Ignore Illegal Download At Your Peril:  Music Business Tells TV~ 

Major players in music industry say television must work out how to monetise its content rather than controlling it.

Television must learn from the mistakes of the music industry and adapt its business model to focus on monetising content rather than controlling it, senior industry figures told the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival

Peter Jenner, president emeritus of the International Music Managers Forum, said that the television could have a better time than the music industry.

He said: “If they learn from what we’ve done and look at the reality of the situation in an analytical way rather than just thinking ‘how can I protect my old business model’.”

Technology has made copying uncontrollable – so instead of trying to prevent peer-to-peer sharing of content, the television industry should be developing platforms for compensation.

Will Page, the chief economist at the Performing Right Society (PRS) said “television is waiting for a silver bullet”, but he added that the TV industry must address illegal downloading. Doing nothing will see the problem getting “worse and worse” – but, Page said, “neither is disconnecting people from the internet a good way of increasing revenues.”

Peer-to-peer filesharing means that it is more difficult for television to create artificial scarcity by selling programmes to different territories at different times. “The idea that you can create artificial scarcity in certain territories has gone now,” said Eric Garland CEO of BigChampagne, which monitors download and bit torrent traffic.

In the first half of 2009, Heroes was illegally downloaded 54,562,012 times, according to data from BigChampagne. Also among the most downloaded shows were Lost with 52,151,396; 24 at 34,119,093; Prison Break at 29,283,591; and House with 26,277,954. Even when broadcasters streamed shows for free as in the case of the CW’s Gossip Girl, bit torrent traffic was still high at 19,706,870.

Source: The Guardian