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Video piracy in the 21st century

Byrichard

A few days ago I was watching a Magnum PI episode where Higgins had a film camera pointed at the television screen to record a game of snooker broadcast from “half way around the world” by satellite.  Today I noticed this article speaking of the way in which twitter’s Periscope app and Meerkat were used to pirate a fight.

Piracy is nothing new but the simplicity with which people can pirate and share content has evolved. Piracy required rolls of films at first. These rolls had to be developed and then copies had to be made. This could take several days. VHS came along and made it easier. With several VHS decks you could make several copies at once. Steve Jobs is well known for the boot leg tapes he had of music concerts. My generation streamed live music concerts using mobile phones. Football enthusiasts used satellite receivers and streaming software to re-distribute live football matches years ago. This is true both for european Football and American football.

The live streaming of broadcast content is now so simple that multiple people, using social media, redistribute content as it happens. There is no lag time. There is no exclusivity possible. PeriscopeTV and Meerkat have made it very simple to share live events circumventing the gate keepers.

Gate keepers provide the highest audio and video quality possible for their customers and for this reason they are safe for now. The pirated copy has low video and audio quality and is filmed by a mobile phone camera. Social networks such as Twitter and sporting organisations will need to strengthen their collaboration. Both of them can and will benefit from joining forces. If PeriscopeTV and Meerkat both get paid by the Fight promoters to carry the signal as premium content then the pirate streams will be of less interest. Price will have to reflect the platform on which content is being shared of course.

Social media, breaking news and information overload.

Byrichard

Social media is really fast because there are so many participants. It’s also fast because one person telling a few others is simplified. The social media are a crowd and when one person says something then others repeat what they have just heard to find out what has happened.

Within a few minutes the crowd knows what is going on. The difference is that whereas the crowd standing at a street corner five years ago would have spread it would have spread at the speed of the telephone and the rate at which people can move around.

Now what I think is interesting is to look at the theme of globalisation and social media, how both the local crowd and the international crowd are using the same tools. If something big happens in one country and there’s enough interest then it gets international interest.

The fact that people post pictures on flickr, videos on youtube and tweet as soon as they know something means that information is easily distributed without the accuracy being checked. In other words you’ll have hundreds of images of an event but will there be any captions or analysis?

The role of the audience will change with social media, and it’s been discussed frequently If everyone has a voice and everyone distributes their content of an event then the reporter is no longer processing they’re receiving. It’s the blog reader, the twitter watcher and the picture viewer.

Having access to all this information is great because we can get a good feeling for the ambiance on the ground at the location where certain events take place but one question remains. Who has the time to look through every blog post, see every tweet and look at every image?

You’re the same people that don’t have time to chat on twitter, or seesmic or work through the whole of your rss reader. You’re immersed in it. How is the everyday public going to react when 20 minutes a day on facebook is too much for them?

Disclaimer: This post was written in 2008.

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is twitter changing your blogging habits? – A 2008 response

Byrichard

Yes and no. Twitter is replacing instant messaging and chatrooms. It’s an open method by which for people to communicate instantly with others. It’s also about the overheard conversation although that term has disappeared.

What does “overheard” mean? Well simply that whenever two people discuss a topic hundreds of people are following this conversation and when they decide they have an opinion they can cut in. They do have that 140 character limit though, so they need to get to the point is efficiently as possible.

When that isn’t possible then they can do the next best thing. Write a comment in a blog post or even write a blog entry of their own where the conversation that took place on twitter is synthesised into a more digestible chunk of information.

As a result twitter is changing people’s blogging habits but the question is why people want to chat publicly rather than in an enclosed space. Today people like transparency.

Disclaimer: This is a post from the 28th of Octobre 2008. An unpublished post