Stokes: Seven must adapt to illegal content sharing

Seven Network director Ryan Stokes has admitted that the television network is lost as to how to stop the proliferation of its content - both local and licensed - via peer-to-peer networks and YouTube.

Stokes told the Broadband and Beyond Forum in Sydney today that content creators “will need to adapt to this new environment”.

“It does start to change how we look at broadcast windows and timeframes,” he said.

“We’ve explored bringing those windows forward. But at the end of the day, we don’t know how to stop [peer-to-peer impacting on the business].”

Stokes believed bringing broadcast windows forward was particularly important for programming that targeted younger audiences.

He said the challenges caused by peer-to-peer and video sharing sites affected both content acquired from overseas sources and also locally-generated content.