Can somebody explain to me why the big TV networks don’t put all their episodes online, make them watchable for EVERY country and charge 20-50 cents per view of an episode?
Sure…
Devil’s Advocacy – a Media Ownership Perspective
In general, the media companies are just as eager to show you content (and advertising, which makes them money) as you are to see it. The problem is, programs are rarely owned outright by anyone. Music is licensed from someone, product placement is licensed from someone else, location fees are licensed from someone else, etc etc etc.
And those rights, to no one’s surprise, tend to be licensed for one region right now. In many cases, one country. Those rights also have very limited timeframes on them, and are administrated by organizations that get paid to say “no…” not to say “yes.”
So let’s say you’ve got a half hour show. It’s got one person in it, one theme song, product placement from one beer company and it takes place at one landmark. Pretend it’s an American show and we want to show it in the UK.
You’ve got a minimum of four rights organizations to deal with… and each organization has a different disposition towards any region on the planet. Maybe you can work out an arrangement with the beer company; they’re dutch anyway. SAG has reciprocity with the UK so we can figure out something but we’re already at two memos per episode. Maybe the landmark wants more money to license itself in the UK than it does in the states – okay, we can skunk that episode. Or can we? maybe our agreement with the beer company is that all episodes have to be shown. But what really sucks is that the song has already been licensed exclusively to another show in the UK… which is owned by another media company… that is fully willing to skunk you just to keep your show out of the UK.
So now the whole thing falls apart… unless you go back to the edit, change out the song to something else and attempt to re-release it. But now, are your licenses intact? Because you’ve changed the show. And you need to get the producers of that show, who have long since moved on to other things, to manage a lot of this, because they’ve got the work product. And they’re going to want to be paid to dig through old business records and why haven’t you been hiring them lately, by the way?
Then, of course, comes the fact that to do this, you need to get paid for it; nobody is going to let you show something for free that cost them a lot of money and if you’re getting paid, they want to get paid. So now you need to find advertisers willing to pay for a foreign show that their customers may not even know about. Or, you go with a worldwide outfit, and they’re making plenty of money on their own internet advertising channels, so they’re not going to pay you much. And you need to relicense music for this stupid thing anyway, and you’ve only got a limited window to make money on it anyway, and before too long,
“fuck it – if they want to see it that badly, they can bloody torrent it”
Starts to become the attitude of the creators of the show.
Believe it or don’t, there aren’t very many professionals in media that want to prevent you from seeing content. It’s just that everyone wants to get paid, and once you jump outside of the agreements that governed the show in the first place, everyone wants to get paid again. As much as possible. Because we all have to make a living.
So here’s the basic problem. There are different countries on the planet. They all have different licensing requirements, media structures, advertisers and consumers. And taking one show from one ecosystem and transplanting it in another, from a business perspective, is a hell of a lot more intricate, involved, and expensive than typing “.co.uk” instead of “.com.” And nobody likes it, and everyone is trying to do something about it, but short of every single player in media giving up and saying
“fuck it, we don’t really want to make money at this shit anyway, go ahead and watch what you want where you want when you want“
…things are not going to change very quickly, no matter how many angry letters you write to the internet.
Now the question now, is…. How quickly are things moving today? What kinds of evidence can we see of media’s progress to become more online/international?
