Last year I used the term "the tyranny of digital distance" when talking about the oddity of a number of geographically-based distribution decisions in the face of the potential for high-speed digital distribution. I cited Ron Moore's commentary podcasts as an example since I could get the podcasts within minutes of their release, but had to legally wait almost a year for the episodes that accompanied them to appear on Australian television.
The term "the tyranny of distance" was used by Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey to describe the geographic gap between Australia and the centres of the Western world (US, UK) and how this divide played a fundamental role in shaping the Australian psyche and character.
Nowadays, geography has been supplanted by an almost instantaneous information network, shrinking the time and conceptual distance between places. The tyranny of digital distance occurs insomuch as the potential and, indeed, expectation of synchronous global culture (at least for English-speaking countries) leads to a constant state of delay and annoyance when the promise isn't met.
The tyranny of distance was geographic with cultural effects. The tyranny of digital distance occurs when the geographic has been replaced by the digital. The age-old national boundaries to legal media distribution will very soon lead to more and more people circumventing those legal limits unless big media admits that dividing the pie up in terms of national licenses (or the ridiculous DVD region zones) no longer makes sense when information is moving at the speed of light!
The webisodes illustrate this point even more clearly. An arbitrary decision by NBC Universal studio executives has suddenly made Australian and other BSG fans feel ostracized from the officially recognised BSG fan community. Thankfully, fans themselves will always find a way if studios won't.
The Battlestar Galactica team has often shown insight when respectfully dealing with fans everywhere. It would do NBC Universal well to listen to Moore and the show's creative team and let the fans everywhere enjoy the webisodes. This would reinforce an international sense of shared media fandom rather than the tyranny of digital distance.
Article comments
1 - Paul
Battlestar Season 3 will now air the day after in Canada. So it REALY makes no sense that we're being cut out from the web episodes.
2 - Dominic Kelly
You can watch the webisodes through aol's browser
3 - orangeguru
I personally was so annoyed about these 'limits' that I refuse to be a BSG fan anymore. I have no problems paying for good content, but I dislike being treated like a paying sheep just to satisfy international deals and greedy tv execs making the best out of it. It's we the fans who make something a success, watch the shows, buy the dvds and create the buzz ...
4 - Tama Leaver
@orangeguru: I think it's important to keep in mind that reading between the lines the creative forces behind BSG (ie Ron Moore et al) have little say when it comes to the decisions made by NBC Universal about supporting material etc. beyond the 'show' in the classic sense. I'm sure Ron Moore wants it to be an international webisode audience ... and I don't think giving up on BSG because of decisions made by people holding the purse strings would achieve anything at all! A strongly worded letter to an NBC Universal exec would probably achieve a lot more!
5 - Snarkattack
That Blainey phrase is gold - damn I hope I remember it!
On a more flippant note, 'webisode' sounds like something edible, or like a cool new soft drink. Mmm.
6 - chromatical
Technically, anyone outside the US who watches the episodes before they're aired in their home country or the DVDs are released there is doing so illegally. I can't blame them - if I lived elsewhere, I'd be downloading dozens of TV shows. The current international distribution model is outdated and ridiculous, yes, and I'm all for opening the markets through iTunes or other online media. But saying international fans are "owed" the webisodes is tricky when much of that fanbase is built upon BitTorrent; the fans buying those DVDs and tie-in merchandise are most likely doing so after having seen the episodes elsewhere.
To put it another way... you mentioned the Tardisodes. I became a Doctor Who fan via downloading, long before SciFi bought the US broadcast rights. Yeah, I was getting the episodes illegally, and though I enjoyed all the bbc.co.uk promotional freebies, I accepted that I couldn't see the Tardisodes on their site because I wasn't part of their intended audience.
While the BSG webisodes do contain new, original content, they're primarily intended as an advertisement for the new season. I'd love for all my non-US friends to be able to see them via SciFi Pulse, but I can understand why the network is solely targeting their potential broadcast audience. Here's hoping that they choose to get rid of the geographic restrictions once the season begins.
(Despite how this sounds, I'm not anti-Torrent. I have hundreds of .avis on my computer and DVD-Rs. I'm just trying to look at this from the business angle.)
7 - Tama Leaver
@chromatical: I take your point about a strictly legal view today. I guess, I'm trying to look at two things: (1) that as Moore and the BSG team have put so much effort into putting a global public face on the production of BSG via blogs, podcasts and videoblogs, it seems something of a slap in the face now to draw a line in the digital sand and say "the production values of this online content is higher therefore we're restricting it"; and (2) I think BSG really should be used as a test-case for a different distribution, one which is in keeping with the massive online presence BSG has - either current via legal or other sources.
In Australia, for example, season 2 started 9 months after BSG in the US and went straight to a 11pm timeslot. The season 2 DVD was available for sale here in the first week of S2 on TV (showing that the TV sales happened regardless of the availability of the content via other means). If BSG was available via direct-download (either via iTunes or some other source) in Australia within a few days of the US release, I'm pretty sure that the show's owners would make MORE off BSG that way than in the little they can get from Channel 7 here for broadcast rights. On top of that, the DVDS - with their lovely extras - still seem to sell remarkably well despite people already owning digital copies in the US (a la iTunes).
(Incidentally, I'm curious about the Tardisodes: they worked just fine here in Australia, but we got Doctor Who some six months later than the UK. Perhaps part of the 'sales' of Who to the US included the rights to exclusively re-distribute related online content??)
8 - hierohero
awesome point! being an australian we are constantly being blokced out of content and quality shows..many that will never be screened here or available for purchase on dvd.its a disgrace.
9 - Toliman
it will remain a retarding factor in distribution, advertising, sales and promotion if television companies cannot embrace and get along with setting up distribution chains to international markets via the internet.
digital broadcasting enables a cheap way to get the audience and the advertising revenues together over different means and different channels. it all travels in compressed mpeg-2 streams for digital cable and FTA DVB, that can easily be cut and fed to international sales partners without having to rebrand every time it travels over an ocean eg. dancing with the stars, 'country goes here' idol, etc.
the biggest hurdle is the stoic yet misguided idea that the content of broadcast material remains secure and immobile after it is sent out to millions of viewers, and that online viewers are satisfied with postage stamp sized medium resolution clips for a fee. the genie cant be put back in the bottle, and marketing the next few seasons of television is going to face a problem when advertisers find out people aren't watching their ads, theyre watching it online for free and without their precious ads.
if advertisers were serious, they would embrace the idea of international peer distribution and tack on their ads to international and local digital content providers & distributors, set up franchise locations to tack local ads onto international content and bypass the local tv and cable distributors that require too many content restrictions.
the argument that remains is that streaming 'live' content over internet channels remains a significant problem due to 'pesky' and 'innocently naive of business' net neutrality and a terrible lack of standards to regulate and isolate portions of the internet to distribute digital TV in a secured medium.
so while the large media companies dither and get around to selling postage stamp sized versions of their videos that take 5x longer to download than to watch, the audience that distributors like NBC, WB, SciFi, Showtime are trying to approach (for luring the advertisers & content distributors like time warner cable, fox, etc.) are ignoring the futile efforts on places lik iTunes Store and simply, distributing it themselves, pushing and promoting the content for free in a watchable, publically accessible high definition (480p to 576p) format they just cant get locally.
if tv companies want to get ahead of the problem of ip theft, they can either go after it like the mpaa/riaa in an unsuccessful, bumbling fashion, or just go directly after the cause, that the people in new markets need the same old products and new products, and will go wherever and to whomever is selling it.
10 - kazza
I think everything that is being said about tv shows being behind in Austrilia is so right and I get very sick of how long it takes and the late time slots we have to put up with, but just one thing, Battlestar Galactica is on Ch 10 not Ch 7.
11 - Tama Leaver
@kazza: Quite right, channel 10, not channel 7! (My bad in an earlier comment...)
12 - rg
hi, well i just wanted to say i live in portugal and here well.. no bsg not even season 1...
so.. there is only one way..
and i ask you this.. why cant i see bsg i'm no less then any other person.. just because i was born here, there must be some law of equal rights saying it's wrong..
13 - adrian
The secret is to subscribe to itunes with a US credit card. One thing that pissed me off though, is that ITS TAKING TOO LONG to get the new season 3 episodes on itunes!!!!!!!!!!! IT STILL ISN'T on itunes!!!!!!
14 - Tama Leaver
@adrian: I don't think the US Credit Card for US iTunes Store is a secret ... it's just something many of us outside the US can't get!
15 - MC
I wonder if BSG season 3 is not going to be released on iTunes at all. Some kind of conflict between Sci Fi and Apple?
16 - adrian
well, they released the free pre-season vid so why not the rest?
17 - peaston
Hmmm...I just moved to Asia. I guess I'll have to create a VPN connection to my sister's computer in the USA to watch this stuff. I only just learned the frustration that so many folks outside the US experience. Not only the NBC webisodes, but Amazon's new video content. Luckily I can buy material from iTunes here.
It is ridiculous that that I have to go through such lengths to get content legally...and I always thought the draw of Bittorrent was folks being to cheap too spend a few bucks.
18 - Convict
Australia just launched scifi channel on the only cable/sat network foxtel. I thought great we will get season 3 and I will be able to get involved in the buzz with the rest of my net friends but alas its just season 2. I'll probably just bittorrent it then buy the dvd when it comes out like i did with season 2. But adsl is 10 years behind US too I have a 10g limit :)
Im really angry but don't want to pirate it cause the creators deserve the money, there must be another way for the masses to apply pressure for change. Lets all put $1 in my bank account and ill start a true global broadcasting company ok make that $100 each News Limited is pretty big.
This is the best written TV show to come out of the US since MASH (ok Friends was pretty cool too) well done to all involved in making BSG and also making scifi a whole lot less nerdy.
19 - Jake
What logical or business reason would NBC have for taking down the youtube copies? They are effectively getting free publicity, and free bandwidth. As for copyright issues, no viewers paid for the webisodes in the USA, so why should they care?
Sure, they get to choose who they show it to, but why would you bother?
In simplest terms: why does NBC gain from restricting global interest in their programming?