SubscribePirate Bay’s Video Streaming
Posted in IPTV, News on May 31st, 2007. By Eduard F. Vinyamata.
Today, one year ago, The Pirate Bay, one of the most important resources for downloading copyrighted content, was shut down by the Swedish police. Three days later the website was up and working again from the Netherlands, with it’s popularity doubled, thanks to extensive media coverage. Today it might be the most recognized websites to track and download pirated content.
A few days ago The Pirate Bay announced they are preparing to enter the video streaming market:
“YES - we’re going to do a video streaming site. It’s true. It’s in the works being done right now and as usual we put a bit of Pirate Bay mentality behind every project we do.”
Copyrighted TV contents are already popular downloads around the world. Although they can also be found in streaming format, they are not reliable. Sites that temporally hold the contents under Safe Harbow law such as YouTube, DailyMotion, etc., keep on pulling them down.
If The Pirate Bay succeeds in finding a way to host copyrighted content in a YouTube like fashion, and taking into account the huge anonymous community support that would come with it, how are traditional media producers and distributors to fight and win this situation?
First, probably, making things easier for the consumer: End the format wars. Think convergence, as Mark Cuban points out in his blog. Think microformats and how this idea could be applied and empower local TV stations…And why not start competing? No ads (at least in it’s current form), no cost to the consumer, no DRM. It might all sound impossible, but Apple (and Amazon to soon follow) just started selling non DRM, high sound quality songs this week…something that a couple of years ago would have seemed unlikely.
With better content quality than what pirates can get, catalog access to vintage content (much like the BBC is doing), and most importantly: availability of contents on record time, pirates would start losing their reason to be. That would in time attract back eyeballs, and in turn revenue.
Is all of this possible, without deeply disrupting current revenue sources and business structures? Probably not, but this is what a paradigm shift is all about.
Related: Online Video Bill of Rights
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