It’s midnight and you’re bored. You don’t own a TV, so you go to your common room, past loud, drunk floormates to watch the poorly placed TV set, just to have a particularly obnoxious student cry through the lame horror film playing. By now, these cramped dorm rooms, loud common areas, and different interests have pointed out one of the biggest luxuries taken for granted at home: watching TV.
Without superb access to TV, most of us at college resort to watching TV online, subscribing to online websites such as Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu, or frantically trying to find a good streaming website to keep up with our favorite shows. With these new online avenues, the business has also gained the ability to create critically acclaimed original shows, such as House of Cards.
Think about how popular Hulu and Netflix are. These two websites account for just over a third of Internet streaming traffic in North America, with iTunes and YouTube accounting for less than 20 percent. Their popularity, however, is not something completely surprising. The Internet connects 2.5 billion people around the world. By 2016, there will be 31 billion devices connected to the Internet. It’s everywhere, revolutionizing the way we date, share videos, shop, and watch TV.
Now, with content available on the train, bus, and airplane, all that is needed is an Internet-connected device. With the integration of technology and the Internet, the reliance on the internet for TV is growing and the positive effects are promising. It is now available through over-the-top providers such as Netflix. But such providers are not only channels that offer a personalized online watching experiences. They create their own original content, but also revive and relaunch shows that have been cancelled. Fifteen new episodes of Arrested Development were premiered on Netflix in May of this year. Although the popularity of the show had waned since its hiatus, it enjoyed even more success than it had when it was on network TV. Now there are plans to move forward with a movie and fifth season.
Even though the Internet is able to deliver content wherever and whenever we want it, the entertainment industry is scared. The Internet makes TV more interactive. According to research published earlier this year, shows with higher ratings had an impact on what people were tweeting 48 percent of the time and Twitter activity improved live ratings for TV shows by 29 percent. The industry is obviously taking notice of this trend, and shows such as You Be the Judge on NBC have realized the importance of viewer interactions and lets them play a part in expressing their opinions and in judging contestants.
It seems that the future of TV is nothing without our beloved Internet. With all these developments, concerns have arisen inside the entertainment industry regarding piracy and the fear of a decline in their revenue. Two years ago, the Stop Online Piracy Act was introduced with backing from the entertainment industry. It was written to combat copyright infringement by tackling unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison. The legislation was met with an international outcry. Some high-traffic website like Wikipedia even blacked out to protest SOPA’s violation of the First Amendment and potential crippling of the Internet.
Clamping down on piracy online would limit the availability of content to countries where over-the-top providers are available. Netflix, for example, is only available to the Americas, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden and a select few other countries. It’s unlikely that TV will be able to survive without a company that has done so much to revolutionize content and to make the demand for high-quality shows even greater.
The benefits of transitioning online far outweigh the dangers of content theft. The industry should stop fearing the change from entertainment on a TV set to online entertainment.
Though piracy is a real issue, there are many more benefits that could come from embracing the transition to and perfecting of the immediate, personalized, on-the-go means of accessing entertainment. Engineers could build a system that provides constant entertainment and, therefore, constant revenue. The industry should adjust to the new means of providing content, join up with these over-the-top providers, and finish constructing one of the biggest changes entertainment has ever seen, instead of pushing for measures to fight and punish the petty piracy crimes.
