Thinking some more about Waxy’s Pirating the 2007 Oscars, there are tons of interesting conclusions one could begin to draw. It’s apparent from the findings that these movies make it into the pirate channels (arrgh!) very quickly. This is clearly the worst fear of the movie studios, who are trying and failing to do whatever they can to stop it. Amusingly, this is having the result of making it harder for Academy members to watch the movies, hurting the studio’s chances of getting votes for awards. I wonder if their suits have sat down and weighed the alleged loss of profit from piracy versus the sales bump a movie gets from winning awards. Is their a calculus to determine the worth of piracy versus accolades? Clearer heads conclude that in the end you’d just want people to see your movie, but I don’t have their spreadsheets in front of me.
Linking to the Waxy article, Daring Fireball notes, “Methinks the movie industry is getting closer and closer to their date with a Napster-style reckoning.” The havok that Napster wrought can certainly be exaggerated—the music industry likes to blame all of their declining sales on it without mentioning that it came onto the scene at the same time that people started spending more money on their burgeoning DVD collections and on video games instead of CDs—but certainly Napster made it easier to get music than ever before. If movies are finding their way into illicit channels that quickly (which I know they are), how likely is it that movie downloading is going to become a major problem, considering especially that young people are both the most likely to be able to navigate a BitTorrent client and the most likely to be spending large portions of their money on entertainment? Probably pretty likely.
So what can the movie industry do to avoid what they imagine is going to be a great calamity? Well, for one, they can chill out. Despite whatever harm Napster and not BitTorrent sharing caused, people still enjoy making and listening to music, and the recording industry isn’t exactly destitute. But more importantly, the industry can be pragmatic about it. There’s no question that getting your hands on a movie for free is going to get easier and easier, and once there are better devices to get the picture from your computer onto your TV, there will be even more incentive to get movies onto your computer. At present there are only two movie studios selling their movies on iTunes, and one of those is only selling a small collection of older movies. There are tens of thousands of movies out on DVD, yet you can only legally download a hundred or so.
So what are the movie studios waiting for? Copy protection, and a bigger piece of the pie. They want complete control over how watch your movies, and they want more money than anyone’s been willing to offer them so far. They want to be able to sell you a file for $15 that only lets you watch a movie on your living room TV, then sell you a $2 upgrade to be able to watch it in your bedroom, then a $10 upgrade to watch it on your cell phone, and so on. They want to be able to count the number of people in the room watching and apply an extra eyeball surcharge. And of course in the process, the products they develop are so hard to use that no one bothers, and they turn to piracy for the pure ease of it. Apple sells millions of songs a week with iTunes for two reasons. One, the store has a large (though by no means comprehensive) selection of songs to buy. You can’t buy what isn’t being sold, which was the problem pre-iTunes. If you wanted to download a song but would not buy the whole CD, you had to either go without or download it illegally. The other reason the iTunes Store is so successful is that it’s very easy to use. People are willing to pay for ease of use. The question is, which is going to be easier in five years: pirating a movie or downloading it?