4 ms·
One possibility is to bundle your work with others and create your own stream-on-demand network. A walled garden where you publish trailers and maybe one or tw
by biff 14y ago
One possibility is to bundle your work with others and create your own stream-on-demand network. A walled garden where you publish trailers and maybe one or two free-to-access programs to YouTube with your branding on them, charge a nominal fee for access to all content and comment privileges on site, and a larger fee for site supporters who get some extra perk, signed stuff, or whatever. Stream live events on the site from time to time, allow users to interview talent, etc.
If you only have one or two things you're selling, and somebody has already downloaded and watched them, you're out of luck. But if you're bundling with other content serving diverse interests, offering the promise of new content down the road, and giving your audience something for paying that they can't get for pirating, you can set a better hook. Suddenly, when content from you or your partners is pirated, it becomes a loss-leader advertisement for your venture, and the cost of that (and benefit from it) is shared across your group. There's a site that just got featured on Reddit not too long ago, http://www.swearnet.com http://www.swearnet.com, that really captured my interest in this regard, if you want to see an example of how this type of thing could work in action.
Piracy always struck me as something only the biggest interests could gain anything from worrying about; an efficiency problem where so much product is being moved that getting 1-2% more of it paid for could make more sense than trying to reach 1-2% more audience, perhaps because they've already saturated their target market.
- anigbrowl 14y agoThis is sort-of how the distribution industry works right now, and I agree that over the long term technology should allow us to exploit long-tail effects to do more with less, just as technology has made the movie production process much more affordable and accessible. The problem at present is that between a fall in (some) costs and the disruption of existing and long-established distribution networks (accompanied by an apparent fall in revenue), finding the investment capital is ironically tougher than ever. http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/18/film-school-roger-corman-explains-why-b-movies-vanished-from-theaters/ http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/18/film-school-roger-... and http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1803469?uid=3739560&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21101905540981 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/1803469?uid=3739560... are very much worth a read to understand why the film industry views piracy with such trepidation.
- AnthonyMouse 14y agoI don't see anything in the WSJ article about piracy. The JSTOR article is behind a paywall, but from the preview it looks to be discussing much the same thing: The major studios are destroying the independents as a result of more control over distribution channels, greater economies of scale, larger budgets to make better movies and their ability to spread risk over a larger number of productions. If anything that makes the argument for new distribution technologies that could allow the independents to reach greater audiences without using the distribution channels under the control of the major studios.