Piracy has hit CBS and its top show “Under the Dome” since the network’s disappearance from Time Warner‘s cable coverage due a continuing fee dispute. Since Friday more than 3 million Time Warner customers in some of the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, including New York, LA, Chicago and Boston have been blacked out. That number is even higher if you consider that CBS.com has also been blocked on Time Warner’s Internet servers outside of those broadcast areas.
TorrentFreak reports that piracy of the popular CBS show “Under the Dome” spiked by 34 percent last week while broadcast ratings dropped slightly. The rate of piracy affecting “Under the Dome” in New York more than doubled. The results would seem to confirm a phenomenon that has seemed intuitive: When people lack easy access to media, they resort to piracy. The same phenomenon seemed to be the case in music where people turned to iTunes in droves and were willing to pay once it was easily accessible.
This in no way excuses piracy. It’s simply a theory of human behavior. People value easy access to media and are even willing to pay for it. Take away easy legal access, however, and people will resort to the easiest form of access, legal or not. Access trumps the law. The lesson to draw from this is that most people will obey the law, all things being equal. This suggests that feelings of guilt or morality attached to piracy are tenuous at best.
The “Under the Dome” case suggests that there may not be a winner in the ongoing broadcast dispute between CBS and Time Warner. The phenomenon of “cord cutting,” once the realm of the tech savvy is spreading. There are certainly new and popular models of video distribution (hello, Netflix, Google and Amazon) and legacy broadcasters and cablers run the risk of marginalizing themselves when they voluntarily take themselves out of the distribution equation.
It’s not only the audiences that are at risk. A media attorney told me last week that Netflix is now offering extremely attractive (that means lucrative) deals to series producers. Given the choice between getting caught in the middle of a broadcast dispute and experimenting with a new form of distribution, which is also quite lucrative, many producers might begin to embrace the latter.
The CBS-Time Warner dispute is about divvying up a “pie” of revenue, how much money each will make from distribution. The risk is that the longer and more frequent these disputes become the more quickly the pie itself will shrink until the argument is over crumbs.
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