Las amenazas de la piratería a la televisión.

A special report on television. (2 of 2). Apr 29th 2010. Ahoy there! From The Economist print edition The perils of piracy.

GO TO Google's home page and type the name of your favourite TV programme into the search bar, followed by the word "torrent". Press the return key. There it is: a feast of pirated television on file-sharing websites, found for you by the world's most powerful search engine. Napster, a peer-to-peer outfit that brought the recorded-music business to its knees about ten years ago, was not nearly as quick or easy. Television piracy gets less attention than film or music piracy, but it is no less widespread. One of the big obstacles that had stood in its way—the large file sizes required to transmit video—is shrinking as computers get faster and bandwidth costs come down. More and more people are buying televisions that can connect to the internet. There is a danger that piracy will move on from teenagers skulking in bedrooms and into the living room. A furtive activity could become mainstream. If Google searches are any guide, piracy is at its most rampant while shows like "Lost" are airing on television (see chart). The peaks near the beginning of each season suggest that some people use torrent sites to get copies of shows from previous seasons, filling themselves in on the plot before the new one starts. It is likely that every stream of a copied show represents a lost viewer on television. Piracy is a direct threat. Yet television is not about to suffer a catastrophic "Napster moment". When Napster emerged ten years ago, music CDs containing two or three good tracks and a lot of padding were sold in shops for $14.99, and often more outside America. Singles were few and cost almost as much as albums. Compressed digital files such as MP3s were not on offer yet. And music piracy was widely tolerated: even respectable folk had their own sneaky collections of C90 tapes. Dissatisfied customers and a culture of copying created an ideal environment for file-sharing to grow. By contrast, television's unit of output is already the size people want it. They like to watch whole episodes of "Desperate Housewives", not extract the best ten minutes of an episode, as music fans like to extract the best tracks from an album. Much free television can already be watched legally on computers and mobile phones. And TV-watching couch potatoes tend to be lazy. Trawling virus-addled websites in search of programmes seems too much like hard work. TV piracy appeals for two reasons. It can bring shows to foreign audiences faster, and it is free. The first advantage matters for only a very few shows, most of them slick American dramas. The Chinese do not hunger for episodes of "Slovenija Ima Talent" (Slovenia's Got Talent) or "Top Gear Russia". And media firms have reduced this advantage further by releasing TV shows almost simultaneously in different countries. The second advantage is not as big as it appears either. Unlike music and film, nearly all television is free at the margin: once a household has paid its subscription, it costs nothing to watch another show. The real threat posed by piracy is not that it threatens television's current business model but that it makes building a new one more difficult. Aware of the limitations of advertising-supported online video, European media firms are currently testing micropayments for shows. The wide availability of free illegal alternatives may well crimp these efforts. In this sense the pertinent parallel is not with music or films but with newspapers and magazines. These days print piracy is a trivial issue, since most general news articles are given away free. If newspapers and magazines begin charging people to read their output, the pirates are likely to turn up, and quickly. So it may be with television.

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