Sep 23
Last night Liz and I discovered that for some reason the first episode of the new Bing Bang Theory, our premium "watch together" show, hadn't been recorded. No problem, we just flicked on AppleTV, went to the TV section and.... couldn't find it anywhere.
Infact there was no sign of season two either, just season one. Very odd. (next-day googling reveals that Warner Bros are withholding it from online distribution to try and increase the value of the show for syndication).
This of course led to a small dilemma. Missed show, no scheduled repeats, no way to buy it online or watch it in Hulu/CBS.com. Hmm. In this day and age do content providers REALLY think people will wait for the repeats/syndication/dvd? I mean really?
No of course not. Instead they* head over to somewhere like The Pirate Bay or the other zillion torrent sites and grab the episode for free. The content owners lose out on the money people were willing to pay (or advertisements to watch), and viewers have to go through a bit of hassle to obtain a copy of variable quality (although one that's almost always better than SDTV).
Nobody wins, aside from the torrent sites with all the advertising. It's quite sad really.
*(by they I mean everyone else, and this is not at all what I did...)
