For an informed view on connected entertainment in the UK & Ireland, visit Cue Entertainment
The
ability of the Tardis to dematerialise and transport its occupants to another
galaxy has taken Doctor Who to some improbable places in the 48 years since the
series began. Now BBC Worldwide and Softwind Studios have enabled nine
incarnations of the Time Lord to materialise in cyberspace with the launch of a
VOD application for Facebook.
Users may
access the site from the “Doctor Who” Facebook page or go straight to the
dedicated portal, where they will find all the Doctors from William Hartnell to
David Tennant waiting to take them on a journey through time and space. “The
Greatest Show in the Galaxy” with Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor is one of the
featured titles and it might draw the crowds, since it is not available on DVD.
Unlike the
BBC iPlayer, which is free for UK users, visitors to the Facebook VOD site must
pay in advance for their entertainment. Softwind Studio Director Francis Rodino
says that it is one of the first applications to use Facebook credits to
monetise video content: “You go to the site and click to play the video. If you
have no credits, you can purchase them right away in your own currency, using
PayPal or a credit card. It’s accessible to anyone in Europe, North America,
New Zealand and Australia.”
Rodino
worked closely with BBC Worldwide to bring the site to the social network and
overcame several hurdles along the way. He says, “When you work on a project of
this kind, you know there are problems to be solved and not always technical.
Simply registering the BBC as a Facebook provider took time but the rights
issues were the main challenge we had to deal with. There were questions about
the distribution of funds among the royalty holders and the legalities of
distributing content online. The concerns were chiefly about copyright, it was
an achievement to get all nine doctors represented.”
The nine
online stories split into 29 parts cost users 15 Facebook credits for unlimited
viewing over a period of 48 hours. To watch a single story costs less than £1,
while £9.00 buys the 135 credits needed to rent all the episodes on offer in
return for over 13 hours of entertainment.
Rodino
tells Cue Supply Chain that a “Top Gear” VOD service will be available through
Facebook from mid-August and will function in the same way as the “Doctor Who”
page: “It will be another first, monetising whole episodes online, but we are
encountering specific challenges with clearing rights to the audio and music.
We don’t just sit around waiting for approvals though: we get on with getting
the product out there and assume that the solutions will come eventually.”
Rodino
notes that Facebook is little more than an enabler in the process since it is
not about video but primarily about a network of friends. It is not necessarily
the ideal mechanism for distributing VOD content, he says: “They provide the
canvas and the paint but it is up to us to create the VOD service. Ultimately,
we will discover whether Facebook is the right platform to consume video. You
need to put the content out there and try these things. If you don’t try, you
don’t know what is possible: it is an important question that the content
owners themselves must resolve.”
Figures
published on July 29 by internet research company ComScore show that Facebook
accounted for more than 16% of all time spent online in the UK during June
2011, more than any other site. Given the popularity of “Doctor Who”, next
month’s figures could be even higher.
The
delivery of pre-paid video from within the relatively secure Facebook site is
an attractive proposition for content owners who continue to feel threatened by
what they perceive as a poorly regulated environment. Although many will
welcome the victory of the MPA in the High Court, there are doubts about the
viability of any action that BT might take to block the Newzbin2 web site.
If the
High Court ruling is upheld, rights holders will have to obtain a court order
against each infringing site and ensure that it applies to every ISP operating
in the UK. While service providers will cooperate, however reluctantly, the
sites themselves are unlikely to give up without a fight.
It took
just three weeks for Newzbin2 to pop up when the original Newzbin shut down in
May 2010. The MPA and others claim that such Usenet-related sites exist purely
for the purposes of piracy although this was not always true in the past. They
provide an index of the location of illegal files rather than a primary source
of the data and for this reason closing them down will do little to eliminate
the problem.
Newzbin3
or its equivalent will appear as surely as its predecessor did and will require
court action for each clone of the original. As long as the demand exists,
broadband users will seek out such sites whether through online search engines
or via social networks. This is why the BBC Worldwide initiative points the way
to a more effective approach to piracy and makes legal viewing online a simple
and inexpensive matter.
BVA
Director General Lavinia Carey says of the ruling, “The decision underscored
the need to highlight all the legal ways that consumers may access digital
video services. There are currently 44 in the UK from which audiences can
access video content on many different devices, to flourish and grow. This way,
everyone benefits from a healthy video entertainment market.”
Her
comments are timely. In France, IP theft watchdog Hadopi launched a €3.2
million (£2.8 million) print, poster, radio and TV campaign to publicise the
PUR (Promotion of Responsible Use) brand. The PUR certificate of approval,
renewable each year, assures consumers that files downloaded from participating
organisations are legal whether free or paid-for. The advertising has
approached its target of 75% consumer penetration, according to Hadopi.
The
industry-backed initiative began earlier this year and 33 companies have signed
up with more applications in the pipeline. The list includes Amazon,
entertainment store FNAC, Universal Music with its music video service Off TV
and VOD channel Vidéo à Volonté.
PUR is the
carrot planted alongside the stick of disconnection: the “three strikes and
you’re out” rule that claimed its first 10 candidates in June, according to
Paris Match. Hadopi has sent almost half a million warning letters to broadband
users since the introduction of the law in October 2010 but the organisation
presents itself in an educational role for the moment.
If the
French trend towards persuasion rather than prosecution should prove
successful, it could be a lesson for the industry in the UK. To help consumers
identify legal content providers has to be better than threats of disconnection
or blocked sites, which have the inevitable consequence of mistaken
identification and malicious accusations.
Figures
released at the end of July show that for the first time, streaming video from
Netflix in the US exceeded internet traffic from peer-to-peer connections. As
connected TV appears in more and more homes, to access content online will
become commonplace. The legal video streaming habit will be encouraged by the
easy accessibility of content such as “Doctor Who” while Facebook credits could
become the micro-payment currency of the connected world that has been talked
about often but rarely implemented.
The ease
with which Doctor Who and his nemesis the Master can reappear elsewhere in the
galaxy mirrors the activities of illegal sites. They come and go so quickly
that they will always be a step ahead of legal action to block them. By selling
his soul for 15 Facebook credits,
The Doctor might have shown others a legal
and effective way to combat the cyber criminals.
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