4 ms·
I think it boils down to the psychology of "something to gain" vs. "something to lose". New creatives who are kickstarting and bootstrapping lean towards the fo
by lukifer 13y ago
I think it boils down to the psychology of "something to gain" vs. "something to lose". New creatives who are kickstarting and bootstrapping lean towards the former, and are fine with relinquishing control if it means they get sales at all. Old guard suits are banking on a statistically predictable return rate, and focus on reducing risks to that return, even at the cost of additional short-term profits or long-term goodwill.
Of course, the fact that Veronica Mars was kickstarted puts a hole in my theory. :) I'm guessing that its stakeholders are still partially in the old guard mindset, and/or they're trusting Hollywood's "best practices" for digital distribution. (They may also be under pre-existing contract restrictions for the Veronica Mars IP.)
- nasalgoat 13y agoI definitely believe it's the latter - the IP holders think they're protecting their content when in fact they are only increasing the piracy of it.
- drawkbox 13y agoI agree. The notion of creating false demand on the internet by constraining supply is not going to work ever, as it is ad infinitum a cat and mouse game. What does work is making content that is desired easy to get to and consume (at their own pace without delays before releases etc) at wide scale. People will pay for ease and they do like rewarding the creators of good entertainment and educational services. The better experience will always win, even if it is pay. Where before content creators wanted everyone tuning in at one time for big ad dollars and network effect, now it is the opposite, they should want consumers to drift through their lands of content at their leisure and not want to leave. This actually distributes traffic and demand as well so there aren't huge funnels of bandwidth hogging false demand schedules (HBOGO recently failed on the last episode of True Detective, where House of Cards people watch more distributed because it is all available at once).
- toomuchtodo 13y agoCounterpoint: Louis CK releases his videos for $5 and says please don't pirate it. People do I'm sure, but there are enough people who see the value. I paid the $5 because I want Louis to keep doing his thing.
- lukifer 13y agoI think of Louis CK as being more on the indie "something to gain" side, even though he risked serious money out-of-pocket on his first special. He wasn't constrained by a history of previous business practices and any particular expecatations of the returns; whereas HBO has been churning out comedy specials for decades, and would never have risked their business model on a DRM-free experiment in a million years.