What Piracy? The Entertainment Industry is booming | Hacker News Reader

What Piracy? The Entertainment Industry is booming

torrentfreak.com

57 pointsllambda9 comments

It doesn't matter that it's growing, they're just going to say that it's growing less than it should be. "Think how good the economy would be without piracy!?"

I think it really is a service problem, like Valve says, and that piracy can be beaten by providing a better service. Unfortunately, the important people in the entertainment industry don't and won't understand that. As time goes by and more younger clued in people start taking over the big companies, things will change.

Unfortunately it will be another 20 to 30 years until a younger generation takes over.

Until then they'll quickly erode our freedoms with draconian laws with immense abuse potential and international treaties done in complete secrecy.

And then it might be too late.

You're right, better and more convenient service would erode piracy, but it would also erode profits and destroy the core business. The core business of a media company isn't simply to deliver content, but rather it is to leverage that content as a mediation tool.

Media companies mediate; they push consumer convenience just as far as they can in return for advertising and distribution dollars.

Examples;

* Cable companies know just how much money the market will bear for channels they don't even want, for the ones that they do.

* Television companies know just how many ads you can tolerate, before time-shifting dominates.

* Hollywood knows just how long it can make international markets wait for releases, in return for cheaper distribution and marketing (a global launch would make a publicity tour very hard).

* The music industry knows how to set prices so that you'll buy the same piece of music over and over again in different formats.

* TV and Movie content gets sold 4 or 5 times over, in theaters, on television, DVDs/blu-ray, online rental, subscription streaming. Only delays and segmentation (both inconvenient for consumers) make this possible.

Media companies are the middle-men, the grand-bargain makers, with their desirable content on one side of the scales, and inconveniences like ads, delays, prices and draconian punitive laws on the other side. Media companies don't mind being hated, that usually means they're doing a good job, as long as you love some of their content - the system still works.

This is why the convenience represented by technology presents such a threat, it dramatically alters the bargaining positions of both the content owners and the distributors.

That middle-man business must be nearing its end, so the question is; can consumer convenient technological distribution get more return for the content creators, the financiers and backers?

All available evidence shows piracy boosts legitimate consumption. It makes perfect sense that rising piracy has led to a boom in production, especially since it has also broken up the monopolies and gatekeepers that kept prices artificially high.

The RIAA and the MPAA are those monopoly gatekeepers, so their profits aren't booming. They have been made irrelevant. It's better for consumers, better for artists and worse for the people who hire lobbyists.

Link to the full report that this references: http://www.scribd.com/doc/79846477/The-Sky-is-Rising

A quick skim shows that it cites things like youtube, self-published e-books, and indie film distribution websites. I'm sure the RIAA, MPAA, etc. don't count any of that as growth.

Of course not. Industry players that aren't a part of the cartel are obviously not industry players.

"youtube, self-published e-books, and indie film distribution websites."

Does the report consider revenue? Or just eyeballs? At the end of the day, people need to eat.

Naturally torrentfreak has a completely unbiased view on this issue...

Good stuff, but the section on music is extremely misleading. Some of the numbers provided I think are actually false. I completed an industry report for record labels using IBIS and Factset. If anything, the music industry has plateaued after looking at SEC filings of the Big 4.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com