Future of TV: Piracy will save production

The transcript of part one of Mark Pesce's speech, "Piracy is Good?" went live on Mindjack a couple weeks ago. It was a thought-provoking piece, but mostly covered old ground, talking about how the Battlestar Galactica had benefitted from SciFi's visionary online free distribution of the video and supplementary material in advance of the broadcast.

But now that part two is up, it's a lot more exciting. Part two is a roadmap of the future of television broadcasting and the economics of TV production. It's got some genuinely visionary material, and it makes it clear that for every loser who gets disintermediated by TV-over-the-Internet, there's a concomitant winner.

The producer has a better chance to reach an audience than ever before, but has no control over how productions reach that audience. If control over distribution could be maintained, if the oligarchy of commercial television broadcasting could consolidate its hold on program distribution, none of this would need to change. But it has already begun to change; the horse has already fled the barn.

The audience is asserting their control over television programming; this is actually a good thing, because the moments for television viewing are expanding in direct proportion to the exercise of this new power. Until very recently, television was an experience which was confined to the lounge room, shackled to a big, heavy box. But now we can watch full-length television programs on our mobile phones (a new capability of the latest generation of mobiles), or on the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP), a high-resolution, widescreen, portable game and media machine, two of the new "must have" items for the younger set.

Part 1, Part 2, Postscript, Torrented video of speech (via Copyfight)