Five Servos of Seperation - Kevin Bacon Goes to China

Continuing what appears to be a vague Transformers theme to my recent posts… for the second time in a week, the new episode of Transformers: Animated has “dropped early,” or as TFW2005’s news post so tactfully put it:
Once again, Cartoon Network and Turner Broadcasting have succeeded in leaking another upcoming episode of Transformers Animated.
Passive aggressiveness aside, as a lifelong Transformers geek, this is a bit distressing. The current TV series– widely regarded as the best thing Transformers has done in over a decade– has been relegated to Timeslot Hell by the network airing it. And why not? TF’s viewership is less “sticky” than other Cartoon Network series (tending to tune in just for this show) and while CN wants to target a demographic that skews older, the show is widely downloaded by that demographic since they have no desire to get up in the wee hours of the morning to catch new episodes.
Cue a positively-reinforcing cycle of downloading depressing ratings with results in a bad timeslot, which encourages more users to download.

Are you being served?

Cartoon Network allows users to view the episodes online via their website– a few weeks after their premiere, so as not to depress ratings. In theory this encourages viewers to watch the episodes when they’re broadcast instead of online.
In practice it really just make the online video service completely irrelevant, it is tasked itself to “reruns,” not premieres. Youtube doesn’t have an arbitrary imposed blackout period on new episodes, so people watch it there instead, an hour after they’re broadcast.

At least, that’s the normal state of affairs. Recently however you’ve been able to watch the episodes on Youtube before they’re broadcast. Cartoon Network uploads the episodes several days or weeks before their premiere, and simply doesn’t “hook them up.” By changing a few episode numbers by hand– viola!
No, actually, it’s even worse than that. Because you can’t watch the episodes through Cartoon Network’s player (which includes matrix to track viewership,) you can only download the files directly with no advertisements, and no way for CN to know someone is watching.

This is distressing from a security standpoint (the files should not be downloadable at all, let alone for yet-to-premiere episodes,) but more dishearteningly from a systems standpoint– because the CN video player backbone already has in place has a very simple mechanism built into it that would prevent this sort of thing… they simply choose not to use it. (I decompiled their player code last night to check, it’s there!)

Channels of Distribution

What does piracy mean in practical terms? When the episode dropped early I uploaded copies of the .flv files onto my own server for a friend in Canada, since the Cartoon Network site is geo-locked for United States visitors only. From there is gets murkier– a hidden copy of the link was posted on an internet message-board, when very few people seem to have noticed it. But analyzing my server logs, I can see a series of people accessing those files with no referring URL, which means they got the link instant-messaged to them from someone– like a game of “telephone.”
Two hours after I uploaded the files for one guy in Canada, a link to my server was posted on a Chinese message board, and there are suddenly have several Chinese Transformers fans downloading it from me. …Oops.
10 hours (and a signifigant chunk of my monthly bandwidth allotment) later, that’s trickled down to nothing. The episode finally made its way to Megaupload, and from there to Torrent sites (the reverse of the usual pattern!) where much vaster numbers of people will download them. I have no idea if the versions being uploaded came from my server, or via someone else independently exploiting the same security flaw. It’s about 50/50 odds either way– one badly secured file was “transformed” into 30,000+ downloads in the span of about 10 hours. The episode won’t air for another 24.

That’s slower than usual. Usually it only takes 3 hours.

Is There Life on Mars?

The music industry spent a decade fighting the idea of digital music before embracing it– with restrictive Digital Rights Management. They’re now slowly coming to terms with the fact they have to give that up too– because by the time they came around, the consumers had already embraced devices that made that way of doing things a restrictive nuisance.
Television fought the same battles– and is now finally grudgingly releasing their content on sites like Hulu, generally under the same “watch the episodes after a blackout period” system, kneecapping their content in the name of protectionaism for their broadcast advertizers.
And as-can-be-expected, because viewers want to see them NOW, a network has spring up for encoding and distributing the episodes hours after their air– “Fuck your blackout period.”
These pirated episodes, unlike the ones on Hulu.com, have no advertisements whatsoever. If Hulu offered the episodes the same time that they aired… there would be no pirate network. (Or at least it would be very small.)

So the question really becomes… how can the networks sell ad-space on a pirated television show when the people doing the piracy cut out ads?

I argue “yes,” but that’s a subject for another time.