THE MUSIC INDUSTRY CLAIMS to have lost millions of dollars in revenues over the past few years due to peer-to-peer trading of songs over the Internet.
Now, television and movie producers are concerned that their industries could also be hit hard through online file-sharing of shows and movies through such software programs as BitTorrent and Videora. Just who is doing this downloading and why?
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IAN IS A 17-YEAR-OLD TORONTO high-school student who has been fixing computers since he was 12 and is acknowledged by his family and friends to be a technological whiz kid.
He spends four to five hours a day on his computer learning about and researching technology, uploading and downloading, and chatting with friends on his MSN Internet messaging service. His personally customized computer has four hard drives and two video cards to make it faster and give it a larger memory to download more efficiently.
Ian has a network cable running from the computer to his TV so that he doesn’t have to look at everything on his monitor. He’s even been known to watch movies on his IPaq personal digital assistant (right).
"Most people don’t know that you can put movies on phones,” explains Ian. “They can’t figure it out. I download and recode for a smaller screen."
Ian belongs to a very exclusive members-only FTP underground source site that works on a trading credit system requiring a minimum of 10 gigabytes of downloading and uploading activity per day to stay on. His membership has given him increased status among his friends, as there’s a high cool factor in being one of the fastest downloaders in cyberspace. He can download a show from a source site at a rate of 10 megabytes per second using all of his wired gear (left), and will often watch it before it airs on TV.
“It’s a race for me,” Ian enthuses. “I can’t wait. When the race starts, I get a kick out of it.” Interestingly, the thrill that Ian gets from downloading a show is often greater than the enjoyment he derives from it.
"Movies are just not that great,” he says. “I download and may not even watch it." Such is Ian’s addiction that he’ll download a program in a lower grade and watch it an hour before the release of the higher
quality version, just so he can claim to be one of the first people to have watched it.
Despite all of this activity, Ian still goes to the theatre to watch movies and purchases DVD box sets of his favourite TV shows, saying that they provide extra features that are eliminated by source sites in order to compress files. Ian isn’t concerned with piracy and feels no guilt or responsibility regarding his uploading and downloading activity and sees it as a game that’s intimately tied to his social esteem among his peers.
"Other people want their favourite shows, and I have them,” he reasons. “Everyone wants them. I’ll burn them, but will never sell them."
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Ed Note: This article, by Steve McLean, is reprinted by permission from the Fast Forward Newsletter, a publication of Solutions Research Group. www.srgnet.com.
Ian’s case study comes from a new effort SRG calls "Technology in the Home and On the Go – Living Lab." It was inspired by the desire to gain a better understanding of consumer usage of and behaviours towards new entertainment and communications technologies and products. “We achieved this through in-depth interviewing and photographic tour of spaces (e.g., home, home office, the car),” says SRG’s president Kaan Yigit.
Particular emphasis was placed on exploring how the convergence of technologies plays out within the home environment and how the new communications and entertainment technologies are changing consumer expectations and attitudes.
SRG visited 40 households in four Canadian markets and conducted in-depth interviews with four early adopter and influencer segments about the emerging digital ecosystem including: TV, PVRs, VOD, HD, mobile video, portable music, broadband, on-demand, the "always-on" culture, video games, wireless and home networking
The study is now complete and results are being compiled. The insights will be available in a number of different formats along with directed workshops. The case study from Ian is one of these 40 interviews. Ian belongs to a small but influential segment of Canadians who "adapt" technology for their own and their friends or families’ needs.
SRG’s annual trend research program Fast Forward keeps track of the evolution of the digital culture in Canada and its newly-launched Digital Life America does the same thing among American consumers.
For more, go to www.srgnet.com.
