Wake up call for the media companies
Just read an article on Mashup.com about how Disney has bought a stake in Hulu.com – the number one on-demand HD-site in the US. Great stuff I thought…but at the same time my old grudge popped up and I wrote a rather heated comment to the article…almost like a blog post of it’s own….hmmm…
So here goes.
The news is all nice and dandy for the viewers in the US but when will the studios and other content owners realize that they need to give up the old revenue streams of gradually milking the non-US viewers by releasing their shows and content in phases to us poor saps? First sell to the TV-networks…then put out a DVD…a Blu-Ray and maybe if we get lucky we can at some point then view the content on-demand and in HD. And oh yeah…a few re-runs on TV just for the hell of it.
Come on guys…get your head out of…well you know…and don’t repeat the mistake the music industry made by clinging on to their “good ‘ol days” and by doing that teaching us that to get music online equals P2P. You might still have a chance if you move fast.
No wonder torrents are getting more and more popular. The mechanisms are in place (I’ve got iTunes, XBOX360 with a Live subscription and….yeah – a browser + a 100meg broadband) but for some reason there is no way for me to legally watch the HD content I want and when I want online.
It’s not that people are by nature purely evil and want everything for free (well not all of us anyways) but it’s quite simply that the powers that be at NBC, Disney, Fox, ABC, HBO, Warner (the list goes on…) are not even giving us the opportunity to do the right thing.
As I write this I’m listening to Spotify for which I’m paying 10€ / month. That’s right…streaming music and happily paying for the great service. So give me my BSG, Lost and 30 Rock in HD and I’ll pay happily (as long as you don’t try and rip me off like you are doing with Blu-Rays).
Category: Media, Movies, Video | Tags: blu-ray, disney, dvd, HD, hulu, iTunes, NBC, on-demand, online video, spotify, Video, XBOX360 One comment »
November 10th, 2009 at 14:05
Completely agree. In fact, I think the studios are missing a massive economic trick with their current trickle-down distribution model. At the moment, they spend the vast majority of their marketing budget to promote the feature release of a film. So they hype you up and get you to want to see the film.
However, your options are immediately limited to the lousy theatrical experience, where one theatre after another has only made the viewing experience worse, not better. The average cinema screen is now the average size that you can get with a cheap £300 home projector. The popcorn is ten times worse and equallt more expense than the average pack of microwave popcorn. And the air quality itself of the theatre is highly questionable. And for all of this, you pay £10 a viewing!
Then, even if you manage to see a great film in a theatre, you will want to watch it possible again, or maybe be able to share it with the family. So really, the opportunity to sell a DVD is in fact, at the cinema exactly at the same time as the theatrical release. Every musician knows that you make your CD’s available at your concerts, not some 6 months later. Naturally, everybody can’t afford to see every film. So you need to also, simultaneously bittorrent the film, ideally using an ad-funding model and release it to the HD online and broadcast networks. This way, you are spreading your revenues around across multiple streams to ensure profitability already in the first day, not in the long-tail of distribution. Recent research has also revealed what most of us already knew, that people who get free content, actually buy more than people who only pay for it. The psychology here is easy to figure out. If you see something you like, you will want to own a better, high-quality copy and hence you will pay for it.
Hulu, and the networks supporting it, are also missing the global economic opportunity of a lifetime. Hulu, as CNN and YouTube are before it, could and should in fact, be a global channel. If content is king, then high quality programming is a deity on the internet and can command massive revenues in global advertising and sponsorship. Just look at how much Google has made over the years being able to sell adwords in every country. Hulu’s fortunes, and therefore the show producer’s and owners fortunes, are not in the US, they are in global ad revenues. And to realize them, show producers need to stop agreeing to regional exclusive distribution and syndication contracts. All contracts and agreements should be non-exclusive, just as they always have been in the mobile entertainment industry. Agreeing to anything else is financial insanity.