reality BYTES
Dear moguls, Do you want to know why more and more of your films, TV shows and animations are being freely swapped and illegally downloaded in Ireland, Britain and Europe? It’s quite simple. It is because there is no legal website on which to buy a blockbuster movie.
Whose fault is this? It is not really the fault of the teenager with a newly acquired broadband subscription. Please try to put yourself into his or her shoes for a moment.
Are you there? Okay.
Here is your situation: you have a new seven-megabits persecond (Mbs) broadband service. Surfing the web, you are shown internet trailer after internet trailer for the latest DVD blockbuster. You are bombarded with pop-up ad after pop-up ad.
Finally, half-crazed with movie lust, you go online to look for somewhere to buy this compelling, fantastic product. You are amazed to find that the only routes open to you are a webstore in Hong Kong or about 1,000 illegal file-swapping sites.
You have heard about downloading stuff for free, but you’ve never done it. You start tinkering around.
It asks you to download funny software and open up your computer to lots of things. This sounds scary but, with little alternative apparently available, you go ahead and do it. After an hour of configuration, you finally get to start downloading a movie. And a whole new illegal, file-sharing world opens up. Am I making sense here?
Before you start talking about the sanctions and prosecutions, let us be honest about this teen’s chances of getting caught: they are about one in 1,000. (And that is a conservative estimate.) Regardless of how many ads you run, youngsters know this. Now back to the main question: why can’t the film and television industry agree a deal with a website which sells blockbuster movie downloads legally?
It is now a full two years since the film industry agreed a deal with Apple that enabled US customers of iTunes to download movies and hit TV programmes.
Over here in Ireland, no such agreement exists. Instead, we’re supposed to go out and pay €21.99 – a full month’s broadband subscription – for a single DVD. Or €59.99 for the latest TV series.
We’re expected to simply ignore all of the easily downloadable TV series lying about online in front of us, free. The fact that so many of us do ignore the downloads and go out to buy the box-sets is nothing short of a miracle.
But, thanks to recession and surging broadband penetration, that is already changing. Every broadband subscription sold in Ireland brings another potentially media-hungry downloader into the game.
It is true that you can purchase films on Xbox Live, and you can view movies online using Sky’s internet player. But you cannot do either of these things from a normal computer on a normal internet connection without separate subscriptions. In other words, it is unavailable to 95 per cent of the market.
It is also true that you can watch a small amount of programming on the ‘web players’ of RTE, BBC and Channel 4 (though the latter two are not legally available to Irish viewers).
But this generally does not include big US TV series, which are in most demand. The music industry, which has long fought the download pirates, is now turning a corner in its file sharing battles, mainly through innovative new services such as Spotify.
More importantly, in the US, deals have been done with websites such as Hulu.com to allow normal web users to view hit TV shows cheaply, or for free.
So why not Ireland? Why continue refusing to compromise on outdated, obsolete distribution arrangements? Make no mistake – there is a very serious revenue crisis coming to your film industry, should you choose not to change.
The choice is simple: give us a legal service or create a whole new generation of people who will never pay anything for downloading your content.
