An Ugly Divorce

Spotify is easily the biggest step in digital media provision and in combating music piracy since Apple’s iTunes. For the purpose of our web feature, Spotify offers the most comparable and pervasive model of media streaming to Netflix (and screen-based streaming alternatives) available in Australia. So comprehensive is Spotify’s service that after signing up to its premium service last week (although I had attempted unsuccessfully to sever the white umbilical chord myriads of times previously), I was finally ready to divorce my beloved Ipod and its collection of music (compiled over painstaking over almost a decade) from my hip and relegate it to stay at home duties. 

It was something that I honestly thought would never happen. I was never (and seemingly never going to be) an iPhone convert due to the fact that its minimal storage space never allowed for a music library comprehensive enough to quench my audiophilia.

 Then Spotify came along. Offline playlists created freely from a library of millions of songs from an amount per month that I would usually spend on a single CD. Where’s the catch?.... unlike iTunes’ DRM-infected mp3s, there is none.  

Naturally, this led me to begin to eye-off my DVD collection with a large amount of portentous lament. It saddened me that the mosaic rectangular plastic adorning my shelf would of little more use than a giant dust gatherer (My newest laptop does not have a CD drive!). 

After some time elapsed and I wiped away my figurative tears, I had prepared myself. As we come nearer and nearer to the online streaming reality of Netflix and other associated foes of the hard-copy disk and broadcast networks, I have pre-acknowledged that, like my music collection, my assiduously compiled decade-old DVD collection had a terminal prognosis.  

Necessary Critiques

Winston Churchill once said, “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary.” This is the attitude we adopted on Thursday as we pitched our web feature to our peers.

There was a positive response to our idea, but concerns were raised as to whether it was too amateurish for Screen Hub.

In response to this, we will strive to use the most authoritative sources possible in our articles, and design the site in a sleek, streamlined and professional manner.

For more information on our pitch, check out our handout!

Sports and Live Content

Netflix streaming was down by up to 25% during the 2012 London Olympics. With Netflix beginning to create its own original content, are sports and live content ways that television will be able to stay ahead?

Staying new and relevant is so important to television programming. At this stage, Netflix and other online streaming services are comprised primarily of old content.

It is also important to remember that the coverage of the recent Olympic games in London was marked by controversy. Much of the outrage in Australia was channelled into the Facebook group Channel 9 Olympics Coverage sucks. Similar criticism was directed toward NBC in the United States for their coverage. The delaying of major events so they could be broadcast during primetime outraged many NBC viewers.

With this in mind, perhaps live content is better suited to online streaming. Will audiences be more satisfied if they are able to stream live content on demand? What will this mean for television?

Kids Programming

Ratings for children’s television station Nickelodeon have recently taken a dive.

 According to a study by Bernstein Research this could be due in large part to content being available on Netflix. They found that children are more likely to re-watch shows they've already seen and are not as strongly enticed by new content as adults are. Furthermore, they found that parents are encouraging their children to use netflix in order to keep them busy. You can read more about this here, here, here, and here.

Despite this, Nickelodeon has renewed its Netflix contract and have denied that this is an issue. Australia creates a large amount of Children’s television content so it’s important that this content is protected. The way different sections of the market respond to online streaming services will be an interesting thing to look at. Perhaps, in the future we will need multiple regulations which apply to different television markets and audiences.

The Globalisation of Intellectual Property

If you read anything online asking why Netflix isn’t in Australia, you will see the same answer repeated: they don’t have the appropriate ‘streaming rights.’

This begs the questions: what are ‘streaming rights’? who are they governed by? and, what happens if they are breached?

Streaming rights appear to be integral to how the online mediascape in Australia will change in the next few years, so this is definitely something which ought to be addressed in our feature.

To further my understanding of this area of law, I set up a meeting with Jeremy Kriewaldt, a partner of the law firm Atanaskovic Hartnell. His explanation was as follows:

JEREMY: Copyright and [intellectual property] law is really all about the same thing, that is protecting the form of a work...Licenses are sold by the producers of a film or TV show to distribute it. The film itself is the intellectual property of the actors, composers, editors, director, but they all signed away their rights to the producers. Licenses cover things from cinema viewings to videotape, or sorry – DVD formatting and release... so that's what these mythical 'streaming rights' are. Nothing special, just ordinary licensing agreements...

Problem with online distribution is that each country has its own copyright laws, and while these have been unified to an extent through the Berne Convention, it’s still a bit of a mess. To really get in there look at the [Copyright] Act and the Convention, that will show you how geographically divided it all is.

Jeremy was very helpful, and a very charming, well-spoken and charismatic man. Our feature website could definitely be more dynamic and engaging if we could include a video interview with him regarding copyright law. This would also make our feature more authoritative – hearing the explanation directly from an expert.

Do you think videos work well in online features? Would you watch it, or skip right on to the next page?

The Catch-Up Effect

Say you've just discovered the intricacies of the meth dealing - science teaching, Walter White in Breaking Bad or the chain smoking, whiskey charm of Don Draper in Mad Men,  you've stumbled across either in a channel flick and the second season is halfway through on your television.

In the days of old you would trundle down to the DVD store and pick up any of the available copies of the previous season...that's if you even made it off the couch, let alone out the front door, before your attention came hurtling back to the latest offering from Harold Bishop and Ramsay St. 

HURRAH! No more! Over the past few years the web savvy and legally 'unconscious' generations have turned to torrenting and online streaming to catch up to shows that would have previously passed them by. The era of the once-off 8pm sit down for the latest installment of Underbelly has been swept away by the knowledge that we can now watch our favorite shows on our time. 

So what is a network to do? 

They rely on guarantees to advertisers that a certain audience share will be met, and thus justify the cost of air time for their product. You would think that with power moving increasingly to the consumer to decide what to watch and when to watch it, such guarantees could become a thing of the past. 

Well it's not all bad news, in fact, services such as Netflix and Hulu which have emerged as the big players in what I would call the beginning of the post-torrent era (with paid low-cost subscription rates), have actually benefited the regular TV ratings of cult shows such as Breaking Bad and Mad Men.

How? 

The recent Bernstein Report on Netflix has termed the phenomenon, 'the catch-up effect' as viewers see later episodes of shows on TV they 'catch up' to the current episode by legally streaming them one after the other through these paid services, bringing them up to date. Alternatively, avid fans can re-watch episodes right up until the newest season premiere on prime time TV,  this effectively secures an audience for the premiere screenings of shows across the stations and as the Bernstein Report maintains, is a definite ratings win for networks. 

What will be interesting to see is how networks will adapt to such a change in Australia. It's likely they will release previous seasons through legal online streaming services much the same way as they have in the US. 

We might even be lucky enough to catch up on all 27 seasons of Neighbours before the next season premieres next year. 

The World Wide - Where?

When I began my search on the legality of online streaming, I did what any self-respecting Internet user would do: I hit up Google.

Unfortunately for me, all the top results were articles and videos detailing how to circumvent the current ban in Australia. This was not particularly helpful.

Stepen Quin and Stephen Lamble wrote of the dangers of relying on Google in their book, ‘Online Newsgathering’. There is so much content on the Internet that much of it will not be picked up by search engines. Rather, I had to turn to the ‘hidden web’ to find material that will point me in the right direction.

AustLii is a portal that allows access to a variety of decisions of State and Federal Courts in Australia. Using a Boolean search (copyright OR “intellectual property” AND internet) I found several cases that will assist the development of our feature.

While there is no case law regarding video streaming, I am working on the assumption that the same principles apply to audio media online. Particularly helpful to my research is Cooper v Universal Music Australia, a 2006 decision of the Federal Court of Australia. It discussed the operation of copyright, licensing and intellectual property rights in the Internet Age. These explanations were very useful, and this case has also given me the names of lawyers in this area of practice who may be available for interviews.

This is a very underdeveloped research area, evidenced by my initial Google search. Our feature will be a real and substantial clarification of a very complex issue. However, research is going to be trickier than I originally thought.

Have you ever experienced problems with Google? How do you find content that search engines don't readily provide? Let me know below!