positive that the NBA could get those kinds of numbers, especially with European or Chinese basketball fans who might not be able to see the games any other way.
All the NBA needs to do is actually make the service work, and provide the games that are already being televised.
[+] [-] ryanhuff|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r00fus|14 years ago|reply
Hey if it worked for the Financial Industry, then why not Big Media?
[+] [-] marknutter|14 years ago|reply
It's a classic case of frustrating customer experiences pushing users to piracy. If the NBA provided a way for me to legally pay to watch every game over the internet, I would gladly do so. In order to legally do this I have to have both a cable or satellite service in addition to a league pass subscription.
I understand that a fair amount of revenue for the NBA is probably coming from the deals it made with TNT, EPSN, and Fox, but a viewer is a viewer, whether they're watching from the net or through traditional venues - why do they care, so long as their advertisers are getting enough eyeballs?
[+] [-] mikeryan|14 years ago|reply
Not "some" all of NBA's TV Revenues come from selling the rights to networks. The networks sell the ads, and they're the ones that care about eyeballs. So the networks care if you start streaming local market games and they're going to try to prevent that. If the NBA allowed you to get your local market games via streaming it would undercut the product they sell to the various networks which is their primary source of revenue.
[+] [-] MatthewPhillips|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drivingmenuts|14 years ago|reply
There is also the psychological effect of a large crowd in a venue showing enthusiasm for the sport. How much fun would a basketball game actually be if there were no crowd cheering and no people present? Athletes might live for the sport, but they get a boost from crowd enthusiasm. This follows on into the remote audience as well.
It would be an interesting (though costly) experiment to see just what happens, on many levels, if you do away with the crowds and just have teams playing in an empty venue, with only online and/or video spectators. I think most people would tune it out and stop watching completely, if not the first time, then soon after.
[+] [-] mmorey|14 years ago|reply
The International Pass has no blackouts and you can watch the All Star game, playoffs, and Finals. The US Broadband League Pass does not give you access to playoffs or the finals.
[+] [-] technoslut|14 years ago|reply
That said, Fred Wilson is not paying for MSG technically so it is piracy if he doesn't get it from the MSG network.
I've had to deal with many years of Cablevision fighting higher fees and blackouts from networks in which the fees are later passed onto the consumer. Frankly I have no sympathy.
[+] [-] bproper|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdminhbg|14 years ago|reply
Regional sports networks, especially those owned by local cable companies, love these deals because of the recurring revenue they get from people like me who would otherwise not have cable at all. Comcast Sportsnet in Philadelphia is the only local outlet for watching the Phillies, so I have Comcast cable.
[+] [-] Killjoy|14 years ago|reply
1) MLB.tv experimented with a local area only package here in San Diego last year. $20 / mo for just the Padres. 2) Rather than that, I simply used one of my VPS' in another region to create an SSH tunnel through which to route the MLB.tv signal. They use your IP, not your billing address, to determine access.
[+] [-] silverlight|14 years ago|reply
So, I downloaded it. And I got caught (via a warning letter from our ISP). Shortly thereafter we canceled our cable subscription.
I cannot fathom why, as a company, you would make it so hard for someone who is willing to pay you for content to get it. I wouldn't have been happy about having to buy it on DVD since I already have a subscription to HBO (and in my humble opinion, their previous original content should be available via on-demand all the time, although I realize that's a pipe dream), but I would have. Instead, they alienated a customer and lost all my money. That was around two years ago, so at $15/mo. (not sure how much of that goes directly to HBO) $360 has now been lost by them/my cable company for that part of my subscription alone.
If they ever allow you to buy into HBO Go (or whatever their online streaming option is called) by itself without a cable subscription I would consider it, but as long as they are stuck in their old-school ways they can forget having me (or most of my friends) as customers.
I know this article isn't about HBO, but I just thought I would point out another example of the way that content producers continue to alienate the people who should matter most: the consumer.
[+] [-] smokinn|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|14 years ago|reply
HN used to block bait sites like this with a much heavier hand.
[+] [-] Bud|14 years ago|reply
Why do you find this insignificant?
[+] [-] illumin8|14 years ago|reply
I voted with my wallet (the cable companies don't get a dime of my money) years ago. Perhaps this level of stupidity on the part of the broadcasters is what it will take to convince the average congressman that SOPA is wrong.
[+] [-] brudgers|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RexRollman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbreese|14 years ago|reply
In this case, someone wanted to watch the Knicks. However, he had no way to do so, regardless of how much he paid Time Warner. TW didn't pay MSG, so TW doesn't have a right to show the game. NBA League pass doesn't cover home games, so that option was out too. The only way he could have watched the game legally was to either A) go to the game, or B) figure out some way to hook up a satellite dish with DirecTV (who I think does pay MSG rates for some tiers), or C) rent an apartment in a different cable company's market and hook up a Slingbox (it would have to be his Slingbox and cable sub, not a friends for it to be legit).
With the CD, you have a license to listen to the music. If you download MP3s of the music (assuming the source was identical to yours), all you have done is outsourced the conversion of the CD to MP3 format. The other person may not have the right to distribute those MP3s, but you should have the right to listen to them (however you obtain them).
(The RIAA has argued otherwise - that you just get the physical media with no rights, but I thought they were found to be wrong in court, but I can't remember the case)
[+] [-] slowpoke|14 years ago|reply
If the RIAA had it their way, you'd probably be forced to pay every single time you play a track on your computer or hit the Copy command to put it on your PMP or phone.
[+] [-] drivingmenuts|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pyre|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vectorpush|14 years ago|reply
That's because they type www.thedailyshow.com and then they can instantly watch the entire week of episodes for free, with Comedy-Central's advertising revenue still intact. The way forward seems pretty clear to me.
[+] [-] zdw|14 years ago|reply
It falls down when there is more than one party involved - for example, shows that are destined for syndication or DVD sales.
One example of this is the SyFy channel - they've basically cancelled or let expire all the programs that were being produced by 3rd parties (Universal's "Stargate" franchise, for example) as they paid top dollar for first showing rights, but the 3rd party made all the rebroadcast, serialization, etc. profits.
See also how Netflix is starting to produce their own shows they can totally own and sell direct to customers.
The future has no middlemen, just people making unique products (art, video, web apps, software, etc.) or money of of standardized interchangeable services (distribution, hosting, connectivity, etc.).
[+] [-] astrodust|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nobody31|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] brudgers|14 years ago|reply
It's hard to see why this would be a big deal. Mr. Wilson has been giving money to the companies behind SOPA every month as a cable subscriber, and even more money by purchasing the NBA tier. Indeed, his financial support of Copyright Alliance member and a campaign contributor to SOPA sponsor Lamar Smith, Time Warner Cable, is significant.
>"Our family spends hundreds of dollars a month with Time Warner Cable."[ http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/01/screwcable.html]
[Time Warner and Copyright Alliance: http://broadbandbreakfast.com/2010/12/copyright-alliance-pic...]
[Time Warner Cable and Lamar Smith: http://maplight.org/us-congress/legislator/470-lamar-smith]
[+] [-] runjake|14 years ago|reply
Who is Fred Wilson and why is it a big deal he allegedly pirated a Knicks game?
[+] [-] waterside81|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mbreese|14 years ago|reply
The only legal solutions I see would be: a) go to the game, or b) dump Time Warner and get a dish (not an easy prospect in NYC).
It sucks to be a pawn in a larger game...
[+] [-] marknutter|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] finnw|14 years ago|reply
They decided not to air it for political reasons - Jeremy Clarkson was on the panel and they wanted to keep him off the air during a row about something offensive he had said on another show.
So I got a copy from an illegal source. I still do not see this as stealing as I had already paid for it (via the UK TV License.)
[+] [-] mbesto|14 years ago|reply
From[1]: But, um, how much are the Lakers – all by themselves – getting from Time Warner Cable for its new regional sports networks? $5 billion.
[1]http://www.ocregister.com/articles/lakers-329235-billion-new...
[+] [-] antiterra|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhb|14 years ago|reply
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/02/anatomy-of-a-pirate.html
[+] [-] finnw|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|14 years ago|reply
It seemed to work that way for the Blackhawks.
[+] [-] GigabyteCoin|14 years ago|reply
Whenever I torrent the latest boobtube flick, it usually cuts out 33% of it's total running time or all of the adverts basically.