Sunday’s New York Times had an article, Studios’ Quest for Life After DVDs. To nobody’s surprise, consumers want to have convenient access to “their” media, wherever they happen to be, without all the annoying restrictions that come into play when you add DRM to the picture. To many people’s surprise, sales of DVDs (much less Blu-ray) are in trouble.
In the third quarter, studios’ home entertainment divisions generated about $4 billion, down 3.2 percent from a year ago, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, a trade consortium. But digital distribution contributed just $420 million, an increase of 18 percent.
Given that DVDs are really a luxury good (versus, say, food or electricity), the 3.2 percent drop seems like Hollywood is getting off easy. The growth in digital distribution is clearly getting attention, though. What’s going on here? I imagine several things. People sometimes miss their shows. Maybe the cable went out. Maybe the TiVo crashed. Maybe they’re on the road. Drop $2 at the iTunes Store and you’re good to go. That’s attractive and it’s real money.
Still, the article goes on to talk about… yet more DRM.
Standing in the way are technology hurdles — how to let consumers play a video on various devices without letting them share it with 10,000 close friends on a pirate site — and the reluctance of studios to cooperate too closely with rivals for reasons of antitrust scrutiny and sheer competitiveness.
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And piracy, at least conceptually, would be less of a worry. The technology [Disney’s Keychest] rests on cloud computing, in which huge troves of data are stored on remote servers so users have access from anywhere. Movies would be streamed from the cloud and never downloaded, making them harder to pirate.
Of course, this is baloney. If it’s going to work on my iPhone while I’m sitting in an airplane, the entire video needs to be stored there in advance. Furthermore, if the video is supposed to be “high definition,” that’s a bare minimum of 5 megabits/sec. (Broadcast HD is 20 megabits/sec and Blu-ray is 48 megabits/sec.) Most home DSL or cable modem connections either will never go that fast, or certainly cannot maintain those speeds without hiccups, particularly when sharing the line with other users. To do high quality video, you either have to have a real broadcast medium (cable, over-the-air, or satellite) or you have to download in advance and store on a hard drive.
And, of course, once you’ve stored the video, it’s just not that hard to extract it. And it always will be. The challenge for Hollywood is to change the incentives of the game. Maybe sell me a flat-rate subscription. Maybe bundle it with my DSL provider. But make the experience compelling enough and cheap enough, and I’ll do it. I regularly extract video from my TiVo and copy it to my iPhone via third-party software. It’s practically painless and it happens to yield files that I could share with the world, but I don’t. Why? Because there’s real downside (I’d rather not get sued, thanks), and no particular upside.
So, dearest Hollywood executive, consider that selling your content for a reduced price, with no DRM, is not the same thing as “giving it away.” If you allow third-parties to license your content and distribute it without DRM, you can still go after the “pirates”, yet you’ll allow normal people to enjoy your work without making them suffer for it. Yes, you may have kids copying content from one to the next, just like we used to do dubbing cassette tapes, but those incremental losses can and will be offset by the incremental gains of people enjoying your work and hitting the “buy” button.
