Tag: entertainment

Media Distribution Done Right: ABC

So a few weeks ago, Lost premiered its third season. While I was dying to watch the premier, I, as usual, was stuck at work pulling a late night. The next day, I went to work again and stayed another late night. Wanting desperately to watch the show, I thought about my options. Lost is one of those shows you can’t just miss an episode and then jump in the next one and still feel satisfaction.

Now normally, someone from my age group would go and “torrent” the episode. Well, that or use iTunes. But I am not comfortable with the notion of DRM. Joe user went to piracy because either nothing was offered to meet the demand that was there or because the solutions offered were too draconian. Recently, an executive from Disney was quoted (famously) for saying that DRM is something to compete with as a business model, rather than view it as a scourge. I recalled this quote and remembered that ABC was offering their shows online.

So I went to ABC.com and looked for Lost. Needless to say: I WAS IMPRESSED. Now this is just my personal opinion, but if all networks did this, I would cancel my cable TV subscription in a heart beat. Here’s the highlights of ABC’s online TV offering:

  • Quality: The content is at a quality at or very near to what you would see if you downloaded the show from iTunes or other less “legal” means.
  • Speed: Unlike waiting to download something, I was able to immediately begin watching the show and it streamed the rest in as necessary. The delay to begin watching was about 3 seconds.
  • Commercials: Regular TV commercial breaks are 3 – 5 minute each. Well on the Internet stream, it is one commercial per break — 30 seconds. And when it finishes, a “resume” button appears so if you really needed to go to the bathroom, you can come back on your own time. As a side note, the advertising was probably one of the more effective ones I’ve witnessed for TV content. Because the sponsor’s logo appears at the top during the episode, I actually remember the advertisers (All State and Century 21).
  • TiVo functionality: I can pause or skip around at will.

This was 100% lost revenue for ABC had I downloaded it using BitTorrent. Or worse yet, I could have been “too busy” once or twice more and never seen the show again because I “fell too far behind.” It seems no matter how you slice it, if the show is at an inconvenient time, but I really love the show, in the older days, the network would have had to simply lose me as a viewer.

There’s some real draws in what ABC has done here.

  • With this new model, they can focus on quality shows and not really have to worry about competing time slots and placing “filler” stuff.
  • Let’s say the network launches a new show. Right now, they have to heavily entice a consumer to view the show to get them hooked. Now, the barrier to entry is much lower because the time slots of other more popular shows matter far less.
  • Telling someone “man this show is soooo sweet” is as simple as sending a link.
  • Old shows can continue to be popular and pull in ad revenue. In today’s medium, you have to rotate out re-runs because of the opportunity costs.

I have a few ideas on how ABC or other networks could vastly improve this service.

  1. Put all past shows up on the service. This will draw in a huge fan base who can then begin looking at other shows and generate new fans that previously did not exist.
  2. Don’t add in more commercials. Notice what I liked about this service and why I would choose it over TV. Fill it up with ads and you stand to drive your consumers straight back to piracy. Consumers don’t mind ads so long as they don’t dwarf the content (think “sugar with your coffee”).
  3. The quality is excellent, but it is missing a full screen mode. I’ll be honest here, you can toss this in as a feature you get with a subscription service. This subscription service would give you access to additional content that regular free users can’t, such as shortened commercial breaks, commentary, deleted scenes, etc.
  4. Integrate the ability to blog about the episode. If you do this, you will create a centralized community that will generate buzz all on its own. Don’t compete with MySpace. Just make each episode have its own trackback link and other forms of social integration such as a Digg link.

I’m really excited to see how things turn out with this. With the GooTube purchase, it seems more and more likely this will be just the beginning of things to come. I hope other networks follow this awesome example (and improve it). If you’re competing with free, the only way to win is to offer better service and ease of use, which is exactly what ABC did here.

Scum of the Earth Scammer

If you haven’t already heard, a man by the name of Jason Fortuny has been the center of a news-frenzy when he played a cruel prank on hundreds of people. He created a fictitious Craigslist posing as a woman looking for a sex partner. As many would expect, he received nearly 200 replies, many with photos, emails, phone numbers, and full names. What makes me angry, as well as many other people, is that Fortuny then decided to publish every response, verbatim.

A lot of people initially react with “Well, that’s the victim’s dumb fault.” You know, even I had that knee-jerk thought. No. Stop. Think.

Have you ever bought something from eBay? How would you feel if someone published your personal information after they got it from you on there? Better yet, how would you feel if it was just after you finished bidding on that inflatable sex doll you bought for your buddy as a gag-gift. Now imagine someone – a potential employer, a subordinate, a new acquaintance you just made that wants to see if you’re romantically compatible, your parents, your teacher, your schoolmates – decided to Google you and the very first hit was your name, your email, your phone number, a picture of you, a picture of the inflatable doll, and a small blurb about how much you paid for it. And some morons might get on a high horse and tell you not to trust making purchases from strangers, but the bottom line is that you will never, EVER be able to escape this again. Ever. Every job interview you will ever have has the potential to turn awkward when your new employer stumbles across this (assuming they even call you back after seeing it).

Most of the respondents did not indicate they were married. None of the activity was illegal. And they were only providing the basic information you’d expect if you were trying to find an online date, which by the way, is an increasingly popular way to meet people. How is this much different than my eBay story?

I noticed a lot of commentary saying those victims deserved what they got because they “posted” their private information online by replying. Pretend Craigslist was a newspaper for a moment, say the Washington Post. You see a personal ad for a person and you send them a little information about yourself. The next day, that person posts all 180 responses verbatim in the same newspaper. Never once did YOU post your personal information for the world to see, just like I don’t post my social security number on the Internet when I log into my banking website. There’s implicit (and often legally protected) expectation of privacy when you are communicating to another person over a private medium (email). Email is private. Sure, it goes through public servers, but so does your snail mail when it goes through your local post office and sits in your mail box for a few hours while you come home from work. It’s a federal crime in either instance to intercept that communication without a warrant. I really don’t understand how people can blame the victims like that. Nothing about their responses was public — nothing.

There was even a case of a man who claimed he never contacted Fortuny – that someone else, perhaps Fortuny himself, used his personal information without his consent. There was the instance of a couple who wanted a third partner for a threesome — a lifestyle, they hid from their highly religious friends and family. There was the Microsoft contractor that first heard about this through a co-worker who saw his name. These are random people who’s lives are now turned upside-down for no good reason except as a good laugh to Fortuny.

I think the moron wanted attention. He was actually happy to report his interview with the New York Times. Funny. Does he actually expect any good press coming out of this? The worst part is that Fortuny, as indicated by his journal, is proud of his accomplishments. He has taunted his victims to sue him, and he has even publicly discussed the idea of making money out of this by publishing a book.

Who cares if the victims were looking for sex. That’s not the point. They could have been looking for roommates or hoping to buy old furniture. The point is now that their personal information, along with photos, are now posted online, opening them up to identity theft and public humiliation. This could have been an angry ex posting half naked photos of you, your cell phone, full name, and some dirty AIM chats you had with them a long time ago. Why doesn’t this sort of stuff happen more often? That’s because it’s illegal, and for good reason.

On to the good news.

First, he published his personal information in great detail.  This makes it very easy for people to send him lawsuits. Which introduces the second point.

There is the very long list of potential legal and personal troubles awaiting this idiot.

  • While you can debate his right to publish the emails, he also published photos that he did not own, opening him up to lawsuits for copyright infringement. As this indicates, infringement penalties range from $750 to $150,000 per violation.
  • Many of those very same photos are sexual by nature. How many of the 150 photos he published do you think are of minors? Well, US law requires publishers of sexual material to provide documentation that participants of said photos are of legal consenting age. As indicated in the link, “prison terms up to 5 years and $25k.”
  • He is also open to intentional tort under intentional infliction of emotional distress. What’s interesting is that this is a rare type of tort to win due to the extreme difficulty in proving the action was “heinous and beyond the standards of civilized decency or utterly intolerable in a civilized society.” Usually this is abused as a type of frivolous lawsuit, but I think the victims may have a chance here.
  • Additionally, he published private information. This is another tort claim. The following two points really show just how much of a home run case prosecutors would have against this guy:

One who intentionally intrudes, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns, is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy, if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person.

One who gives publicity to a matter concerning the private life of another is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy, if the matter publicized is of a kind that

  • would be highly offensive to a reasonable person, and
  • is not of legitimate concern to the public.
  • It’s also likely he broke this privacy law in Washington.
  • It’s an election year. District attorneys are looking for a nice public case to win.
  • He is a Network Administrator, a position typically tightly bundled with trust and company security. I doubt he’ll keep that job much longer, let alone get a new one if he ever gets fired. Judging from how he posted his personal information on his site (a lot of it), it’ll be easy for angry people to track his employers and let them know about this scandal.
  • His victims will file claims all over the country. It will be very expensive and unpleasant for him to defend himself due to all the traveling costs as well as coordinating defenses concurrently across the country. This will severely impact his working life, which, as I indicated in the previous bullet, will be very difficult from which to recover.

I hope he gets buried in court.