The entertainment industry model is broken

Tuesday June 26th, 2012

BBC News – Internet piracy appeal fee challenged by Consumer Focus

Suspected internet pirates will have 20 working days to appeal against allegations of copyright infringement and must pay £20 to do so, according to revised plans to enforce the UK’s Digital Economy Act.

How can we resolve this situation? Simple. It is down to the TV network/production studios to fix this themselves. If we are going to talk about system failure, it is them. Not us.

Start delivering online content properly. Preferably with choices of international subtitles included*.

For instance, Game of Thrones. Imagine this is available via iTunes the next day say at 69p? 69p is peanuts because you can buy a can of your favourite beverage, sweets, etc. Now what if say 5 million people in the UK gets hold of one episode of GoT? £3.45 million.

If you want to get the complete set, put it at a sensible price. Something like £15 and competing against physical media is a joke. Stores are doing deals all the time and somebody has to have some balls to set the online content at a lower price. You can still reap the rewards.

It’s mind boggling simple and yet somehow someone wants to play voodoo economics.

*Every single BBC TV shows on iTunes does not have subtitles. Honestly, it’s embarrassing because the BBC takes pride in itself delivering access to all and yet they cannot produce subtitles. What is exactly holding them back? Could somebody at the BBC please explain the situation to me? Don’t bother writing out paragraphs full of nonsense. I want to know the real reason why a british institution cannot do a simple thing? If it is all about copyrights, then who really cares? All we want to know what people are saying, learn some great quotes and recite them to people.

Update: Maths isn’t my strong point but hey… £3.45 million is still a lot.