2014年9月4日
By Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen Conference Chair, 流媒体 and CMO, id3as
编者按

How to Win the Piracy War: Offer Premium Content at a Fair Price

从1999年到2001年，我是MTV的记者. com, with a nebulous beat that included everything from covering Eminem’s court dates (he had plenty of them in those days) to interviewing the likes of Green Day, 王子, 和唐·亨利谈论他们的最新作品. It ended up being more celebrity news than music journalism, 但那个时代确实包括了一个丰富的时代, 重要的, ongoing news story that I was fortunate enough to cover regularly: the rise and fall of Napster, and the music industry’s flubbed response to large-scale piracy.

Even a copyright maximalist such as 王子 -- who, 不像大多数其他艺术家, goes so far as to regularly refuse to grant permission for others to cover his songs -- understood why fans turned to Napster instead of buying music. cd变得如此昂贵, 专辑里塞满了填充物, that consumers didn’t want to shell out $18 for one or two songs they liked and a dozen that they didn’t.

音乐产业的解决方案, 最终, 数字下载, 特别是iTunes, which allowed consumers to purchase music by the track rather than by the album. 这并没有拯救这个行业, and streaming services are worse for artists than iTunes or physical media, but almost every one of them (save for Thom Yorke and a few other holdouts) is on Spotify, 然而不情愿地.

The movie and television industry has mostly learned from the music industry’s mistakes, and instead of publicly prosecuting pirates in high-profile cases that turn consumer sentiment against them, rightsholders have instead embraced online delivery to one degree or another from the beginning, 悄悄地追捕海盗. That’s because they realized early on what their counterparts in the music industry didn’t: however rampant it appears to be, 盗版仍然是一个相对较小的问题, and the best way to combat it is by giving consumers access to the content they want, 在他们想看的设备上, 合法而且价格公道, especially now that DRM technologies are less onerous and invasive than they were even two years ago when I (misguidedly) 呼唤他们的终结.

A Irdeto最近的研究这表明这个策略是有效的. According to the study, 70 percent of adults in the U.S. “从不”看任何盗版电影或电视节目. 根据a presentation Futuresource Consulting’s David Sidebottom gave 在今年的伦敦流媒体论坛上, that’s in part because services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video give consumers access to a wide range of content at a reasonable price point -- about $8 per month.

以这个价格, a subscription to Netflix or Amazon Prime Instant Video is a relatively painless (for most consumers) add-on to their existing pay TV services, and both services offer enough content that they offer viewers a legitimate alternative to pay TV when coupled with occasional pay-per-title digital downloads and rentals.

正如Sidebottom指出的那样, consumers are slowly shifting from an ownership mindset to an access mentality; why pay $12 to own season one of 《百家乐软件》 when you can watch it anytime you want, and on multiple devices, with Amazon Prime Instant Video? 更重要的是, why fool around with torrents and sketchy illegal streaming services when you can get most of what you want on the level and on the cheap?

盗版永远不会消失, particularly among younger consumers for whom even an extra $8 a month might be too much and who are perhaps less worried about the privacy and security issues that go along with visiting sites and using services that traffic in pirated content. But as the research from Irdeto and Futuresource indicate, most consumers are more than willing to pay for the content they watch, 版权所有者正在引领潮流, 而不是追赶.

This column appears in the September 2014 issue of 流媒体 “打赢海盗之战”."