I was just countering Holly’s proposition of “prosecuting” people. If they want to cut down piracy, they’ll have to come up with something. But that something is certainly not “prosecuting”, it’s figuring out how to get shows to the entire world at the same time and making money with it.

Fox and all networks license shows themselves to other countries. With those rights currently (in almost every case) are the digital rights. So if Fox sells “House” to a company in Germany, Fox doesn’t have the right to “stream” House to German Internet users.

It’s on the foreign rights holders to figure out the digital strategies locally. Fox isn’t best positioned to sell advertising in those countries either anyway, so it makes far more sense for the networks to do it the way they are doing it. That’s not to say the model will not change, but at least in terms of $$$, I’d say Fox makes the “untapped” money by selling the rights to its shows.

At some point if the networks think they can make more money by keeping the digital rights and getting into selling digital advertisements internationally than they can by licensing the rights it may change. I don’t see it on the horizon though.

A quote: “The shows are also heavily watched using digital video recorders and on the Web, which makes it difficult to know what their real audience is, Mr. Beckman said.”

The thing is, Fox did a good first step, all Terminator related videos except the full episodes themselves are available internationally now. And as I said above, they do look at web viewing numbers (the legal ones). But whether that will factor in in any renewal decisions… well, as a Terminator fan, I hope it does.

What these numbers show, and it’s what Anthony probably wanted to say, is that there is huge interest in these shows, which is contrary to what the Nielsen system says.

Oh and one final remark: no matter how many times certain people say “stealing”, it won’t make it true. Copyright infringement is not stealing.