Quote:
Originally Posted by Nautilus
The whole "free culture" croud just want to get their shit free, they're not going to settle with any "cheap" replacements - ZERO is the only price they're ready to pay. Maybe legal download services, if available, will have some moderate success, but the vast majority of current TBP downloaders will still be pulling their shit free from TBP. Until the damn thing is dead no legal replacements, however cheap, are going to really compete and make it up for the lost income.
Our own industry is the best example of that - unlike major studios we do provide convenient DRM free downloads at fair prices, and just look where we are now.
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I think before saying that, you really need to look at the "free culture" landscape. With the exception of scene type groups, most of the pirated content available trickles from niche communities, namely DDL forums and private bittorrent trackers. Note that public versions of these venues have existed for a long time; it's not as though niche communities sprung up through want of a new publishing medium. These sites do a great job focusing on their respective niches; high quality screen captures, great documentation, you name it. Not only that, but you can cherry pick which ever files you want - no need to pay for an entire site membership when you're just after that one video. Is it really any wonder that they attract a crowd? There's demand for the service.
I think the nature of those sites says a lot about what the "free culture" demographic might be willing to pay for. Visiting one of those sites isn't a whole lot different to visiting the video store; it's all on the shelf, well presented, you take what you want, nothing more, nothing less. Forget about the checkout for now.
You can probably see that tubes come pretty close to providing all of these features. They work quite well as a video channels / stores and have the capacity to provide pretty much everything the "free culture" crowd likes even better than the aforementioned source can.
Consider tubes:
- Trailers are available
- You can watch on demand (no long wait)
- There's no waiting for site rips or updates to be pirated
- There's no added complication of tracking down files
- You don't have to run clients in the background and burn upstream bw
- There are no download / upload ratio requirements
- The presentation is quite adept
- There is already a preference toward tubes for many of the above reasons
With those advantages (or added value), there is definitely incentive to pay a small amount rather than go through the less friendly process of piracy. Just how small is a pretty important question - the answer to which probably isn't within the realm of 'business as usual.'
Of course there's the problem of tube owners debasing the entire market by offering everything for free (often using pirated content too). It's no different to a pay site opening its doors and doing the same really. They are actively competing and cheating, but that's more of an internal industry issue than it is an external influence.
I don't really want to deride any aspect of the industry at present, but as far as piracy is concerned, the cat is out of the bag, end of story.
