Movie Industry: Loss of Control Worse Than Piracy

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.'"

Comments

Step 1, no DRM

[exomondo]

You can't prevent me from giving away a copy of a movie i purchased without creating an inconvenience when i want to use it legally, so get rid of DRM.

Make it affordable, obviously.

Make it accessible, if it's harder than downloading a torrent then you'll fail, people will pay but you can't make it harder than getting it for free.

Make it global, nothing is more annoying (ok maybe not entirely true) than finding out you can't get particular content because your region isn't licensed for it.

Give customers a decent product

[NiceGeek]

I know an Canadian artist who is also signed to Warner/Sire in the US. Her latest album was a bit of a departure from her last one and Sire was too scared to support it in the US so she signed a distribution deal with a indie label for this album. Currently this album is #2 on the iTunes Pop chart and #18 overall.

tl;dr - Record labels are run by idiots who only want to release music for the lowest common denominator.

Re:Customers don't know what they want.

[NoobixCube]

www.desura.com

Re:Well..

[TheRaven64]

iTunes was the only game in town because the iPod had something like 80% market share when the iTunes Music Store launched, and the iPod could play DRM-free MP3s, DRM-free AAC, and Fairplay DRM'd AAC. Apple owned Fairplay and refused to license it. A competing music store needed to offer DRM-free music for it to be playable on the iPod, but the labels would only allow their music to be sold with DRM. There were competing music stores, but they all used Microsoft's DRM, which didn't work with the dominant portable music player. It wasn't until they allowed Amazon to sell DRM-free music that there was a competitor that worked with the iPod.

Re:Customers don't know what they want.

[icebraining]

This is the biggest lie of all, because in reality the MPAA affiliated studios have been having record profits year after year. The whole "piracy is killing us" is just simply false.

2010 was the fifth consecutive year of record profits, ffs!