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My
downloading addiction
 I
think it's time to come clean about an addiction that
has hit me this year. In July I decided to cut off my
cable to save a little money. TV wasn't interesting
me. Besides hockey all I did was flip channels or turn
on the news or some nature channel and just leave it
on for some background noise. Often I'd be in my room
anyway so I'd never really be watching. So I cut it
off.
However,
a strange thing happened after I cut it off. I started
downloading TV shows. Yes, shows I never made time for,
I decided to check out now that I couldn't see what
people were talking about on forums. I began downloading
shows like "The West Wing", "Stargate",
"Buffy: the Vampire Slayer", "24"
using a combination of Kazaa,
eMule
and now BitTorrent.
Add to my dirty love for "Oz"and other HBO
shows I never could get on standard cable, I began searching
out "Samurai Jack", "Sealab", "Ghost
in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex" and "The
Shield". Some of these are good shows, some of
these are great shows. Others I won't mention having
downloaded a couple and not acquired a taste. Whatever,
now it seems that I am making even more of an effort
to watch TV than before; and I don't have cable!
What
are you using to download?
I used to use
Kazaa a lot because the interface was easy.
But now I use a combination of eMule (a variant
is called eDonkey) and BitTorrent. eMule is
a standard file sharing app where you can
open up a directory of files you want to share
and search for files you want. BitTorrent
is an interesting method of parcelling out
downloads of a file that many people want
to download so that each person gets a different
piece and then share the pieces of the file
they have already downloaded with others.
This takes the load off of the original file
sharer. However, you still have to search
for the original files. |
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The
difference in my behaviour is in my procurement. Before,
I never had time to be a slave to the TV schedule. But
now really I am making more of an effort to
secure a show by searching it out and spending bandwidth
and time downloading it. With TV, I might give a show
a couple minutes before getting bored or walking away
during commercial breaks, now I am more likely to watch
a show in its entirety after spending sometimes half
a day downloading it.
This
is something to consider for the future of television.
Television shows are sponsored by advertising, but many
people flip channels during advertising and don't watch
a complete show. If they download a show, they may watch
more of it, but there is rarely any advertising in the
files offered for download by the people sharing it.
Certain television shows also will reach more of an
audience internationally through file sharing than trying
to gain a spot in a certain television market. Certainly,
anime, which until the Cartoon Network set up, was almost
never going to be shown on North American television
but gained a large fan-base through fan-subbing.
From
the observations, could a conclusion be reached about
how programming might change in the future? With the
test distribution of digital vcrs (ReplayTV and TiVO
being the main brands), could some shows gain revenue
through direct distribution rather than through set
markets? How could these shows survive without advertising?
Or could advertising be inserted some how in the digital
vcrs (though without breaking up a show's continuity).
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