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

Too little too late

[cboslin]

Does anyone even care what the DRM loving Media moguls think anymore? Hardly. Son, that horse has done left the barn....you all blew it big time!

Re:Too little too late

[hairyfeet]

Wil Wheaton nailed it when he said "make it simple, make it cheap, and folks WILL buy it. Make it expensive and a pain to use? people will just BT". he gave a perfect example, he bought the Doctor Who episodes on iTunes and then when he crossed the Canadian border his videos wouldn't play so his first thought was 'If I would have just pirated it i'd be watching my shows now".

And THAT kind of bullshit is the problem. There are plenty of shows I'd buy online if they would give me them as .avi files to where i could just drop it on my thumbstick and play it on my netbook, or go to my dad's and stick it in his Nbox so we could watch together, but they won't so i just buy DVDs from the bargain bin and rip them to avi. This means there are plenty of shows I WOULD have bought but just decided it was too much of a PITA to deal.

The sooner they accept that piracy exists because they are offering an inferior product the better. That was something Jobs got when it came to media, make it simple, make it cheap, make it easy, and folks buy. Make it a stupid DRM infested royal PITA? Kiss those dollars goodbye.

The biggest problem with the movie industry...

[joaommp]

... 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.

Re:The biggest problem with the movie industry...

[jedidiah]

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.

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.

Innovate or Die?

[Freaky Spook]

Why innovate when you can legislate?

That seems to be what is going on these days.

Re:Customers don't know what they want.

[blahplusplus]

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

[mewsenews]

i honestly tried to grasp the logic set forth in the article but all i can see is "wahhhh we don't like the itunes model". if you don't want to get swallowed by itunes like the music industry did, create your own digital storefront. you never will because this implies actually building something rather than sitting back and letting the royalty checks flow in, you lazy, litigious, delusional assholes

Well..

[Wovel]

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.

[tonywong]

The only reason they don't like iTunes is because it busted up their cartel. Period.

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.

Nice quote...

[Junta]

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:Nice quote...

[Trogre]

Unfortunately in many cases the only way to even get the content one wants is by piracy.

Consider the original Star Wars trilogy. The only way to see the theatrical versions in HD (or even anything more than LaserDisc quality) is to download or otherwise obtain fan-edited versions, which have been meticulously reconstructed from several different sources. Official versions just don't exist, except deep in Lucasfilm vaults and probably won't see the light of day again until they have degraded beyond a usable condition.

All those "make sure you're getting the genuine product" ads can bite me.

Adverts and lack of control (by the user)

[Anonymous Coward]

I hire/buy a DVD and place it in the disc drive, press play and try to go to the movie.

But no, some prick has decided that I WILL watch the advert for organisations that I have come to hate (movie companies, distribution companies, etc). Every time I see tht adverts I am reminded that they have an excessive level of control and I seek a means to take some control back myself. As I am forced to watch the adverts I think about the region codes on the DVD. And so the brand value of the advertisers goes even further down

I don't pirate to save money, I pirate so that I can choose what to watch. And I choose to watch the movie not that self serving adverts that make my blood boil.

Pirates do not sell me pirated movies; movie distributors sell me on pirated movies.

Re:Adverts and lack of control (by the user)

[xenobyte]

I keep thinking about this graphic: http://xandermol.com/blog/media/1/20100724-GxzeV.jpg

I explains EXACTLY why some people actually prefer pirated versions. And while it is possible to skip most of the junk on DVDs, Blu-rays is significantly more locked in. I've seen blu-rays where you can't do anything at all when playback starts - you can't skip previews, you can't fast-forward, jump to the menu or anything. You just have to sit and watch 11 mins of previews, warnings and so on. I returned that blu-ray. Another release of the same title from another country in the same region had different extras so I checked that out. It had two previews, both were skippable and you could jump directly to the menu (to start watching the movie) anywhere. Much better.

But the core is value for money. Sure previews are nice, but a year later they're obsolete and a pain to watch. So simply do this: When the disc loads, go directly to the menu. Make the first choice to watch the movie with previews, the next to watch it directly, then setup, then extras. That way people that want a cinema-like experience they can have that, and people that just want to watch the movie can do that.

Re:No business model can compete with free

[airfoobar]

If what you say were true the industries in question wouldn't be having record breaking profits every year for the past several years. Netflix, Hulu, Spotify and similar services would never have gotten off the ground. iTunes wouldn't be selling mp3s if people weren't willing to "throw a buck at the creator" -- where "creator" is used very loosely in this particular context -- and movie studio bosses wouldn't be complaining about how BIG iTunes has gotten if people didn't want to pay for its services. You wouldn't have studies showing that pirates spend more on entertainment than the average person (which makes sense, because they are the ones who actually spend more time on entertainment). The "piracy is killing X" line has been repeated enough times in the past century and every time it turned out to be a big lie, please stop repeating it already.

Re:How does your model deal with piracy?

[TheRaven64]

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.