Sunday, November 20, 2011
A Pirate Is Just A Customer You Haven't Earned Yet
In response to
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-brodsky/hollywood-takes-over-the_b_1102119.html
I have been saying for a long time that the movie industry needs to embrace the internet to a much greater extent. Piracy is a problem for many industries, but Napster gave apple a model that would allow them to get around the problem in the music industry. Sure, it’s still a problem. But people are much less resistant to just buying their favourite songs on-line from a simple, maintained, reliable, legal source. Steam did the same thing for game piracy, again, still a problem, but it has been a major step forward.
People are concerned with what is convenient and downloading is easy and convenient. You sit in your home and the movie/game/music is right there. If the movie industry would spend less time whining about what other people are doing and instead take the matter into their own hands and identify the OBVIOUS gaping niche, without all the litigious posturing, they would make a much better go of it.
There is obviously a massive desire for easily accessible movie content directly to homes. These companies would make a fortune if they put up their own website that offered not only their back catalogue of movies for a reasonable price to online buyers but also early release MASSIVE cost promotions. How much would a person have paid to see the second half of harry potter deathly hallows even a week before it was available at the cinema? They could have charged hundreds for tickets rather than $20 or whatever it is American cinemas charge these days.
Apple took Napster and turned it into a massive cash cow creating countless jobs not only in the technology sector but also in the sector they represented. Music. Rebecca Black anyone? Say what you like about her but would anyone have signed that girl? No way. As a result of her mother’s $4000 investment a LOT of money was made for someone with no apparent skill or talent. Because one industry that had previously taken a massive stance against piracy took on board the lessons that the pirate sector had taught them.
Netflix is a great step forward towards this cause, but here's the thing, there are active customers and convenience customers.
Active customers
· Shop for CD's
· Wait up all night outside gamestop for Skyrim to come out
· Go to the cinema for new releases
Convenience customers
· Download music on itunes
· Download games on steam
· Erm... "Acquire" movies
These systems not only create a massive amount of NEW business to these sectors they also give smaller developers/artists/whatever a much more accessible platform to distribute their material, for a profit. How many people would you want to see your home made documentary? Would you like your documentary to net you 1c every time someone simply reads its synopsis? These are REAL options if the movie industry simply got involved in the internet rather than trying to control it.
There will always be pirates. But the "millions" companies lose implies that if the pirate couldn't download it, they WOULD have bought it. This is not always the case. I know a lot of pirates who download stuff just to see if it’s anything they would even be interested in, so how about selling temporary licences for a nominal fee? Temporary but representative trial runs of content. 30 minutes of a movie for a dollar, 9 dollars for the rest of it?
How’s THAT for solution brainstorming? These things are not difficult, they have been shown to work for other similar industries, and also have made those industries obscenely wealthy... It’s time the archaic movie industry got itself into the 21st century.
A pirate is just a customer you haven't earned yet.
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