Some general nonsense and linkage from a bloke who spends his time building websites, moaning about stuff, brewing various types of brown booze, and riding a motorbike.
Piracy (or “How to make money from content in a digital age”)
In a digital world distribution is easy, and as internet access and bandwidth expand the marginal costs of consuming media diminish. With consumption of digital media on the rise, how can content providers secure their revenue streams?
Many content providers will decry the woes of file sharing and piracy, citing the impact on the producers of entertainment media - artists, musicians, sportsmen - all relying on the content providers to buy their wares and distribute them, thus ensuring continued investment in their future.
Unfortunately there is also an increasing sense among consumers that providers are out of step with the way that people actually want to consume the media.
Take a humble CD. I can walk in to HMV and buy a CD that can be played in my CD player, DVD player, computer, car etc. etc. without hindrance, yet if I buy that same content in digital form I am often saddled with restrictive DRM that prevents me from playing it on any more than 5 nominated devices or from transfering it to different storage media as I see fit.
Most consumers don’t think that buying a CD is just buying a physical form of a specific piece of media content, they are buying those songs to listen to as they see fit. That may not be the strict legal situation but it is the human perception.
Secondly there is the issue of convenience.
I want to listen to music and watch movies and TV programmes when it’s convenient to me, in a form that is convenient to me, on a device that is convenient to me. I don’t want to wait for a UK channel to pick up a programme that aired in the states 6 months ago if I can just download it - it’s not a question of malicious piracy or illegal distribution, I just want to watch my favourite programmes - I’m showing them loyalty, not stabbing them in the back.
The problem is one of abundance when large scale content providers are used to scarcity.
They are used to drip feeding us tasty morsels down a limited pipeline over which we have little control or choice. Unfortunately for them they are no longer the only game in town - I can get my media fix from any number of sources, bypassing their scheduled delivery and demographic targetting, skipping their coveted prime advertising spots with gay abandon, and basically just consuming the media in the way that I want to.
The big question for content providers should not be how to defeat peer-to-peer distribution, bespoke media consumption or time-shifting, it should be how to harness it, benefit from it, build on it, and ultimately monetise it.
If they can’t guarantee millions of eyeballs glued to the latest prime-time dramas then the advertisers won’t pay them big fat fees and they won’t be able to pay the content creators their equally fat fees for their content, and they in turn won’t be able to pay Hugh Laurie a squillion dollars an episode to walk with a limp and verbally bitch-slap anyone foolish enough to not be as bright as his character (who I love, by the way - go Greg!), and then less people will tune it to view the stuff… Vicious circle, no?
