Hollywood should try a different model

Written By: - Date published: 10:11 am, July 30th, 2016 - 17 comments
Categories: business, capitalism, internet, Media - Tags: , , , ,

Interesting results reported here:

Piracy: Streaming Video Accounts for 74% of Illegal Film and TV Activity, Study Finds

Pirates have largely shifted from peer-to-peer downloads to illegal streaming-video sites for film and television content, according to a new study.

In 2015, out of a total 78.5 billion visits worldwide to film and TV piracy sites visits, 73.7% were to streaming sites, according to a data analysis by U.K. antipiracy firm Muso. Torrent-based sites like the Pirate Bay and the recently shut down Kickass Torrents represented just 17.2% of overall user visits, with direct-download sites accounting for the remainder.

I find the shift to streaming completely unsurprising, though the total number of 78.5 Billion is higher than I would have guessed! Also unsurprising is “Hollywood’s” depressing reaction:

The massive volume of piracy activity overall illustrates the daunting — and unending — task entertainment and media industries face in fighting the problem. Hollywood has urged Google to improve efforts to remove pirate websites from search results, but with illegal piracy cabals able to resurface virtually instantly using different URLs and mask their identities and locations using anonymizing services the epidemic shows no signs of stopping.

Instead of fighting their own customers (and a losing battle), Big Entertainment should try a different model. People want high quality, universal, easily accessed content, and most of us are prepared to pay a reasonable price for it. Why is that so hard to understand?

17 comments on “Hollywood should try a different model ”

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  1. Neil 1
    30 July 2016 at 10:52 am

    Kickass torrent website was back up & running within 24 hours of it being shut down, Hollywood is fighting a losing battle, whatever they do, there will be somebody smarter that will find a way around things.

  2. Savenz 2
    30 July 2016 at 11:26 am

    Why so hard 2 understand for Hollywood?

    Because they are power, money Hungary neoliberal dinosaurs who champion TPP agreements so they can fight progress to keep their monopolies in place. they learnt from tobacco, buy politicians & litigate competitors & change agents, maintain profits & status quo as long as possible.

  3. Psycho Milt 3
    30 July 2016 at 11:30 am

    Stupid fucks with their exclusive deals. I’m not going to subscribe to half a dozen different streaming services that all have exclusive deals for some programme I want to watch. If the Hollywood numbnuts busy hassling Google would instead come up with deals that enable all streaming services to provide all content, I wouldn’t be ducking off to Watch Series to see an often low-res version of what I want to watch, all while stress-testing my ad-blocker’s ability to stop ads and new windows interrupting it – or borrowing my kids’ illegally-downloaded latest series because it’s going to take months for them to turn up on Netflix. We do actually want to do the right thing, if these shitheads would just make it possible.

  4. dukeofurl 4
    30 July 2016 at 1:54 pm

    Funny how they loved Globalisation when it mean more consumers for Hollywood film/TV and Big Music, but hate it when it means a small server farm operating overseas.

  5. dave 5
    30 July 2016 at 8:04 pm

    tv msm big media are largely irrelevant and have been for at least the last 10 years

  6. b waghorn 6
    30 July 2016 at 9:19 pm

    We get high quality easily accessible content at a cheap price ffs it netflix and the like,
    I find it odd that lefties that rage against dodgy pollies etc think it’s ok to to pinch shit. grow the fuck up

  7. NZJester 7
    30 July 2016 at 10:03 pm

    They keep trying to control when and where each market can access content for a price. As we are such a small market we sometimes get locked out of things or get stung very badly in high costs for access to less mainstream content.
    They cut a lot of people off from legally streaming things from US services like the US Netflix for example and those same people have found a lot of the content they got from US Netflix is not available on the New Zealand version. They must now pay for multiple services to get a lot of the same content and a lot of people just can not afford to pay for more than one. They have instead gone looking for other avenues to view that content denied them here or denied them at a reasonable cost.

  8. Nelson Muntz 8
    31 July 2016 at 1:59 pm

    “Instead of fighting their own customers (and a losing battle), Big Entertainment should try a different model. People want high quality, universal, easily accessed content, and most of us are prepared to pay a reasonable price for it. Why is that so hard to understand?”

    They have. It’s called Netflix.

    Duh.

    • locus 8.1
      31 July 2016 at 7:15 pm

      when all live or recorded TV, film and video can be sourced via pay per view that will be the day….. Netflix ain’t even close

  9. adam 9
    31 July 2016 at 2:43 pm

    I meant to put this up yesterday but got side tracked. An example of how much the studios just don’t get what is happening.

    Fan fiction. I’m hope people have been seeing what CBS is trying to do, they are trying sue fans. They have gone an extra step, and written guidelines. Which are stupidly out of touch, and in some places, just plain idiotic.

    Here a cool video, about the history and the role Axanar played to bring this to a head.

  10. Cricklewood 10
    31 July 2016 at 2:58 pm

    Kodi + exodus + sports devil = all you could ever watch in one place in high quality and ad free.

    That said is it OK to steal something because you don’t like how the shop is selling it?

  11. keith ross 11
    1 August 2016 at 6:34 am

    I thought that the different studios had been reporting record profits year after year in the last decade.? Maybe this is not total truth but most have been making more than ever. This may be due to the expanded market that the internet provides with access to far more people and countries than before. with new revenues from expanded advertising and the other side ,streaming services(pay ones), they are crying doom and gloom while raking in record profits. The old entitled white males in charge have trouble accepting that they no longer control everything that they survey and it pisses them off, hence lock them up !(the pirates) They need to embrace the fact that there needs to be a new model for a new product which is free to replicate. In the old days they had to physically make stuff like videos and dvds but not anymore so charging too much is not on or restricting content based on geography will not work any more. Remember the dvd global zones?

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