It wasn't surprising to me how many hands shot up in the class when I asked who pirates music, media, computer programs, etc. More than half, maybe more, if the kids were more honest. Nobody wants to admit to piracy.
I brought up the subject of it because recently the RIAA and the MPAA want to install government controlled snooper software on everyone's computers to track and automatically delete it. That is scary stuff. Big brother is looking after you.
So, why is the RIAA and MPAA going after this kind of programing? A lot of it is attributed to economics and bad PR for the RIAA and MPAA. Remember when they sued single mothers and 15-years for pirating music? Yeah, that didn't pan out for them, in the long run.
The RIAA and MPAA has failed to understand that the basic rule of supply and demand as radically changed with the surge of digital medias and mediums. I found this video that explains it a little better since I am not an economist and only took one course in high school:
So, physical media is expensive and digital is cheap. There is no such thing as scarcity anymore. Example of this is I want the new Death Cab For Cutie CD and there are only 2,000,000 CD made of it. It would makes sense for the publisher to set a price based on that there are only 2,000,000 CD available in the USA. But, iTunes/Amazon have made that number from 2,000,000 to infinity. There will never be a lack of it because it's in digital form.
The landscape is changing. Warner Brothers is one of those companies that I applaud and despise. Warner Brothers took a great step forward by offering new release popular movies in a Blu-Ray/DVD/Digital Copy form. That way, I get my movie and a copy for my iPhone as well. And if I didn't have a blu-ray player, I would be ready with one. One of my biggest complaints about physical media, especially movies and TV shows, is I don't want to pay twice for the same material. If I buy a copy of The Office, Season 2, on DVD for, let's say, $30. I don't want to have to pay for it again on iTunes for another $30. I've already paid the artist/studio/publisher their rights to own it.
This gets into property rights of each medium, but it also explains why I have so many friends that will pirate the last season of LOST because they have it on DVD, they bought it, but they don't have it for their iPod.
I said that Warner Brothers also took a step back. Netflix has come into an arrangement with pretty much each studio now to delay new releases of movies for 30 days. Example: Sherlock Homes hit store shelves March 30th. It won't be available for rental from Netflix until April 30th. In return, Netflix has received a lot more movies and TV shows for their Instant streaming service, but that is another example of the studios trying to create supply and demand. They don't want you to just rent, they want you to own. And now, Netflix, when they do get the DVD, it's a bare bones DVD. I recently watched The Informant and Where The Wild Things Are. Both Blu-Rays had the movie and nothing else. If I want extras, go buy it.
The studios need to cling to the old business model as long as they can because they know that digital media will have to be cheaper than physical media and they don't know how they are going to charge the same. Plus there is this:
So, what does all this have to do with Discover Mediaworks? Well, it's mostly looking at the future and how we will distribute Discover Wisconsin, Into the Outdoors, and Trail Nation. How we will act as a digital company.
We will need to look at how we will deliver to the stations and also how we generate new revenue with digital outlets. Will we continue to leave everything for "free" on kididdel.com? Will we strike a deal with iTunes or Amazon and have them host and sell episodes of DWTV at .99 cents? How can we treat our products that will have no scarcity in digital form and still profit from them?
One important thing to keep in mind is that our money isn't really made by selling copies of our DVDs. That's extra, not really a main stream of revenue. That means that if someone rips a DVD and puts it on Youtube, we're not really missing out on sales, and the bottom line really isn't affected *that* much (yes, there is the potential for other losses associated with such activity. Nothing obvious and immediate that I can come up with right off hand, the effects would have to be studied to know exactly what they would be. I've seen approval WMVs put up on Youtube - if anything, that sort of activity would drive people to want to find it somewhere at a higher quality to view. Which currently doesn't exist.)
ReplyDeleteThe "Free" that we're going to be implementing on Kididdel will include ads that play before the videos (right?) along with banner ads and the like. Money is being made regardless of sales of the shows or segments, and if anything we would probably lose out by trying to charge for our content, because there would likely be less views, and the amount of people now *not* watching would be likely to cost us sponsorship dollars.
As far as the RIAA and what they do - sadly, they have money, and a LOT of it, and stand to gain more than the actual creators of the copyrighted work by cracking down on violators. Arguments could and should be made for change, given how messed up copyright law is in this country, but on the other hand, change or not, someone needs to do the policing, otherwise what good is any copyright law, if it obviously isn't respected?