Jazz Odyssey

On October 18th, the pilot for the new Battlestar Galactica premiered in the U.K., 3 months before it was due to premiere on the Sci-Fi Channel in the U.S. in January. Within a couple of hours of the U.K. broadcast, copies of the pilot began to circulate through various BitTorrent networks. This "piracy" catalyzed a major word-of-mouth buzz about the quality of the program, and while one’s initial instinct might be that the viewership for the U.S. premiere suffered as a result of such widespread distribution, the fact is that the premiere and all subsequent episodes have been the most popular programming ever offered on the Sci-Fi network.

There’s a lot to digest in giving this incident some thought. As the news hit this weekend about an aggressive MPAA campaign targeting BitTorrent sites hosting television programming, Slashdot pointed me in the direction of this fantastic article by Mark Pesce. Mark examines the facets of Battlestar Galactica phenomenon and gives consideration to some of the primary issues:

• Audiences have been intrigued and influenced by the possibilities of time shifting in their consumption of entertainment, but have been trained to not want to pay for television programming
• These same audiences are increasingly technologically able to leverage new distribution channels to acquire the entertainment they want and then read/watch/listen to it at their conveniece
• Technological advances in hardware (paricularly portable media players), increased broadband penetration and the relatively low cost of storage space/blank media have increased the possible times/places that media can be consumed

These conditions lay a foundation for piracy to rise–and and Mark questions in his article: "piracy presents us with an economic problem: how do producers
get paid for the programs they create when audiences disintermediate
the distribution channels through which producers get paid for their
programming?" Tough problem to solve in the current universe where technology and consumer behavior have evolved faster than business models have been able to adjust but Mark’s article provides some good food for thought.