Hollywood, you have sticks, you need carrots
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
George Bernard Shaw
You would think that seeing the pile of wreckage plastered on the side of the road that is the RIAA, that Hollywood and the MPAA would seek to do things differently. Back in the days of Napster, file sharing was still in its infancy. But after their thundering defeat of Napster, instead of killing the beast they saw it grow stronger and rise from the ashes like a Phoenix. Instead of fighting a company, suddenly the RIAA started fighting the only entity they could, their customers.
Will Hollywood go down the same road? While they have far from "defeated" the Pirate Bay, what is their next step? ISP's worldwide are not too keen to accept their three strikes rule, so will this mean more lawsuits against their own customer base?
Time will only tell, but its obvious to everyone that Hollywood, much like the Music industry, is keen to wield their sticks, without offering decent carrots in return:
So the question I have is, could Hollywood actually present a P2P business model that would appease their own strategists, as well as the end users?
Hollywood needs to:
- Control distribution
- Coerce users to upsell
Users want:
- Options
- Affordability
- Convenience
Hollywood will have to lose:
- DRM
- Region locks
Users will have to lose:
- Bandwidth
- Privacy
So what if Hollywood became the worlds largest bittorret tracker? Ok, hang with me a bit on this. What challenges Hollywood more? The fact that illegal torrent sites are giving away their product? Or that illegal sites have essentially taken over their distribution channel? Short term, both. Long term, the distribution channel. By controlling the distribution, they have the ability to package products, cross-sell, and of course regulate when products can be seen.
But in this purely hypothetical business model, Hollywood allows users to download torrents/movies, directly from them! But not for free. Instead of Hollywood throwing together massive data centers to download their product, they get their own users to do it for them, in exchange for reduced prices.
So, lets imagine a few products with catchy Hollywood-like names:
Producer - Pays the most ($50 a month), but only has to retain a .25% upload ratio. That means for every gig they download, they only have to upload 250MB.
Director - Pays a little less ($40 a month), but has to retain a .50% upload ratio.
Actor - Pays a little less ($30 a month), but has to retain a 1.0 upload ratio.
Extra - Pays very little ($10 a month), but has to retain a 3.0 upload ratio.
So not only would Hollywood be receiving direct revenue from each customer, but they can sit back and let their customers maintain their distribution network.
Also, in order to limit the number of films people can download, Hollywood could encode the videos in a fairly high bitrate (sub 720p, but still higher than the average DVD rip found today). In terms of security, Hollywood could embed a hashcode of some sort in the video, so if a video made its way over to a standard torrent site, they could at least have a small selection of names/IP's where the video could have come from. So, in theory, after a number of leaks, they could track down the offender fairly easily.
Ok, this is far from perfect, but it could be a step in the right direction. Either way, Hollywood its time to put down the stick.
Filed under //
bittorrent
Hollywood
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