Opinion - Why won't you let me buy my content?
12/01/08 16:29 |
Opinion
I'd really
love to have my content delivered directly to my
AppleTV every day.
I really would prefer to pay for my video content, if only I could!
Let me explain...
I really would prefer to pay for my video content, if only I could!
Let me explain...
This is the
future, like it or not. The reality is, if you fight
it - people will steal it anyway. It happened
with music and it's already happening with video.
There can be no denying that people will pay for things if they think they are getting value for their hard earned. With MacWorld 2008 only days away I thought it would be interesting to use MacWorld 2007 numbers so there is a direct comparison once Apple announce the 2008 numbers. At MacWorld 2007 Apple had passed 2 billion songs sold. It took 3 years to get to 1 billion songs then just 10 months to get the second billion. That's 5 million a DAY.
Again, at MacWorld 2007 Apple announced that 50 million TV shows had been sold and in the first 4 months of movie sales, 1.3 million sold. So...it works. But we still can't buy one TV show or Movie in Australia, or a whole heap of other countries. What gives?
The rumour-mill is full of iTunes movie rental whispers...can you imagine what that would do for Movie numbers? Let's have a guess - 1.3 million in 4 months in the US and select European nations, price rentals cheap enough and I'd bet that number would start pressing half the music sales numbers per year. I picked a random movie on the US store and it was USD$14.99, a quick conversion to AUD$16.78. So presumably we'd pay about $19.99. That's still cheaper than buying most new titles in a physical store. TV shows tell the same story, USD$1.99 we'll end up paying about AUD$2.99.
Is that really that much for the convenience of having the video there, ready to go whenever you feel like watching? No ads. Just press play. I don't know about you, but I don't really have time to be screwed around by TV stations that start shows late, randomly play repeats mid-season, cut the end of sentences so they can trim 30 seconds off the running time of the show to squash in another ad and then cancel the show or move it to 11:30pm Monday night because it doesn't rate. Then when we do eventually get the show on DVD, it's priced so high that it's not affordable - unless you wait another 3-6 months for it to become 'cheap'.
The beauty of this model is that consumers get to buy what they want and the show gets supported. I understand that in Australia (and elsewhere) the complexity of buying shows made in the US or UK adds significantly to our 'buy price' but that doesn't mean we need to get ripped off, or worse still, not have it as an option at all.
Every time I read 'reports' about how much piracy is costing the studios and how much it drives the cost of producing the content I can't help but laugh. They don't make the content available, then complain when people steal it. Blame the pirates! Arrr! iTunes hasn't removed piracy from the music industry, but it sure hasn't made it worse. The current business models were developed a long time before the Internet and digital distribution was viable. For some reason there seems to be this notion that if you cant fit the square peg in the round hole, you just need to get a bigger hammer. Pushing high margin models doesn't work anymore, high volume is the only way to stay relevant. Just look at how many online music stores have come and gone before and more so after iTunes, the story is almost always the same, to expensive, bogus rentals or limited support.
I read the other day that in this new digital age that 'Lo-fi is the new Hi-fi', how true! People download lower than broadcast quality TV shows every day from BitTorrent and watch, with no ad's, whenever they feel like it. HD-TV is great, no argument - the bottom line is that when it comes to day-to-day TV, I'd gladly trade HD for SD if it meant I could watch at my convenience.
Production studios seem to be on an agonisingly slow ride to understand this simple point - Give them what THEY want and they'll buy it. Give them what YOU want and they'll steal it.
The sooner they understand this, the sooner I can start paying them for my fiance's favorite nightly soap opera...*sigh*
Zillatron
There can be no denying that people will pay for things if they think they are getting value for their hard earned. With MacWorld 2008 only days away I thought it would be interesting to use MacWorld 2007 numbers so there is a direct comparison once Apple announce the 2008 numbers. At MacWorld 2007 Apple had passed 2 billion songs sold. It took 3 years to get to 1 billion songs then just 10 months to get the second billion. That's 5 million a DAY.
Again, at MacWorld 2007 Apple announced that 50 million TV shows had been sold and in the first 4 months of movie sales, 1.3 million sold. So...it works. But we still can't buy one TV show or Movie in Australia, or a whole heap of other countries. What gives?
The rumour-mill is full of iTunes movie rental whispers...can you imagine what that would do for Movie numbers? Let's have a guess - 1.3 million in 4 months in the US and select European nations, price rentals cheap enough and I'd bet that number would start pressing half the music sales numbers per year. I picked a random movie on the US store and it was USD$14.99, a quick conversion to AUD$16.78. So presumably we'd pay about $19.99. That's still cheaper than buying most new titles in a physical store. TV shows tell the same story, USD$1.99 we'll end up paying about AUD$2.99.
Is that really that much for the convenience of having the video there, ready to go whenever you feel like watching? No ads. Just press play. I don't know about you, but I don't really have time to be screwed around by TV stations that start shows late, randomly play repeats mid-season, cut the end of sentences so they can trim 30 seconds off the running time of the show to squash in another ad and then cancel the show or move it to 11:30pm Monday night because it doesn't rate. Then when we do eventually get the show on DVD, it's priced so high that it's not affordable - unless you wait another 3-6 months for it to become 'cheap'.
The beauty of this model is that consumers get to buy what they want and the show gets supported. I understand that in Australia (and elsewhere) the complexity of buying shows made in the US or UK adds significantly to our 'buy price' but that doesn't mean we need to get ripped off, or worse still, not have it as an option at all.
Every time I read 'reports' about how much piracy is costing the studios and how much it drives the cost of producing the content I can't help but laugh. They don't make the content available, then complain when people steal it. Blame the pirates! Arrr! iTunes hasn't removed piracy from the music industry, but it sure hasn't made it worse. The current business models were developed a long time before the Internet and digital distribution was viable. For some reason there seems to be this notion that if you cant fit the square peg in the round hole, you just need to get a bigger hammer. Pushing high margin models doesn't work anymore, high volume is the only way to stay relevant. Just look at how many online music stores have come and gone before and more so after iTunes, the story is almost always the same, to expensive, bogus rentals or limited support.
I read the other day that in this new digital age that 'Lo-fi is the new Hi-fi', how true! People download lower than broadcast quality TV shows every day from BitTorrent and watch, with no ad's, whenever they feel like it. HD-TV is great, no argument - the bottom line is that when it comes to day-to-day TV, I'd gladly trade HD for SD if it meant I could watch at my convenience.
Production studios seem to be on an agonisingly slow ride to understand this simple point - Give them what THEY want and they'll buy it. Give them what YOU want and they'll steal it.
The sooner they understand this, the sooner I can start paying them for my fiance's favorite nightly soap opera...*sigh*
Zillatron
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