Piracy Payback

Combating Piracy: You can (and must) compete with free

May 12, 2009 – 8:10 am

Rarely does a news item relating to piracy go by without some industry representative exasperating that they cannot compete with piracy because it is free.

Not true – and many lessons can be drawn from industries unrelated to piracy…

The bottled water industry provides a product that is arguably available to most people for free – yet we spend over $60 billion each year on bottled water for limited if any health benefit.

A look at hospitality is also relevant – we regularly eat and drink in restaurants, bars and cafés even though we often have the ingredients for the same output sitting in our pantries, cellars and refrigerators at home.

Yet, we never hear players in these industries cry foul at having to compete with free.

That is because they can compete with free and so can the industries who typically consider themselves to be victims of illegal downloads, counterfeiting and other forms of piracy.

We suggest any newly inspired drive to compete with piracy would look to focus on three key areas:

1. User Experience
2. Simultaneous Global Distribution
3. Networked value-add Content

User Experience

An anecdotal user experience from a friend in downloading (yes, pirating) a missed TV show went something like this:

1. Go to TV website to find the name of the missed episode
2. Go to torrent search site and run a search for title
3. Dodged border-line adult adverts, unclear title notation and duplicate entries to find the required title with sufficient leeches/seeds and hit download to open/download preferred P2P client
4. Waited for TV episode to download
5. Tried to open TV episode but needed another codec
6. Located and downloaded required codec
7. Began playing TV episode then realized it was dubbed in German
8. Repeated step 2 and 3 (though taking care to peruse comments and any other available metadata to ensure it was in required language (English)
9. Repeated step 5
10. Watched the show (while ignoring the Dutch subtitles)

Not ideal.

Surely we can imagine a world with the following:

1. Go to TV website to work out the name of the missed episode
2. Clicked on download link to open/download preferred content client (possibly even streaming, P2P or both)
3. Enter required payment details (once, if necessary)
4. Wait for TV episode to download
5. Watch the show

Though we are evolving towards the latter scenario, it is still a far cry from reality and usually involves steps such as:

1. discovering the title is not available on the catalogue you are searching
2. the service is not available in your country (grrrr … more on this below),
3. the proprietary DRM is too restrictive to allow you to play it on your required device

All of which results in a user reverting to the original steps outlined in my friend’s experience above.

While the example above is limited to a TV episode, the gist holds true for film, music and games.

The trick to combating piracy in this instance is to design the best possible user experience and then look at the best business models to fund it. Most ideas that have feared to tread this path have been squashed by the industries desperate to preserve the status-quo.

Simultaneous Global Distribution

If I don’t want to see a movie in a cinema, why do you make me wait until it is available on DVD

While these lead times have been reduced to address this already, there is little argument to not make it zero – any early release channel (eg cinema, television, retail outlet) should be able to rely on its own merits sans early-release benefit. The reality is that piracy happens arguably due to this anyway so who not combat head-on rather than ignore the obvious.

Not only should this be simultaneous across any distribution network, it should also be done globally.

Services such as Hulu and DRM-free Amazon MP3 are great but currently limited to North America. The traditional content distribution models tend to lean towards region (if not country) specific distribution deals that ignore the border-agnostic nature of the internet.

Hulu, Amazon MP3 and their burgeoning peers are great and innovative ideas that are cognizant of the realities requiring a revenue yield – the sooner they can be made available internationally, the sooner they can compete against less legitimate channels.

Networked value-add Content

This one has been bandied about ad nauseum yet we’re seeing only limited application of it in industry. The premise is that the WWW allows publishers/content-owners to bundle value-add content to their core offering. Gaming is an obvious example of this with the use of multi-player functionality across the network.

In the software field, Microsoft have begun offering bonus programs for registered users of their products through their Genuine Microsoft Software program – sure you may not like the freebies but the concept is sound.

Outside of gaming and software, the bundling opportunity here is no less ripe for film, TV and music.

So why does so little of this seem to be happening today to combat piracy? Why can’t we compete on user experience? Why can’t we optimize our content distribution approach? Why can’t we bundle networked content?

The answer is that there are massive industries for who the traditional monetization model was working just fine. Any attempts to innovate will dilute this model and create complexity by making us think differently. Thus we’ll combat piracy by resorting to chasing ISPs and closing down innovative start-ups that might drag us in this direction … all the while insisting that we cannot compete with free. Pity.

In the end, it is just the end user that suffers – unless they revert to dastardly piracy.

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