Agency Spy

Whether or not the TV industry wants to bury its head in the sand, file sharing will continue to errode the paying audience, as well as Nielsen’s ability to track audience numbers. If you need some hard evidence, take a look at what happened when the first episode of the Showtime series Weeds got leaked onto bittorent sites. The future is looking rough and tumble for networks, cable providers and media buyers alike.

So, we thought we’d share a fantastic interview by Torrent Freak with a nine year old girl named Hannah. She downloads music using LimeWire and has her own computer. The whole piece is fascinating, but here’s the highlights:
TF. What was cool about it [downloading music]?

- Because you can put anything in and it will come up and you don’t actually pay for it. Well you have to pay for the internet and LimeWire comes with the internet but you have to pay for that so LimeWire isn’t really free.

TF. You mentioned you like Sean Kingstone - what if I told you that Sean Kingstone’s boss might send you a letter asking for money because you shared his album on LimeWire? What would you say to him?

- W.E! [whatever!] … I’d say “tooooo strict!” and anyway he can’t make me do anything. He’s not the boss of me, he’s the boss of Sean Kingstone.

TF. What do you think might happen if you didn’t pay him?

- Nothing. I’m too young to be charged by the government so he can’t charge me.

TF. Would you carry on using LimeWire after he sent the letter?

- Yeah!

TF. Why?

- Because you can get good albums off there. My CD’s don’t work in my mp3 player so LimeWire is the only way to do it. I bought High School Musical 2 on CD but it won’t go on my mp3 [player]

TF. Do you think you should be paying for stuff off LimeWire? You have to buy CD’s from the shop…

- You have to pay for CD’s because they’re actually on a disc not on the computer. My cousin, right, she uses LimeWire when she doesn’t have any money for CDs.

TF. Did you ever download anything by anybody and then go to see them?

- I got stuff by Lee Ryan and Simon Webbe and then I went to see Blue.

Okay. Hannah is not afraid of the government and she’s probably not downloading enough music to get caught anyway. Really, in her mind, music is free when it comes across the internet. She’s nine. That impression influences her behavorial patterns, which will soon become habit - a cultural standard. No matter how many PSA’s the RIAA produces, the odds are, she’s not going to change. Girlfriend is going to get her music. It’s her right.

Hannah is too young to peform the more sophisticated operations required by bittorent, which keeps her from downloading larger files like movies and TV shows, but just you wait… When she hits that pre-teen stage (keep in mind that bittorent is only going to become more user friendly as the years go by), it’s going to be a very different ball game.

We think cable networks are suffering and will suffer most. Their revenue comes from subscriptions and (gulp) we can’t tell you how many folks we know who are currently downloading HBO’s ‘Tell Me You Love Me.’ We really wish you could buy just HBO and leave the full monty of USA, VH1, Nickelodeon etc. out of the deal. We would pay for a la carte cable. We’d probably get Showtime, too.

To their credit, network television is employing some new methods of delivery that are more consumer friendly, such as hosting entire episodes online for viewing with a short advertising break. We’ve actually watched ‘Heroes’ this way while waiting for a flight. We’ve also bought series packages on iTunes. However, we still download most of our TV from file sharing networks where the commercials have been neatly removed. We’ve got almost twenty years on Hannah. We didn’t grow up with the ability to download music. If we don’t feel bad about downloading TV, do you think she will?