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Why There's No iTunes For Movies
theodp writes "Slate's Farhad Manjoo would gladly pay a hefty monthly fee for immediate access to recent movies and TV shows — if someone would just take his money. In reality, he pays nothing because no company sells such a plan, and instead resorts to getting his programming from the friendly BitTorrent network.
As I wrote several times before about TV shows, game releases and cinema starts this is all about segmentation. Putting up an international one-price-for-all platform for movie purchases would undermine the local market branches the industry has elaborately established over the past decades. You can charge different prices for movies in the EU, Asia, US and so forth. The differences make for additional profit. They would never give that up voluntarily.
If they aren't selling it, they they are losing nothing when we pirate it. This in turn means that there is no damage to them, and thus no case against us.
If they are selling it, but there are artificial barriers caused by legal restrictions on over-riding region coding and the like, then this could be argued to be an illegal restriction on free trade under WTO rules, although we all know that no-one with the money to fight such a case ever would.
Actually, having just done this a couple weeks ago, I can tell you that at least in my case they send you a little booklet for each TV that you use and you're supposed to write down what you watch on that TV.
Interestingly, I don't have cable (television, I do get my internet access from Time Warner over a coax cable), I don't have satellite TV, and I don't watch OTA broadcasts. I DO however watch movies and television shows via my internet connection. The interesting part is that I told the nice lady who called and asked me about being a Nielsen family all of this and she actually sounded excited. She informed me that they really wanted some perspective on the viewing habits of people who do that, but for some reason (I suspect it has to do with Nielsen's mission statement) only if they pipe the video to a TV to watch it. I do exactly that in 3 rooms of my house, so they sent me the packets.
I wonder how Thundercats and He-Man are going to enjoy their ratings boosts... The late, great George Carlin is going to be highly rated this month too, as well as some online-only media outlets that probably have never seen a rating point.
The fact that they were highly interested in my survey suggests to me that some media companies see the writing on the wall, and want accurate information about my viewing habits in spite of the fact that they keep screaming that I'm killing them by watching online content exclusively. A small critique I have is that if they're going to start recording activities of people who use their TV like I do, they're going to have to make the box for you to write the channel name into bigger, so I can properly fit a URL into it.
Finally, I'd like to say that I don't know how large of a sample they take any given week, but I hope it's low enough that a media company or two takes notice that someone out there is seriously using sites like Hulu and netflix, and considers expanding the content available via such channels.