Streaming movies offers instant gratification: no waiting, no driving—plus great portability: you can watch on gadgets too small for a DVD drive, like phones, tablets and superthin laptops.
Hollywood movie studios should benefit, too. The easier it is to rent a movie, the more people will do it. And the more folks rent, the more money the studios make.
Well, apparently, none of that has occurred to the movie industry. It seems intent on leaving money on the table.
And if you don’t make your product available legally, guess what? The people will get it illegally. Traffic to illegal download sites has more than sextupled since 2009, and file downloading is expected to grow about 23 percent annually until 2015. Why? Of the 10 most pirated movies of 2011, guess how many of them are available to rent online, as I write this in midsummer 2012? Zero. That’s right: Hollywood is actually encouraging the very practice they claim to be fighting (with new laws, for example).
The moral? Make your wares available legally, cleanly and at a fair price—and only the outliers will resort to piracy. And you can keep making money.
Brutal. And so very true. I have never seen an industry so intent on preventing something, yet take so many actions that encourage that very thing.