Movie Industry: Loss of Control Worse Than Piracy 360
tlhIngan writes "Miramax CEO Mike Lang has admitted to what we all suspected. The biggest worry is a distribution monopoly, not piracy. They saw what happened to the music industry with iTunes, and vowed to not lose control and be at the mercy of Apple or whoever becomes the dominant distributor. From the article: 'Lang, whose company today debuts the Blu-Ray version of the cult classic Pulp Fiction, emphasized that people don’t necessarily want to pirate, as long as they get what they want. “Innovate or die,” should be the motive of entertainment industry companies, where it’s key to listen to customers.'"
The biggest problem with the movie industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
... is that the quantity of movies even worth watching is decreasing by the minute, let alone the quantity of movies that might be worth pirating.
Innovate or Die? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why innovate when you can legislate?
That seems to be what is going on these days.
Re:Customers don't know what they want. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that most customers are clueless morons. In the game industry they support - MMO's, DRM, and DLC. I remember when everyone was pissed that game companies had the nerve to charge you full price for an MMO while it was an online game and they charge you monthly. The fact that most people are so clueless and take it up the arse has pushed the game industry in hugely negative direction with games being chained to online and DLC'd to death.
MPAA are morons (Score:5, Insightful)
Well.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Had the music industry not insisted on DRM, iTunes would have never had anything like the power it ended up with..
Re:Customers don't know what they want. (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the choice between piracy (no income) and losing control (to Apple) they'd rather pick piracy. That is how bereft of thought these guys are, that there is no choice for them but to pick one or the other. No wonder Steve came in and took their lunch money.
No business model can compete with free (Score:3, Insightful)
In the past people might throw a buck at a creator if they pirated something because they felt a little bad about it. Today, with piracy normalized (hey everyone does it), most people don't feel any nagging sense that they might have done something "not right" when they consume a creator's output without providing any form of compensation.
This is because deep down most people believe that entertainment is an optional extra. People make the rational decision when given the option of paying for it or not paying for it. They save their resources and pay for the necessities.
Perhaps in the long run, people will be less likely to invest in creating expensive entertainment ( lets face it, the SyFy Channel has pretty much bailed on it already because their existing "make money on the DVD sales" model collapsed). Whether the lack of expensively produced entertainment is actually a bad thing is another discussion entirely.
Nice quote... (Score:5, Insightful)
people don’t necessarily want to pirate, as long as they get what they want.
If you admit that, why do you refuse to give people what they want?
I want to convert my media into various formats for playback on various devices without DRM fouling the process.
I want to import your media into my video library and never have to physically sort through media to watch what I want (though I do like having shelved copies of media to see, I don't actually want to have to deal with them day to day).
I want to play your content locally, rather than streaming it over my internet connection and incur the wrath of lower bitrates, slow seeking, and service outages right when I want to watch something.
I want to manage all my content in a single place and not have to open a different application or website depending on which publisher/distributer just happened to kind of/sort of give it to me.
Currently, I can have *all* of this, but only if I either go through the tedium of keeping up with how to remove DRM which frequently requires peculiar setups I may or may not have, or download it from someone who has too much time on their hands and breaks your DRM anyway. For me the problem is not that I don't want to pay for the content, it's that the quality of the illegal content is higher than the legal. I do actually refrain entirely because I just don't feel like going through the trouble legally or illegally, it's just not worth my time and energy. That could easily change if movies were as manageable as mp3s purchased through itunes or amazon.
Re:The biggest problem with the movie industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is simply no point in remaking Footloose when I can probably buy the original in the $5 bargain bin at Walmart.
Piracy is not the biggest threat to Hollywood, their own back catalog is.
Re:Well.. (Score:4, Insightful)
That is truly delicious iRony there...
Re:No business model can compete with free (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Step 1, no DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
'll pay, really. If netflix streamed what they have on mail request i'd stop torrenting altogether
I'll up you one.
I hate advertisements, water marks, and disruptive in-show advertisements SO MUCH, that I would pay Netflix $75-100 per month for full streaming access to everything they have, plus recent TV shows.
Does not have to be 1080p either. 720p is just fine.
Does not have to be all the TV shows either. Something like 20 shows for $14.99, 40 shows for 24.99$, etc. I get to pick them.
As long as you deliver me that content without advertisements, and in an easy consumable fashion, I will PAY MORE.
I am not interested in maintaining a huge inventory of DVDs any longer. I can rip them, but it costs me 5-7 gigs each to store them. Of course, I use RAID and NAS. My actual costs of maintaining DRM free access to my DVDs is ultimately more than $50 per month once I factor in hardware costs.
The only drawback, is that I cannot maintain perfect anonymity (cash purchases) about what I watch. However, I would give that up (which is huge to me) just to be able to access larger catalogues of movies on demand and not pay for the costs of personal storage.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Customers don't know what they want. (Score:0, Insightful)
Not only that most customers are clueless morons. In the game industry they support - MMO's, DRM, and DLC. I remember when everyone was pissed that game companies had the nerve to charge you full price for an MMO while it was an online game and they charge you monthly. The fact that most people are so clueless and take it up the arse has pushed the game industry in hugely negative direction with games being chained to online and DLC'd to death.
Actually, customers know exactly what they want, and the gaming industry prices itself accordingly. Just because you don't agree with a price scheme doesn't mean everyone else is clueles. It only means that you don't value the service(s) provided in the same way they do. The game industry will only price games at what people will pay - that is the law of supply and demand, and it won't change just because you think it's stupid.
Re:Adverts and lack of control (by the user) (Score:3, Insightful)
Hear Hear!
I already paid for the movie, stop nagging about stealing a car...!
Re:Too little too late (Score:5, Insightful)
While they're at it, they need to drop the un-skipable commercials and the stupid FBI warnings (great, I buy it like I'm supposed to and they thank me with an up-front threat). Next up, they can stop screwing with the hardware. Their stupid (and broken) encryption demands is why you can't instantly switch video feeds. They add cost to every device and kill innovation.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Customers don't know what they want. (Score:5, Insightful)
Control of distribution is what has built these media empires. Essentially the studios as we have known them for eighty or ninety years will cease to exist.
I'm not sure why anyone should shed a tear. People will always want movies, what will they care if it's production companies backed by Sony or by Amazon and Apple making them? Besides, the movie industry has for so long been so filled with such colossal frauds and criminals, whose accounting practices should pretty much land every producer in the greater Los Angeles area in prison for everything from mail fraud to extortion, that I think it's high time some new blood was injected.
Re:Customers don't know what they want. (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, to be fair, it was Napster, Kazaa, Limewire and Bittorrent that scared the living crap out of the music industry and Apple was there at the gate to go "Now there there, Mr. Music Industry, yes you've been horribly ass-raped by the pirates. Just give us a big discount on your material, and we'll sell it legit."
Re:Customers don't know what they want. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Now there there, Mr. Music Industry, yes you've been horribly ass-raped by the pirates. Just give us a big discount on your material, and we'll sell it legit."
I think music (and movies) had already been devalued (by market saturation, cassette taping, CDR's and the internet successively) and Apple just came along with a pricing model that was based in reality instead of wishful thinking. You can't fight "supply and demand" and win.
Re:How does your model deal with piracy? (Score:5, Insightful)
So? Newsflash: DVDs and BluRays end up on torrent servers as soon as they're released too. Some people pirate because they have an entitlement mentality. You can probably stop them pirating if you make every copy you sell locked down with invasive DRM, but getting them to pay is a lot harder and you'll probably piss off a lot of paying customers in the process. Some people pirate because you are not selling them what they want. Sell them DRM-free downloads at a reasonable price and they'll become paying customers.
But then, we're talking about the movie industry. Their entire business model is 'don't give the customer what they want'. They delay DVD releases because 'it would cannibalise cinema revenue'. This, translated, means 'a lot of people would rather buy the DVD than go to the cinema'. Not really surprising given how small the quality difference between a half decent (but still cheap) home cinema setup and a real cinema is these days. So, having identified a market, they intentionally don't fill it. The result? People who want to see the film during the time when the studio is hyping the crap out of it with millions of dollars of advertising but don't want to go to the cinema pirate it.
American TV shows are even worse. The region 1 DVD release is usually 6 months after the end and the region 2 release comes even later. That means that there's a year-long window between the show becoming available to pirate and it becoming available to watch (rent or buy) legally. Dollhouse Season 2, from 2010, is still not available to rent on DVD in the UK. I can only assume that this means that Fox really wants to see it pirated. I rented season 1, but they apparently don't want my money for season 2.