Fascinating op-ed over at the Guardian on staggered releases driving people to piracy.
I agree that there's a clear effect on piracy resulting from botched international rollouts, but I think there are two issues conflated here. One is miscalculation by content companies--intentional delay, which does indeed rob them of legitimate customers and encourage piracy. But the other is that it's not feasible to negotiate release deals worldwide simultaneously. Sometimes you just can't legally offer things in a timely manner.
That's not a legitimate driver of piracy. Would simultaneous worldwide release turn some pirates into customers? No doubt. But would the cost of doing so (a) preserve current profits and (b) not create additional pirates as a result of higher prices? Unlikely.
I find fault with the "legitimate alternative" argument just as I do with the spurious "lost sales" arguments on the other side. The truth is that wanting instant gratification is just as powerful a piece of social psychology as externalizing blame. It's not right when the media companies do it and it's equally bizarre for people to whine about the draconian measures and outlandish claims of the *AA and then turn around and do the same.
No matter how impatient for a movie or TV series and no matter how infuriating the un-skippable crap at the beginning of a DVD, it's fundamentally a larger problem: the irritating things that the studios do are a direct result of the market being unwilling to pay the price for avoiding them.
The economics are pretty clear-cut: say you've got an entertainment property that brings in $200 million, on a budget of $150 million (real budget, let's not pull any Hollywood accounting tricks for this example). They charge $10 per head worldwide, giving them 20 million customers. But they know that 25 million people have it.
Is it true that they've "lost" sales of $50 million? Of course not. Most piracy isn't because something was a little too expensive or a little too late in release, so they'd never capture most of those 5 million people as "customers". Say it's 1 million they could convert by doing something different. If simultaneous worldwide release would have cost an extra $10 million, would it have increased sales by a million people? Only if every potential customer pirated it because it wasn't available where they were, a highly unlikely scenario. It's much more likely that people simply have an entertainment desire that outstrips their budget. Raising prices a little bit might have brought some of the "too late" crowd back into the fold, but at the expense of growing the "too expensive" crowd that now pirates more because where they previously bought 25 of the 30 albums they acquired, now they can only afford 22. They're still going to keep collecting 30. The property owners made the right financial decision in not paying the premium that wouldn't have been recouped.
Short of market intervention restricting the profits of companies (something I'm not personally opposed to, but that is antithetical to many), the only answer is to have customers pay more.
It's all triangulation on a massive scale. Would I pay $20 to watch the next season of Merlin or Downton Abbey as soon as it airs in the UK? You bet! But that's not a shocking revelation to the content companies. The issue is that doing so is not demonstrably revenue-enhancing to offset higher costs. That $20 is probably money I'd spend on entertainment anyway--I'm not changing my budget, just shifting where the dollars go. It helps the producers of Merlin on a micro level, but the downstream effect on a macro level is negative. That's what needs to change. But neither side will budge--getting people to live within their means is about as unlikely as getting content companies to admit they're unreasonably greedy.
This is a parallel argument to the notion that simply creating more jobs will let people buy more stuff and fix the economy. The structural issue is that modern society just doesn't need full employment, and people are living longer and longer while population is increasing. In other words, we're rapidly expanding the labor force while almost as quickly reducing the need for labor. We need a bigger fix.
We're just not willing to pay the true cost of what we want, and it's coming apart at the seams.
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