TV and Film Industries Going the Same Path as Music Industry

For over a decade the music industry has engaged in a fierce battle against Internet piracy and not only is the war far from being over but so far it didn’t favor it too much.

Now the TV industry finds itself in the same situation and although the approach the music industry had toward file sharing didn’t prove to be very efficient it looks like it is going to be adopted by the TV and movie studios as well.

According to Eric Garland, CEO of BigChampagne, a marketing research company focused on file-sharing networks, piracy of TV shows is rapidly increasing exceeding even that of movies and music. Garland estimates there are more than 60 million Internet users worldwide involved in pirating content.

While the conviction of the four men behind The Pirate Bay caused quite a cheering in the MPAA and TV studios’ camp, Garland reminds them that back in 1999 when Napster was put to sleep everyone sighed in relief as well. And look where we are today with the file sharing in its prime – "Everyone always gets excited, and six months later we are back where we started and the problem will have grown," he emphasized.

But things may be not so bleak for the TV industry, it pretty much depends on the perspective they choose – as TorrentFreak points out more than 90 % TV shows piracy come from outside the United States, where new episodes sometimes wait for up to a year to be aired on TV in those countries. Moreover, another thing to be considered is that piracy of TV shows could very well mean that customers are not satisfied anymore with the way they are offered some services and that has to change – as the same site highlights “it's more about availability than the fact that it's free, and should be viewed as an opportunity, not a threat. The more restrictions there are, the more piracy there is. It's as simple as that." But is the TV industry ready to acknowledge and accept that. After all, it took music industry ten years of legal battles and… it still didn’t.