They know, and nobody does anything about it

The ancien regime, in its latest coup in the hopeless war against progress took down Megaupload and Megavideo, which were among the largest file sharing websites there are.
Of course, there are plenty of others. But today, while trying to get my daily dose of on-demand TV series on iwatchnetwork.eu I realized that the Megaupload assassination must have sent a wave of shock through the web.
Since Megavideo and many others do not work very stable under Linux I had switched my attention to two much smaller hosters, videoBB and Videozer. Usually there are plenty of links to the series episode I currently want to watch, and usually they work. But today I was shocked to find out that NONE of them worked, neither for the newest episodes nor for very old ones (which tend to be off the focus of the copyright-protector-file-deleters) Even links that had worked the day before suddenly only showed “This file has been deleted by the user” (of course, the user…)
That was a very quick reaction and it was done so completely that is set me thinking. I mean, given, if I had such a website I would have immediately started deleting illegal files so the governments of the western countries don’t slaughter me like they slaughtered Megaupload. But this must take a while, especially if you consider that these websites probably only employ a handful of staff. So what is the conclusion? To me it looks like they knew very well that 99%+ of the files they were hosting were illegal. How could they not know that anyway ? But they must have been prepared, maybe kept them all in a specific server directory which could be easily turned off to take it offline. One single click and you are off the grid.

Clever, and good for them. Bad for me.

I am not getting tired of saying it – the media industry has completely missed the turn of the century, and they are completely unaware of the opportunities and the necessities the internet brings. I would love to watch my TV series legally (and therefore always available) but where can I do that? Sure, there is Hulu, which once was praised as the future of media consumption. There are others that followed this example. But it is all in United States. Here in Singapore, as in Europe, or wherever, one still has to rely on pirated content. Fighting piracy without replacing it with a legal alternative is majorly unfair, and even more so it is fruitless. In June last year, the German government took down a very successful website that collected links to illegal movies and series. Two weeks later, it was there again. Not that Germans love the illegal, in fact we tend to stick to laws and rules more than most other countries, but what is the alternative? Especially in my home country the big TV companies can not be counted on. They do have online portals where you can watch their content – but it is all crappily dubbed and only available years after the original aired in the US (which is typically the home country of the series we are watching) No alternative, so what can you do? For some reason I still don’t understand, the big media and production companies still fail to see this. They should fire their marketing staff, every single one of them.

It’s not that it doesn’t work. Of course a company must generate profit, and they can, very well. For years already, the producers of South Park have put the show’s episodes online – for everyone in the whole world. Even in Germany they are available in English, besides the dubbed version.
Obviously this works, and obviously they make profit with it. Of course they have some commercials, but still far less than they do on TV. It’s only fair to have commercials.
Secondly, try to find South Park on those illegal streaming sites – you won’t. There is no need to host them illegally as they are available legally. Even on YouTube you have a hard time finding anything.
And last but not least, I believe that the popularity of the show has increased ever since it was available online. Of course it has – just today, after trying in vain to watch first Family Guy, then Big Bang Theory, The Office and How I Met Your Mother, I went to my last resort: South Park. Even though I have seen every episode dozens, if not hundreds of times, I keep watching it, simply because it is the only source of this form of entertainment available at this time.

I am simply amazed that no other film company has tried to follow this obviously good example. Not a single one. I just don’t understand why…

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