
Fox’s 8-Day Delay on Hulu Triggers Piracy Surge - chaostheory
http://torrentfreak.com/foxs-8-day-delay-on-hulu-triggers-piracy-surge-110822/
======
tghw
The 8-day policy never made any sense to me. Let's say I have a show I
regularly watch live on Monday nights. Then one week, I miss it. Since I don't
want to watch the episodes out of order, I can't watch new episodes live for
the rest of the season _unless_ I grab a pirated copy so I'm caught up before
the next episode. Otherwise, I just skip one week and watch the rest of the
season on Tuesdays via Hulu.

This just smells like corporate bureaucracy, and it is unfortunate, because it
helps no one.

~~~
ars
The entire business model is based on people paying extra to watch "now".

If you look at the cost to watch a movie, the earlier you want it the more you
pay.

It starts with theaters, then pay per view, then buy it, then expensive
rentals, then cheap rentals, and finally tv movie. You have b-list theaters
somewhere in the last as well, and I may have missed some other places.

If you are willing to wait to watch your shows you will pay a LOT less for
them. But apparently most people are not willing to wait, otherwise this model
would not work.

~~~
alanfalcon
It's rather annoying when the rules are changed in the middle of the game.
That's basically what happened here, with the final episodes of Master Chef
(my current guilty pleasure) suddenly going to an eight day delay after the
first 95% of the season was available on a one day delay.

I accidentally stumbled upon the winner of the show during my eight day wait
for the episode to come to Hulu, and now I have no incentive to watch the
final episodes and give Fox/Hulu whatever ad revenue they'd get from that.

The Hulu comments have been filled with angry viewers, some of which are
listing the sites where people can go to pirate the show.

~~~
rcfox
> I accidentally stumbled upon the winner of the show during my eight day wait
> for the episode to come to Hulu, and now I have no incentive to watch the
> final episodes and give Fox/Hulu whatever ad revenue they'd get from that.

So why watch the show at all? Wait until the end of the season and read the
results on the Internet.

If you find yourself about to object, then perhaps you do have an incentive to
watch the final episodes. Otherwise, I just saved you 12 hours of your life.
;)

~~~
chc
There's a reason they are called "spoilers": They ruin much of the impact of
the actual show without providing a corresponding reward.

Your suggestion is similar to saying, "So you've eaten five pounds of cupcakes
and now you don't feel like eating a proper dinner? Either you don't need a
proper dinner at all, or you really do want to eat this vegetable platter!"

~~~
rcfox
My point was that the purpose of watching this kind of TV show isn't to gain
specific knowledge; it's about the progression of events towards the goal.

I just finished "Star Trek: Voyager", so I'll use that as my example. In the
first episode, they get stranded far away from home. You know they're going to
make it home because that's how stories work. Does that make the show spoiled?
Well, they saw reason to make 7 seasons of 24 episodes, so I'm guessing it
wasn't spoiled.

Actually, studies[0] have shown that spoilers make stories more enjoyable.

[0] [http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/spoilers-dont-
spoi...](http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/08/spoilers-dont-spoil-
anything/)

~~~
dkl
I find it hard to believe you don't understand why alanfalcon was ticked off
(regarding the spoiler). Your example has nothing to do with the issue.

~~~
rcfox
I honestly don't understand.

~~~
Game_Ender
You can't draw solid conclusions from a single study with undergraduates.

------
blhack
Do these people realize that there are a lot of pirates that _pay_ for their
ability to pirate things? Between seedboxes, or usenet, or a faster internet
connection, or extra disk space...some of these people are paying as much to
download this stuff illegally as they would if they just bought a cable
subscription.

And, honestly, the lack of ads is a bonus, it's not the sole reason pirates
pirate.

How the hell the media companies continue to screw this up is baffling.
They've got a product that people want really bad. And yet...they don't really
want to give it to people?

Huh?

If people were banging down my door to use a product that I had created, I
think I would probably be working my ass off to facilitate their ability to
pay me for it.

For places like FX, which carries several shows that I like: why on earth
can't I just stream FX from your website?

~~~
pavel_lishin
I pay about $15/month for my _legitimate newsgroups access and search engine_.
I think that's more than we pay for Netflix and Hulu, combined.

But my cable/Hulu/Netflix streaming bill isn't where Fox's revenue comes from
- it comes from their advertisers. If they sell me their shows in a convenient
.avi format, they're gaining me at $10/month, but they're losing every single
company that pays for me to watch their commercials.

~~~
rhizome
How much are you worth to Fox's advertisers on a monthly basis, then?

~~~
fragsworth
A 30-second time slot in a medium-sized market will cost roughly $5 per 1000
viewers (<http://www.gaebler.com/Television-Advertising-Costs.htm> )

This means each user is worth $0.01 per minute of commercials. The average
American watches ~4 hours per day, 25% of which is commercial advertising,
which comes out to 30 hours per month of commercials. That's 1800 minutes of
commercials.

Answer: _$18/month_ , average. Roughly.

~~~
hammock
I am in this business. The CPM (cost per thousand impressions) actually varies
quite a bit by daypart (time of day) and channel (broadcast, syndicated or
cable). Primetime CPM is around $20-30. For daytime or cable TV it can be less
than $10.

And then CPM for online video like Hulu is totally different as well - due to
a number of factors, such as the smaller number of spots, the difference in
attention paid, the quirks of Nielsen ratings on the web, and the clickthru
opportunity.

There was some hubbub a while back about how CPMs for a 30s spot in the
Simpsons on Hulu was actually going for more than a new episode of the
Simpsons on Fox (something like $60 vs $30).

Most of the TV you watch on Hulu is prime content and even though it is
online, you can expect a CPM of $25-50.

~~~
jeffool
Very interesting. If I were to want to read up on this type of info
(advertising, new media versus old, etc.) with actual dollar examples, are
there any sites in particular you'd recommend?

~~~
akira2501
The rate card can change as often as the ratings are released. From an "old
media" perspective, pricing is pretty volatile.

~~~
jeffool
I understand, but I was curious if there was any leading site for such news?
Not necessarily like HN or reddit, but, an industry blog that does a good job
of keeping people informed.

------
waffle_ss
I pay for Netflix and Hulu Plus streaming (the latter of which _still_ comes
with ads). If it's not on there, I feel like I've done my due diligence and
have no ethical dilemma with pirating.

~~~
absconditus
Viewing videos is not a necessity. It is possible not to watch something at
all.

~~~
jrockway
When you pirate something, you're sending the message that you want the
content. Whey you don't watch something, the producers can't be sure if it's
because it's simply not to your taste, or that you just don't like the
mandatory delivery mechanism. Network middlemen aren't interested in
"alternate" distribution mechanisms, but the people that actually want get
paid for producing content are. Every time you pirate something, the world is
one step closer to one where you can just visit a TV show's website, pay $1,
and download this week's episode. Let's get there faster.

And anyway, is it even piracy when it was already broadcast into your house?
(Anyone can watch Fox for free with a big enough antenna.) I can pay someone
to clean my house; why can't I pay someone to videotape my TV shows?

~~~
danielsoneg
> When you pirate something, you're sending the message that you want the
> content.

That, I think, is an undervalued point here - Piracy as a signaling mechanism
is, I think, why an awful lot of what's currently out there for digital
delivery (Hulu, especially) exists.

The industry's still not entirely sure what a viable market model looks like -
that's part of the reason why Fox pulled their 8-day move. Bittorrent's shown
people will do it for free, Hulu's shown more people will do it if it's easier
even if they have to watch ads, Netflix has shown people will pay for it
(though recently they've shown the selection needs to be bigger), but nobody's
hit the magic bullet that both consumers and industry will accept yet.

In the mean time, piracy is certainly a valuable signal for the industry that
demand exists - it's just that the price and mechanisms aren't right yet. (I'm
sure the content producers feel the same way /s)

~~~
rick888
"In the mean time, piracy is certainly a valuable signal for the industry that
demand exists - it's just that the price and mechanisms aren't right yet. (I'm
sure the content producers feel the same way /s)"

If you can get a show in HD quality, very fast, without commercials, and at no
cost..nothing will compete with it that costs money.

Content producers shouldn't have to consider pirates the competition.

At this rate, the answer will be a forced monthly fee/tax through all of the
major Internet providers.

~~~
nitrogen
The present article suggests the opposite, if you replace "costs money" with
"has ads". Else, why did piracy rates drop significantly when Hulu was
launched, and spike again as shows were pulled?

Also as counterexample, lots of people pay for Netflix.

------
Historiopode
Since many of these comments discuss piracy and content distribution, allow me
to give you an unprompted insight from a country which is in a _worse_
situation than the USA. As of today, the country I live in offer very few
legal content distribution platform for movies and television shows, and none
of them has neither _tolerable_ pricing and acceptable DRM policies nor non-
laughable title selection, proper listing & metadata—for example, I would not
be able to know in which quality I am renting a movie. Anyway, most of the
movies simply do not hit digital distribution. Physical movie rental is dying
quite rapidly for most obvious reasons, which means that the few remaining
services are starving and offer nothing but the safest-hitting movies.

As a remarkably honest biped (who, e.g., bought _two_ Adobe Suite licenses,
one for his PC & one for his Mac, and has _purchased WinRAR_ ), I am thus
being put in the hilariously paradoxical position where not only I am hardly
incentivized to legally purchase content, but I am _unable_ to do so. I am
_struggling_ to do so, and I can not; this is such a tragicomical condition
that my fruitless effort to legally retrieve movies&shows has become a running
joke within my circle of friends. Adding insult to injury, every single major
firm persists on sticking to this ridicolously unreasonable regional
distribution paradigm—which adds basically no value even from a job-creation
standpoint— whereas I would be absolutely happy to throw money at them by
purchasing non-localized content.

P.S. To be clear, I live in European first-world country, where the value of
the movie market is more than big enough to justify sensible business
investments.

~~~
robrenaud
What prevents you from bit torrenting the content you want, and then sending
appropriately sized cashier's checks to the content producers?

~~~
boyter
I would be interested to see what happened if someone did that. My guess would
be that the content producers (movie industry) would begin legal action as
while you paid for the content you didn't pay for it in the manner they
dictated.

~~~
robrenaud
The point of the cashier's check is that they don't know who you are. I have a
hard time believing that someone who paid market value for the content and
didn't even require distribution service would be in a worse position than
someone who pirated the content and paid nothing.

------
kin
For me, HBO Go does it right. My parents have cable and I pay for their HBO
just for the HBO Go subscription. It comes with their ENTIRE archive of TV
shows, every single episode of all their shows. Not to mention, I was able to
watch Game of Thrones episodes as they came out the next morning before
spoilers could make it to me, not much different than waiting for a show that
airs in the east coast to hit prime time west coast.

Fox's problem is that they did this mid-season and they started with a FREE
business model and then took it away. You can't give someone something for
free and then half way through take it away and make me pay for it. It
wouldn't make sense for me to want to pay for it, of course I would resort to
something else.

~~~
absconditus
HBO Go is not available to those of us without cable even if we are willing to
pay for it.

------
norswap
And this is for 8 days. Imagine now people in the EU, who have to wait
_months_ to get a badly translated version or the original dvds, despite the
fact that they understand english perfectly (and even if they don't, amateur
subtitles are often available the next day).

~~~
DasIch
Almost everyone simply downloads or views it illegally. The thing is it not
only takes month for the series to arrive here, the DVDs are released only
after the series has been shown on TV.

That is if the series is actually popular here and relatively easily
available. Dexter, Weeds, Lost, Sons of Anarchy are a couple of series I can
think of that are unpopular and therefore not as simple to come by.

~~~
absconditus
Television shows on HBO and Showtime (Weeds from your list) are usually not
available in the US until the DVDs come out, which is usually shortly before
the next seasons starts.

I am aware of HBO Go, but it is not available unless one already has cable and
HBO.

------
dmaz
It's important to mention that for MasterChef, this was the season finale.

------
nitrogen
I have a proposal for advertisers to reach the audience most likely to skip
advertisements and stream or download shows:

Instead of expecting viewers to put up with 18 minutes of mindless advertising
for every 42 minutes of actual content, just show a ten second long list of
sponsors at the beginning of the show (along with their general product
category), after the opening credits.

Example:

    
    
      We would like to thank the following corporations
      for sponsoring the production of this show.  Please
      consider thanking them as well, by purchasing their
      products.
      
      PanCorp - Maker of fine non-stick cookware
      Net Net - High-speed ISP, gigabit speeds
      ...
    

Then, the creators of the show would plead with uploaders to leave that ten
second clip in. Advertisers could then count every download as a successful
impression, and geeks like me who aren't significantly influenced by
traditional advertising would learn about potentially interesting products and
services.

~~~
hugh3
I really don't think you understand how advertising works. I prescribe four
seasons of Mad Men. (It's streaming on Netflix right now, y'know!)

 _geeks like me who aren't significantly influenced by traditional
advertising_

Do you _really_ believe that you're magically superior to the things which
influence the rest of the human race?

(If you do, then I know exactly how to make an ad to manipulate you already --
tell you what you want to hear by appealing to your sense of superiority.)

~~~
nitrogen
_Do you really believe that you're magically superior to the things which
influence the rest of the human race?_

No, not magically, _rationally_. I deliberately disregard anything that is
demarcated as an ad and look for and comment on things like product placement
within shows. I've never seen a beer commercial with scantily-clad dancers and
thought, "Man, I'd sure like a cold one." Cheap cable TV ads with flashing
lights, out-of-gamut colors, and an 800 number repeated over and over just
make me tune out and change the channel. I try to counteract the effect of
logo and color familiarity by buying brands that look different from what I'd
expect. Any time I learn of another subliminal advertising technique, I add a
counterattack to my defensive arsenal. On top of that, if I record a show I
use MythTV's commercial detection to skip ads entirely, and anyone who
downloads their TV won't be seeing commercials either.

"But you're not in their target demographic." _No kidding._

I'm not saying that I can't be reached by advertising -- I gave explicit
directions for how to do so in my original post. I'm complaining that
advertisers continue to reach to the same old bag of tricks, tricks that
appeal to the lowest common denominator of animalistic behavior and consume 18
minutes of every programming hour. I'm saying those tricks _don't work on me_
because I tune them out, skip them, block them, etc. I never answer surveys,
I'm not a Nielsen participant, etc. I've tried contributing to media metrics
with my Hulu viewing and rating habits, but Hulu continues to recommend shows
from the same network rather than the same genre, and networks continue to
alienate online viewers by delaying shows (Fox) or pulling them entirely
(Syfy).

I'm offering a viable alternative for advertisers to earn money on someone
like me, but advertisers seem to think they know better. In the mean time,
I'll continue to apply whatever selective pressure I can to get advertisers
and content producers to evolve.

 _(If you do, then I know exactly how to make an ad to manipulate you already
-- tell you what you want to hear by appealing to your sense of superiority.)_

I make a conscious effort to avoid this type of influence as well. [Edit: and
I'm not motivated in this regard by a sense of superiority, either. The only
sure way to influence me is with hard data demonstrating a high quality and
utility of whatever product you're offering.]

~~~
chc
Even if you can be reached by advertising (which, judging from the pride you
take in averting it, I doubt), targeting _you specifically_ would have a
horrible ROI. You are not going to spend enough to make up for the loss of all
the other people who respond to normal advertising.

~~~
nitrogen
This is the fallacy that is, IMO, killing online video. I am a tech guy with
above-average lifetime income potential and influence on the high-tech
purchasing decisions of my friends and family. I have money and want to spend
it, but it seems nobody is selling what I'm looking to buy. I am not alone.

~~~
chc
You're not alone, but are there as many of you as there are other people? Even
if you and a hundred people like you spend 75% of your income on everything
that's advertised according to your specifications, that's much less money
than 5,000 people who make half as much as you do spending 5% of their income.

~~~
nitrogen
I don't expect anyone to give up the average consumer. I'm talking about
earning money in venues in which there's a higher than typical concentration
of geeks (e.g. online streaming of science fiction, P2P downloads). Sure, 5000
* .05 * x > 101 * .75 * 2 * x, but focusing on the first only gets (in this
example) 62% of the available revenues. Why not capture some of that other 38%
for significantly less effort than the 62%?

However, I do believe that manipulative advertising is a net detriment to
society, regardless of how effective it is at reaching the average consumer.

------
snorkel
What sad times we live in that this is called "piracy".

------
lean
Interesting. Any data on how many more users signed up for Hulu+ in the same
period?

