Bugads
Loyal Reader Stephen links me an article by Mark Pesce from last year that I missed: “Piracy is Good?” Pesce starts from the now-famous phenomenon of the “pirating” of British airings of season-one Battlestar Galactica episodes increasing rather than decreasing ratings of the US broadcasts of those same episodes, and goes on to descry a revenue model for the burgeoning system of “hyperdistribution.”
A few weeks before the series premiered on television, I sat down to watch the 13 episodes of the first season, all of which I’d found on BitTorrent. Somewhere around the second or third episode I became briefly aware of the “bug,” the smallish, semi-transparent station ID which has become the constant on-screen companion to all television broadcasts. I was looking at the bug for SkyOne, the British satellite broadcaster, which nestled comfortably in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. I noted the bug, then proceeded to ignore it. But it never went away. In episode after episode, the bug remained, a tattoo commemorating the trip from broadcaster to audience.
Somewhere around episode seven, it hit me like a ton of bricks: I was looking at the most valuable and most underutilized piece of real estate in the world.
His proposal, in brief: producers should sell the bug. I see some complications right off.
* As Pesce foretells, “there will be a lot of work going on in the next decade to determine just how obnoxious such an ad can be before the audience objects to it.” Given a world in which broadcast radio thinks it can get away with 10-minute commercial breaks, I’m thinking that bug advertisements err on the side of too obnoxious rather than not obnoxious enough. This feeds the second problem that jumps out.
* Isn’t it likely to be both trivial and a matter of pride for savvy file-sharers to edit bugs out of the video data? It seems like that could lead to the same sort of rent-seeking by content-providers we see now – instead of lobbying for intrusive enforcement efforts against filesharing they lobby for intrusive enforcement efforts against sharing altered files.
Still, those are problems. But are they worse problems than trying to perpetuate an obsolete revenue model? I doubt it.
A possibility Pesce doesn’t broach is also, like the Bug, already with us: product placement. Could you profitably fund a television series on product placement dollars? And how obnoxious could that be? Immediately the kinds of shows you couldn’t do this for: many historicals and much science-fiction, come to mind.
UPDATE: Informative comments by d’Herblay below, saying
1) It’s NOT that easy to remove bugs.
2) “Personally, when I’m choosing between torrents of various encodings of a single episode, the criteria I use are speed of downloading and the quality of the encoding. My suspicion is that if the production companies embraced BitTorrent distribution, they’d have the ability to put a lot of dedicated seeders online, quickly disseminating a perfect reproduction, and would be able to drive out amateur editing.”
Comment by Michigan J. Frog —
January 10, 2006 @ 10:43 pm
Let’s not forget that when bugs first became common, they generated lots of negative feedback. But they’re still with us, alas.
Comment by dHerblay —
January 11, 2006 @ 1:33 am
I know that several Buffy fanvidders, working with source material then not available on DVD, tried various techniques to remove the WB’s watermarking. I don’t know of anyone who had much success, and these were mostly transparent bugs rather than the obtrusive, opaque ones now becoming common. (The most obnoxious bugs I’ve seen recently have been the ones Ytv stuck on the Justice League episodes shown in Canada months before they aired in the States: not only were they large and animated, but they had sound effects.)
Personally, when I’m choosing between torrents of various encodings of a single episode, the criteria I use are speed of downloading and the quality of the encoding. My suspicion is that if the production companies embraced BitTorrent distribution, they’d have the ability to put a lot of dedicated seeders online, quickly disseminating a perfect reproduction, and would be able to drive out amateur editing. And since I fast-forward through not just the commercials but the credits with VHS and skip them outright on DVD but faithfully watch the credits on downloaded episodes, I bet that I could even learn to tolerate a few commercials in my downloads like a good little couch potato.
Comment by Chad Orzel —
January 11, 2006 @ 9:01 am
This shouldn’t be a new idea to anyone who’s watched Fox recently– they have a near-constant stream of stupid little animated characters popping in and out around the ”bug” to promote new shows and the like. They’re certainly erring on the side of ”too obnoxious.”
As for product placement in SF, you can do it, you just need to be a little clever about it. See, for example, _Demolition Man_ which was fairly dreadful, but did have a cute gag about all the restaurants of the future being Taco Bell.
Granted, that would require some imagination, but it’s not impossible.
Comment by Mr. Obscura —
January 11, 2006 @ 9:17 am
I agree with Chad regarding, ”they’re already too obnoxious”. It irritates me no end when the bottom third of the screen is covered by bugs during a sports broadcast while the game is in action. The directors think they’ve got that screen real estate, so they don’t attempt to bias the shots to put action in the top part of the screen. I miss the game, but the network gets its promo in front of my eyes. And almost all of the offense right now comes from a network promoting itself. Can you imagine how obnoxious it will be when product advertisers are doing it?
Comment by jlw —
January 11, 2006 @ 9:57 am
Product placement in SF dates back to 2001 and Silent Running, which had a large and not entirely positive placement for American Airlines.
But if you want to see how the bugs-in-lieu-of-breaks model would look, turn on some soccer, especially Mexican League action on Univision and Telemundo. Persistant bugs in the corner for Budweiser or Tecate; animated bugs for Honda. Doesn’t usually interfere with the action, but might be a bit much in a drama.
Comment by colin roald —
January 11, 2006 @ 12:58 pm
dHerblay says: ”the criteria I use are speed of downloading and the quality of the encoding”
This is because the bugs are not yet Too Obnoxious.
Comment by Bruce Baugh —
January 11, 2006 @ 7:48 pm
The bug is, of course, a big factor in the growth of sales of season sets of DVDs, for everyone I know who buys them, and browsing BitTorrent sites suggests that a lot of folks like them.
What I don’t know is how durable most downloaders think of their torrent traffic being. But I would be deeply unsurprised to find that people download the best/most satisfactory of the overnight encodings for their short-term fix and then wait for the season sets to get lasting copies.
Pingback by Crooked Timber » » Battletipjar Galactica —
January 14, 2006 @ 11:09 pm
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