So I read an article on the Wall Street Journal about WB starting a paid P2P service in Germany, they’ll be charging per download (how stupid) almost the cost of a DVD (yes, and they’ll be doing this using everybody’s bandwidth… oh god)
Here’s what I think… (get ready old executives from Warner Bros who don’t know s### about P2P)
Finally a big slow monster is using their brains for a couple seconds, but then farts.
Pricing per movie close to the cost of a dvd… hmm, not fair to the user, maybe a monthly fee would be the way to go, this would encorage file replication on the network.
I think they might have a shot at this, just for 2 things:
– Most People are dumb and bitchy, they’ll probably won’t even know they’re downloading off of a p2p network, they’ll think they’re buying the movie ‘off their site’. Hopefully the service will provide the quality you can’t expect off of illegal downloads days before the movies even make it to the theater. I mean, people still go to the movies, rent and buy dvds.
– It’s Warner Bros. They’re not inventing the wheel as the article says, there have been other paid p2p services, but they probably haven’t had the rights to the awesome content Warner Bros has on TV Shows and Movies. They have all the money in the world to advertise their content as always, and make people want it and thing it’s cool… Wouldn’t you like to get The Matrix Trilogy on super nice quality, and legal?
I would definetively pay for this service if it was a monthly fee, I was a netflix suscriber, paid like $20 a month, but only ended up having 3 movies a week (if I was lucky enough not to have them stolen by my neighbours), now they’re offering a $10 offer, and there’s no way I’m going back, I rather download.
Warner Bros, I’d be on your service if you offer it for $5-$10 a month, maybe $15, I’d be downloading like crazy all day, all night, which would give you one more peer for your other customers.
If we all thought this way, a fair bang for our buck cause we’re putting our internet connection, our computers and our electricity bills… then they’d think… “Well, I guess you’re right, we’re not printing discs, booklets, covers, or distributing this to stores, plus all the administrative costs, now we’ll have the money in the bag every month for sure, it won’t be as much as per movie, but shit, it’s monthly and there’s a lot of people that download for free now, we’re loosing that money and we’ll still be losing it if we charge per download, maybe the whole MPAA should think about this, the world is changing, so should we or we’ll be extinct, it’s not like we’ll be able to sue everybody’s asses. ”
So If I had an executive position on Warner Bros with some influence on this project I would say to whoever is the responsible dude that signs this deal:
“You will fail If you don’t have the whole MPAA on this, and offer a fair price for UNLIMITED high quality downloads, remember you’ll be using people’s bandwidth, you won’t have to PRINT and DISTRIBUTE COPIES, you take the middle men out of the picture, PEOPLE LIKE FLAT RATES and you have a SHITLOAD of people sharing your content, you don’t have to pay for bandwidth like this, now you are paying for printing, distributing and all the administrative costs, this would be more cheaper and you’d be stashing cash every month, you could take a lot of rental services out of the equation, it’s a no brainer god damn it!”
This is completely a personal opinion and doesn’t represent in any way the opinion of my employer.
In fact what I would do [and here comes the billion dollar idea], I’d get the MPAA to look at each other faces, and fund the research to build a P2P network, but not with PCs entirely… I’d build a TiVO like device to download/share/store/play movies using a remote controller, just like TiVO. You could access your device from anywhere using a web interface, you download all day while you’re at work, when you get home you watch movies, set some more downloads before you go to sleep, and during all this time, your device is connected to the network, file replication would be amazing, downloads faster… it’d be beautiful, and the regular Homer Simpson would pay for it. Billion dollar idea right there.