The Daily Times

SOPA and PIPA are dead. For now.

Thanks to an organized protest by regular (okay, some of us are a little geeky) citizens, it looks like these draconian bills won’t be coming to a vote in congress for the foreseeable future.

If you’ve been out of the loop, SOPA and PIPA were acts lobbied for primarily by the MPAA with the notion that this kind of legislation is necessary to staunch the piracy that is draining the Hollywood entertainment industry dry. The problem is that the bills do very little to actually stop piracy while opening up enormous holes in the protections ordinary citizens have from overreaching government and corporate interference in their speech and in their daily activities.

What these bills also highlight is how out of touch Hollywood and the rest of the big entertainment industries are with their audiences and the way those audiences access and enjoy their entertainment products.

I’ll admit that not everyone who reads this column is necessarily as geeky as I am, but my home entertainment setup is becoming more popular every day. I don’t have a cable television subscription. Instead I have an Apple TV and a Roku player connected to my living room television set. I have a Blu-Ray player too, but it doesn’t get used a whole lot.

I don’t have a cable subscription because I got tired of paying a company something like $60 a month or more to pipe raw sewage into my living room. Instead I got a fantastic deal on high speed Internet service at a fraction of the cost of cable TV, and I subscribe to Hulu Plus and Netflix. Plus I purchase one or two television shows (ones not available on Hulu) from iTunes as “season passes” each year.

I pay for only the things I want to see. I don’t offer a premium subscription oblation for a ton of cut rate content I don’t want to see.

Except sometimes I can’t.

Last year, I was following a show called “Chuck” on NBC. I was purchasing individual episodes as they were available and watching the show on my own schedule. But one week, the episode wasn’t available. I searched all of the online video stores: Amazon, iTunes, CinemaNow — the episode was nowhere to be bought.

It turns out that the production company or the network or the studio or all three decided that episode wasn’t for sale. It happened again and again with that show. All my attempts to give the entertainment conglomerates money for the products were rebuffed.

It was easier to pirate the content than to buy it.

Because of my aversion to cesspools I didn’t pirate the show. I just stopped watching. So NBC didn’t get to sell my eyeballs to advertisers, and they refused to sell their product to me. I didn’t pirate a single minute of the show, but NBC still lost money and marketshare.

The heart of the problem is that we, the entertainment consumers, are not the entertainment industry’s customers. What the networks and the other big players in the entertainment industry want is a public that can be easily packaged and sold to advertisers. Hollywood isn’t selling a product, they’re selling a demographic.

Now, I’m not against advertising. Advertising can be effective, entertaining and even useful to the consumers. But I’m unconvinced that traditional TV advertising is the only or even the best way to monetize entertainment. The industry needs to work on new and creative ways to serve the audience, which is emerging as its true customer. Things are changing rapidly, whether industry insiders are prepared to deal with it or not.

The audience is no longer the product. Bills like SOPA and PIPA are big entertainment’s last ditch effort to keep consumers bound to an old way of doing business. Instead of backing bad legislation, big entertainment should figure out how to effectively sell its wares directly to consumers.

We want to pay for the entertainment we enjoy. Why won’t Hollywood let us?

Timothy Hankins is a musician, writer, arts critic and regular contributor to Weekend. Contact him at (weekendcolumn@hnkns.com)

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