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The death throes of an industry

jacquesmattheij.com

11–20 of 82 posts

Re: The death throes of an industry

#11
post #7

I'm not convinced this is a global issue. Here in Israel, many local TV shows are freely available on the internet, including the ever-popular Eretz Nehederet. Plenty of Israelis pirate content, but the local media industry seems to be doing fine. I can't recall any attempts to crack down on pirates, let alone attempts to pass draconian anti-piracy legislation. This is all anecdotal. If someone knows where to find th…

I'm not convinced this is a global issue. I wouldn't be so sure. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-1735520...

Yes, the death throes of the American media industry are a global problem.

However, evidence is needed to prove that the global media industry is dying.

Re: The death throes of an industry

#12
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference is between stuff that you release and stuff that you don't. Once released bits become common knowledge and they lose a large amount of their potential value because the scarcity element is instantly gone. This is one of the driving engines behind the the whole software-as-a-service game, it gets rid of the problem of piracy and it turns the product into a subscription rather than a one-time sale. N…

Paid mobile apps are widely released, and people I know make a living selling them. Is anyone who buys a mobile app a chump? And what about the ACH information? If you came across that sort of data you would feel free to use it to transfer a few million bucks to your own account? It would be just as easy as copying a movie. So if the data is out there, you are arguing that it's OK to do that?

[deleted]

Re: The death throes of an industry

#13

This is big talk, but in the meantime I went to the gym the other day and checked out the movies for sale and bought a Blu-Ray of the Truman Show for $7.99. I went home and played it, there were no annoying trailers or anything. Me, my son, and the reporter who's always writing about our coven in the newspaper all watched it and had a great time. Hollywood offers consumers many chump choices (like bloated cable packa…

I think jaquesm's point below about mobile apps is (accidentally) a great point.

People are happy to pay for media when it's easy to do so. Mobile apps are pirated only rarely because it's so easy to buy them. That's why they're growing like crazy.

Hollywood's mistake has been to make it so difficult to buy media. So few movies and shows are available for streaming, for example.

There's a great opportunity in helping shape the future of entertainment.

Re: The death throes of an industry

#14
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced this is a global issue. I wouldn't be so sure. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-1735520...

Yes, the death throes of the American media industry are a global problem. However, evidence is needed to prove that the global media industry is dying.

Ah, I see what you mean. In that case it's not even an American problem since Hollywood is doing quite well.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-...

Re: The death throes of an industry

#15
You're envisioning a future where you replace the middlemen you don't like with a set of ones you do like, that aren't up to the job anyway.

Marketplaces have existed for years in various forms - iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, TPB, MegaUpload etc ... their users are almost exclusively interested in Big Content stuff. Mininova highlights this - they went legit and right now 135 people are downloading their most popular video, 70 times fewer than the number of people currently downloading the 4th Mission Impossible rip which is pretty much the very definition of Big Content easy, safe fluff. Mininova was one of the most popular websites in the world before they went legitimate - this isn't people not knowing, this is people not caring.

Kickstarter-ish models for production is just surreal - it is the complete opposite of on demand and that's a critical component for the future.

The overall premise that the RIAA/MPAA are or have to die at all is pretty sketchy - the problem is they're predatory and not keeping up with technology and consumers, not that they're redundant.

Re: The death throes of an industry

#16

You're envisioning a future where you replace the middlemen you don't like with a set of ones you do like, that aren't up to the job anyway. Marketplaces have existed for years in various forms - iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, TPB, MegaUpload etc ... their users are almost exclusively interested in Big Content stuff. Mininova highlights this - they went legit and right now 135 people are downloading their most popular vide…

> Kickstarter-ish models for production is just surreal - it is the complete opposite of on demand and that's a critical component for the future.

Tell that to these guys:

http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/the-kickstarter-film-festiva...

I'd happily pay for Pat Metheny to produce his next album before I can get my hands on it with a mechanism in place that would revert the money if he never released it, and even without that mechanism I'd take the risk.

Re: The death throes of an industry

#17

Your formatting got screwed on a copy/paste I assume, bit difficult to read.

Couldn't all of the mobile apps our friends are writing fit onto that same disk drive? With room to spare for the source code to Facebook and Google? Does that indicate that the entire intellectual property business is in its "death throes"? You could also include all the credit card numbers and ACH information for all the accounts in the world on that same drive. I guess that means its OK to use those numbers? How c…

Software is not analogous because it has been developed from the very start with the knowledge that the bits would be easily copy-able, and has been designed accordingly. I remember being asked to type in phrases from a game instruction manual at least a decade before anyone was consuming commercial audio or video on their PC. Furthermore, software is an interactive medium, which makes copy protection easier, and copying riskier. It isn't clear to me how you could make copy protection inherently part of music (without ruining it). Even if you fully controlled all the hardware and software used for playback, you wouldn't control the link between the speaker and my ears.

As to ACH information, it depends on what you mean by "use those numbers," since they have no inherent value. If you mean reading them for fun, I would be OK with that. If you mean using them to drain money from people's bank accounts, that would not be okay, but it also wouldn't be copying (since the original would be destroyed). If you knew of a way to copy money from one account to another, I would be completely fine with you copying my checking account in full.

I know you would probably prefer that people think about stealing and unauthorized copying as the same thing, but there is a difference and it's important. One is completely physically undetectable to the victim, and the other isn't. How can you tell the difference between your CD selling poorly because people are pirating it, and it selling poorly because it sucks? Without widespread snooping on other peoples' electronic communications, you can't. If someone drained your bank account it would be trivial to detect.

Re: The death throes of an industry

#18
An industry is dying ... That industry is the media industry

That's a spectacularly vague assertion. Let me give you a more pointed one: there is no such thing as the media industry. In [textual] publishing alone there are at least a dozen different highly specialized industries that, aside from a common technology base (the printing press) are radically different in structure and operation. And that's within any one language/nation; if you look at, say, mass-audience consumer movies, is it reasonable to stretch and assertion that "the movies are dying" to cover both Hollywood and Bollywood, much less crowdsourced low budget SF epics from Finland and state-subsidized art films from France?

(I'll agree that the MPAA and RIAA are parasitic and preside over a business model that doesn't appear to be long-term viable without lobbying for government support -- but that's not the same thing at all, and I really wish pundits like Mattheij would be a bit more circumspect in their predictions.)

Re: The death throes of an industry

#19

You're envisioning a future where you replace the middlemen you don't like with a set of ones you do like, that aren't up to the job anyway. Marketplaces have existed for years in various forms - iTunes, Amazon, YouTube, TPB, MegaUpload etc ... their users are almost exclusively interested in Big Content stuff. Mininova highlights this - they went legit and right now 135 people are downloading their most popular vide…

> Kickstarter-ish models for production is just surreal - it is the complete opposite of on demand and that's a critical component for the future. Tell that to these guys: http://www.kickstarter.com/blog/the-kickstarter-film-festiva... I'd happily pay for Pat Metheny to produce his next album before I can get my hands on it with a mechanism in place that would revert the money if he never released it, and even withou…

Yeah it works when it's novel, now imagine that it's normal ... instead of going to Netflix and streaming a movie tonight you go to kickstarter-for-movies.com and book what you're hopefully going to watch for Christmas.

I cannot imagine a worse way to be entertained, it actually returns us to the pre-internet days with the added plus of gambling on and paying in advance for everything we want.

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