Quote:
Originally Posted by srockhard
If a member to your paysite requests a hard disk by mail with all of the content of your site would you send it? FUCK NO! ....then why allow downloads? Why enable the pirating of your content and then complain that it is being played illegally on tubes? You are the owner of the content and you control what happens on your site (hopefully) so just button it up and save yourself some heartache.
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Exactly.
People used to tell me I was crazy to have high quality, large video files at the time I started my first pay sites saying NO ONE would download them as they were too big. Of course, they were wrong. When I used Dvix to encode videos, I was told by people on the forums this was stupid and you would lose members because of the specialized codec, again, this was wrong. When I choose to not make 5-10 versions of every single clip on my site (different sizes, quicktime, wmv, avi, etc.) people said you would lose members and people bitch. Again this was wrong.
Almost everything I was ever told on anything along these lines I have done has been wrong or I should better say, it did not impact my members nor membership. Out of those few who did contact me to complain, you just told them to get a different player, or download the codec, and they were happy as a clam and remained a member just like any other when you had gotten them over the hump.
My point is, you run your business how you see fit. For me, I have opted to not allow downloads on most of our new content on the pay sites. We are working to add in username/ip on the player in case they try and rip a video, it will ID who that person was. If they would like to pay $5-10.00 per clip to get the older stuff off of clips4sale stores, have at it. You're paying a premium for that.
This business model works for me. It may not work for others. It's your business to run how you see fit.