*quality

Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by lurgee.

I think there's three main points here:

(1) The availability of shows online legally and illegally is what has encouraged people to invest in deeper storylines that build over time rather than episode to episode sitcom with little continuity. The pilot model and short term nature of these shows comes from a different era where there wasn't that same availability to catch up on a show you missed. As a result, people were reluctant to get overly involved in a storyline, nowadays it's the opposite.

(2) I think cable companies are always going to struggle to embrace video on demand because their advertising agreements as a major source of revenue (compared to subscriptions for Netflix) require them to stretch out the broadcast of the show. I'd wager that as an ad sponsor, the value of being able to reinforce a brand weekly as a opposed to dozens of times over short several day binge weekend is much larger.

(3) US TV tends to be based on very short term contracts and consequently short term narratives and story arcs. This becomes particularly evident where shows that never expected to make it to their 4th or 5th season see characters acting irrational and appearing to exhibit multiple personality disorder as writers try to inject drama into underdeveloped characters. You can see the lack of long term planning, and the writing looks like it's been done episode to episode, with the result being a mess. I'd say that this was a big issue with Lost and Heroes (subjectively speaking).

Comparatively, I would argue the success of something like Game of Thrones is partly attributed to a ready-made long term narrative from the source material which avoids these usual issues. In the case of House of Cards, they not only had the UK version to base it on and the additional flexibility that Netflix provided and I'm sure these were major contributing factors to the strength of the show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oheDqofa5NM (full speech) from http://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/1kzyob/kevin_spacey_urges_tv_channels_to_give_control_to/cbudl9j

Living in Thailand, most TV shows aren't available here until WAY after the Western airdate, if ever.

I live in a pretty small town. Western movies don't play here, and if I travel an hour or so to a town where they do, they do they are dubbed in Thai with no English subtitles. DVDs are readily available, but they are usually pirated cam copies burned to disc, and again dubbed in Thai.

Games? Not available in stores in my town. Bangkok, sure -- but again they are almost always pirated copies burned to disk. Console games are the same way and any shops selling the game will also chip the console to play pirated disks. I could, and admittedly probably SHOULD use steam for PC games.

Other software? Basically same story as games. If you go to a computer store here, advertising usually says that they are sold with Linux OS or bare drives. But, the shop will automatically put on a pirated Windows plus loads of software (office, Photoshop if you ask for it, etc.) upon purchasing the hardware. They are usually fairly inept at it, frequently have viruses or fail to actually activate the OS, etc. so I tell them to leave the drives bare and do all that stuff myself. But for 99% of people who buy a PC here, they will automatically get a pirated OS and software along with it.

Basically, my default mode of getting ANY media is piracy. Price (free versus not) is a part of that. Incomes are low here, but cost of living is comparatively even lower. Still, if media was fully available here but equal to the price in, say, the US the vast majority of people here don't have enough disposable income to afford much if any of it. A bigger issue for me personally is convenience. Piracy (torrents, etc.) as a distribution system is infinitely more convenient, easy, and "customer"-friendly than any more legitimate service. I get what I want very quickly, usually in multiple options for filesize vs quality on up to as-good-as-broadcast/blu-ray 1080p, with most everything available from a single source (isoHunt, kickass, PirateBay, take your pick). In terms of user experience, legitimate distribution can't even begin to compete with that -- and that is BEFORE considering price.

Instead, they exacerbate the difference by treating paying customers with open contempt. Pay for TV service? Enjoy 10 minutes of ads for every 12 minutes of show. Buy a DVD? Sit through un-skippable ads, dire piracy warnings, etc. before the show actually starts. Move or simply take the disk on vacation to another country and you will likely be screwed by region locking. Buy software? Get some DRM that slows things down or restricts fully NORMAL use of the software, nags you to register, etc. On the other hand, if you pirate stuff all of that goes away. No ads. Watch/use the media wherever you want, whenever you want, on whatever device you want. Software DRM circumvented easily, usually hours after the first release if not *before*.

I honestly see it as a problem that I am not supporting the creators of the media that I enjoy. But, Pandora's box has been opened on this one. Generation X and Y learned to scoff at the idea of paying for music due to Napster. iTunes has been extremely lucky to turn that around even slightly, making lots of mistakes along the way (DRM and device-locking, etc.). Gen Y and beyond are going to have the same attitude towards piracy with regards to ALL MEDIA that we learned to have towards music. I don't think there is any getting around that.

For content creators, I think that funding via Label / Publisher / Network is going to die out. And soon. The good news is that something akin to an evolution of patronage of arts and creators can work even better than it did in the past. The Motzarts and Beethovens of the future don't need 1 rich duke or king to commision a work, they need 10,000 average Joes on kickstarter or the like. I see things trending more and more in that direction, and all the time. I think it is an exciting time -- unless you're an exec in one of the old dinosaur publishers/networks.

Oh wow, reading your comments, specifically about Heroes really does explain just what happened to that show. I never really understood how it dropped off so much, but now one of life's mysteries is solved for me, thank you

It is a source of constant mystery to me how badly mismanaged the whole "Big content" industry is.

Even Kevins saintly benefactor Netflix, is still region locked.

Can we agree right now that if you are using the term "region" with regard to the internet, you are doing internet wrong? Even my beloved Valve get this wrong (although in their defence, that decision is made by the 3rd party publishers).

I have money. I like stories. I will give you money for your stories.
Stop putting obstacles in my way.

Good man. Knows how to pronounce GIF properly.

was JUST going to say that.

Piracy is certainly a service problem.
I'd love to give HBO my money but if they make me wait one freaking year to do that, they'll loose. I'm still going to buy their BluRays but certainly not at full price. I can wait, I've already seen their shows.
I would actually pay for a subscription to HBO, if it was available here. It isn't.

That's why Game of Thrones tops the piracy charts. Because they make it harder to give them your money. I bought Hannibal on iTunes. Saw each episode 1 day after air date, what an awesome show.

Yeah, I think if HBO opened HBO Go to people beyond people who have cable and HBO, and if they kept the fee reasonable, their subscriptions to HBO Go would go through the roof, piracy would go way down on their shows, and I don't think there would be any real long term impact on Blu-ray/DVD set sales. The combo pack at Walmart is $35 or something like that a season, not a bad deal, but the normal price elsewhere is a bit high.

Well.. he can't be right in everything.