Download fantasy final mp3 music

Go on. Admit it. You've done it at least once in your life. You've knowingly paid for pirated multimedia. Or you know someone who has. Maybe it was the first season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer on DVD, or a Best of the Bee Gees CD, or Final Fantasy X for PS2. Or maybe it was something more hardware-based, like having your DVD player reconfigured to ignore regional codes or buying a cable W/satellite descrambler.

Okay. Maybe you haven't. But odds are, you have. [Full disclosure: your reporter admits to once buying a fake Faye Wong CD. And Season 2 of CSI on DVD. Sorry.] Case in point: an instant audience poll during a panel session at the CASBAA (Cable and Satellite Broadcast Association of Asia) conference in Hong Kong this past October asked the following question: "Have you ever purchased, rented or knowingly viewed a pirated video product in the last 12 months?"

Some 63% of the audience responded "yes".

The punch line: the topic of the panel session was pay-TV piracy.

Pay-TV piracy is as old as pay-TV itself, particularly in Asia, where in many markets cable TV operations themselves were either unlicensed or downlinking satellite video channels illegally--practices that still go on today. But it wasn't until last year that CASBAA and CLSA Asia-Pacific made the first serious attempt to quantify the scope of pay-TV piracy in Asia in terms of lost dollars, as well as defining the different types of piracy that cable and satellite companies must deal with.

The report was well-timed. Not only is pay-TV becoming a major force in liberalizing markets where cable/satellite monopolies are getting some competition, it's also being positioned as the next big growth area for telcos aiming for triple-play broadband services. Several broadband players across the region have already cracked their respective pay-TV markets, and piracy issues will affect them just as much as they affect cable operators. The same will be true for mobile operators that adopt broadcast video standards like DVB-H (digital video broadcast for handheld devices) or satellite DMB being developed in Korea and Japan.

How big a problem is pay-TV piracy? Last year, CLSA reported that annual losses from various forms of piracy came to a conservative estimate of $874 million for all of Asia Pacific. This year, according to a report released at the end of October, the number was $970 million--up 11%.

Simon Dewhurst, director and head of media and entertainment investment banking at CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, cautions that this doesn't necessarily mean that piracy is becoming a worse problem, although in some markets it is.

"The figures in the report are estimates, not exact numbers," he says. "The fact that the amount we came up with is 11% higher doesn't necessarily mean the industry is losing more money than last year. It means we've got better at finding where the piracy is. We were much more cautious last year, and even this year's numbers are still conservative."

In fact, says Dewhurst, in a sense the dollar numbers are beside the point. "It's not a matter of operators being out of pocket. This is money that is not being reinvested into the industry. It's not being passed on to the channel providers and the program providers and everyone else in the value chain."

Moreover, Dewhurst adds, the damage from pay-TV piracy also comes from the knock-on impact on things like foreign investment, concerns over IPR protection and even tax losses. There's also the darker side of pay-TV piracy--the fact that some of the money generated by illegal services goes to crime syndicates and terrorist groups.

Beyond black boxes

One key element in pinning down the extent of the pay-TV piracy problem is knowing piracy when you see it. The most obvious facet of piracy is, of course, the consumers who buy descramblers to view cable or satellite TV channels for free. Many in the industry see this as a behavioral issue, in which consumers see cable TV as an entitlement and don't see buying a descrambler as stealing.

"Many people, because of the cultural characteristics in a given market, don't think stealing cable is morally wrong," says David Dea, president and CEO of Taiwan Broadband Communications. "We need to do something about it."

Francis Chang, chair of CASBAA's legal and anti-piracy group, as welt as VP of legal and business affairs for Star Group, says that consumer piracy is a behavior issue based more on economics and ease of access than a desire to stick it to the Big Cable Company.

"Piracy is easy behavior," he says, drawing a comparison between cable piracy and illegal MP3 downloads. "Look at Napster today. There was a survey that asked people if they would rather pay $20 for a CD or download it for free. Most said 'free'. But when they were asked what if they only had to pay one dollar, most said they would pay. So I think most people want to do the right thing, but it comes down to cost benefit analysis."

Many experts say that consumer education about the true nature of piracy would convince many not to do it, although similar campaigns by music companies to counter MP3 downloading have proven strikingly unsuccessful.

CLSA's Dewhurst notes that the industry is perhaps putting too much focus on customer piracy, which is in fact just one element of piracy that only accounted for $154 million in lost revenues this year. He adds that educating the consumer only addresses one aspect of the problem, which is where the customer knowingly does something wrong.

"In other cases, the customer doesn't even know the service is illegal or that the operator is getting their satellite channels illegally," he says.

Indeed, unauthorized operators are costing the pay-TV industry much more money-at least $256 million annually. That includes both operators operating without a license and licensed operators that downlink satellite channels without paying for them.

Other types of piracy include under-declaration of subscribers by operators (typically in an attempt to lower licensing fees from channel operators--$32 million), ad masking (the practice of operators selling local advertising space over advertising already sold by the channel operator--$17 million) and satellite overspill (i.e. pointing your satellite dish in, say, Singapore to a satellite and downlinking channels intended for operators in Thailand--$3 million).

The amount of these types of piracy varies from market to market. For example, Thailand has twice as many illegal pay-TV subscribers as legitimate subs, due mostly to illegal cable systems outside of Bangkok. In the Philippines, unauthorized access by users accounts for 77% of piracy. Taiwan loses $113 million annually to a mix of piracy activities, including unauthorized operators, subscriber under-declaration and ad masking. Hong Kong's piracy mainly comes from overspill and pirated cable set-top boxes.

Interestingly, India's piracy problems are so vast and idiosyncratic that it's a pay-TV piracy category unto itself. It's also by far the largest, logging over $564 million in piracy losses a year--more than all other categories in all other markets combined.

"There's a huge gray market in India where dollars are not being reported by the channel operators, the MSOs or the last-mile operators that actually go door to door and collect the cash," says Dewhurst. "That alone is costing India's pay-TV industry $507 million a year."

One reason India gets its own category, Dewhurst explains, is that the gray market stems from the legacy of how India's the pay-TV market has developed.

"In 1991 during the first Gulf War, CNN ran its Middle east footage using a satellite that sits over the subcontinent. Small cable operators were formed in India to pass those signals on so people could know what was going on. A professional pay-TV infrastructure was later built on top of that, but they found that they couldn't eradicate the old structure, because that's what people were used to, and were forced to adopt the market practices at the last mile."

Not just revenue leakage

While the CLSA/CASBAA report may go a long way in illustrating the scope of the problem, the immediate question is: What can be done about it?

Chang of CASBAA and Star Group admits that fighting piracy will be a question of bringing it down to "an acceptable level" rather than eliminating it altogether.

"I think we have to accept that there will always be piracy," Chang says. "Whether we get it down to an 'acceptable level', well, what's acceptable? It's really a cost-effectiveness issue."

There's also the question of just how serious a problem it is at the end of the day--and just how serious government regulators should be taking it.