Kill Everything: April 2010

(An open letter to CBS and their lawyers.)

Dear CBS,

My Internet Service Provider, Rogers, informs me you caught me stealing the TV show, Nurse Jackie. Sorry about that. I plead guilty – with an excuse.

I don’t own a TV. I don’t want to own a TV. I don’t want to pay for cable. I watch everything on my computer. I represent a growing number of people. Each year, more and more people realize that they don’t actually use their TV anymore. At best, they link their televisions to their computers. It’s obvious that the Internet is eventually going to replace television completely. No one thought the Internet would kill newspapers – now no one questions it. Television is destined to meet the same fate.

The easiest way for me to watch TV shows on my computer is to illegally download them. You are competing with pirates, and the pirates are winning. Why? Because they provide me a better service than you do.

I genuinely don’t want to illegally download shows. For starters, downloading torrents is slow and annoying. Secondly, I strongly believe in financially supporting creative output that I enjoy – music, movies, television shows, books, comic books, etc.

Why do the commercial TV options fail me?

Each of the various TV companies insist on having complete control of their shows. This means that they only stream their shows on their own websites. So I find myself needing to keep track of many different websites. (Which network shows CSI again? I can never remember.) This gets doubly tricky for me, because most American websites don’t stream in Canada, where I live.

In your email to me, asking me to not illegally download Nurse Jackie, you informed me I can watch complete shows on CBS.com. No, I can’t – your form letter is wrong. I’m in Canada, and all your streams are blocked to Canadians. Same goes for Hulu, Comedy Central, and many other popular streams available online in the USA. Which is extremely frustrating.

“In Canada, Comedy Central Videos are available on The Comedy Network.”

Great – so instead of seeing the 5 minute Daily Show clip embedded in an article, I now have to go to the Comedy Network, find the show that clip was taken from, and watch the entire episode? Fat chance. Instead I will just get angry and frustrated.

I actually had to go through this process recently for a Saturday Night Live skit. Someone posted a clip on YouTube. Oh, it’s gone – NBC complained about the copyright violation.

"Don’t worry," someone told me. "You can still see it on Hulu."

You know, unless you’re in Canada. I eventually found the clip buried on GlobalTV.com, after much effort.

Back to Nurse Jackie. I can’t view it on CBS.com. So where do I go? Well, who is broadcasting Nurse Jackie in Canada? I have no idea. It’s not like CBS has one single Canadian company broadcasting all of their shows. Instead, each TV show’s distribution rights are sold to many different Canadian stations. So, feeling guilty thanks to your email and wanting to do the right thing, I have to do a search.

It turns out Nurse Jackie is on The Movie Network. Great. Yet another TV company website to decipher.

Visiting TMN’s website, I quickly discovered they are only streaming the premiere episode of Nurse Jackie, season 2. Nothing else. So they are useless to me. Evidently only subscribers to the channel have access to web streaming. Wow. So it would appear there is no legal streaming source for Nurse Jackie in Canada.

As a Canadian consumer, wanting to do the right thing, now what am I supposed to do? You tell me.

Are you starting to understand why piracy is more convenient?

I have money in my hand, and I’m looking around the Internet for the product I want, and it’s just not for sale. This is a situation I find myself in regularly. I want to download a digital copy of an album, but the musician is only selling CDs. I want to pay to download a videogame, and the company insists on sending it to me in a box. I want to watch a streaming TV show, legally, and no one is streaming the show.

In all of these cases, the pirates are standing right next to me, whispering, “You want that video game? You want that music? You want that TV show? Here you go. No charge.”

Fast, convenient, easy to find. They do it better than you.

And then you catch me, and you quite rightly say that I’m doing something wrong. I know it’s wrong. I want to do the right thing. I genuinely do. But you have made it so impossible for me to do so.

Okay, sure. I could buy Nurse Jackie on iTunes -- if I want to re-watch season 1. Where's season 2? Oh, sorry. It's not for sale yet. Why not? Presumably it's because The Movie Network people are controlling assholes.

But let's say I want to watch season 1 again. I could. But do I really want to pay $4 a show for a show I’m going to watch once, then delete? Maybe. The price isn't too high. While Nurse Jackie is a great show, I don't want to watch multiple times. Why should I have to pay the same price as someone who will keep that show forever and ever, amen?

(There’s an added wrinkle to the iTunes situation. Sometimes shows playing in the United States aren’t picked up by stations in Canada. When that happens, they don’t appear on iTunes and they aren’t streamed anywhere. Would you still slap me on the wrist if I illegally downloaded a show then? Of course you would!)

Lately, I do find myself watch streaming shows on legal websites. For example, I watch a few different programs on CTV.ca and GlobalTV.com – Survivor, The Amazing Race, and others. In exchange for watching the program the legal way, I get to watch the same commercial five times. Do companies really pay for this kind of advertising? Aren’t there marketing studies which indicate that overexposure to an ad can actually be harmful, in the end?

It seems very strange to me that I get to watch a show for free, by seeing the same ad five times, for a product that I will never, ever buy. Still, it’s a small price to pay for a show streamed to me.

This is the struggle and frustration I go through to watch a show the legal way.

Just to remind you, in the case of Nurse Jackie, there is NO LEGAL WAY for me to watch season 2 on my computer. None.

Now let's compare this to the illegal alternative – the website eztv.it, for example. I’m sure you know all about that website.

I go to EZTV, and there’s a simple drop down menu that lists all the TV shows available. The listing includes shows from all the different networks across the planet. CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, BBC, CTV, and more. I don’t have to remember 10 different websites, each with their own unique structure, each streaming their own collection of shows. I can quickly bring up Nurse Jackie and get a list of every episode of Nurse Jackie currently available. I can also see what shows were uploaded over the past few days, and thus keep track of the shows I want to watch.

“Oh look! A new episode of Nurse Jackie was just uploaded yesterday! I’ll be sure to grab that!”

Peer-to-peer downloads are slow. I have to plan my TV watching ahead. It would be much more convenient to have a site that streams shows on demand. But we already know what happens when I try to do that.

So... Where does this leave me?

I told a friend of mine about the email you sent my ISP. How I got caught stealing.

My friend said, “Dude – don’t surf the Internet without a condom on.”

And he sent me an URL to a product that would hide my ISP when I illegally download stuff.

There. Problem solved. I can illegally download shows, and you can't catch me.

But that still sucks. I genuinely want to pay. I do. Putting on this "cloak of invisibility" is just another step in the ever escalating battle between consumers and producers. If I hide, you guys will never learn.

So I find myself at a crossroad. I want to do the right thing and watch shows legally. On the other hand, the system currently in place is so inconvenient, so convoluted, so broken, it’s next to impossible for me to obey the law.

Comedian Marc Maron complained that we find ourselves “between paradigms”, and how this is a terrible place to be. Twenty years from now, all of these matters will be cleared up. Until then, we’re stuck in the mire of unresolved issues. Information wants to flow freely across borders, but the corporations are still trying to find ways to stop that flow. TV companies are still clinging to old rules, old paradigms.

CBS, you're telling me, “Don’t steal our show! Do the right thing!”

THERE IS NO WAY FOR ME TO DO THE RIGHT THING. Nurse Jackie is not being streamed anywhere in Canada. I can't buy the show on iTunes. I can't watch it on your website.

Still want to punish me?

Please, please hurry up and fix the paradigm.

Sincerely,

Nikolaus Maack