Distributed Video Distribution

Video piracy is rampant. This is obvious. The video industry is losing money (even if you don't think they deserve it). This is obvious. The video industry needs to adapt to meet these new challenges. This is obvious. What's not obvious, is how they should do this, and how profitable they will be doing it.

I'd like to recommend that the video industry cease attacking pirates with litigation and legislation, and start learning a lesson from them: the lesson of distributed distribution. BitTorrent, the latest in a string of peer-to-peer electronic distribution systems, is more than capable of handling the load. A quick glance at pirate websites will see that the popularity is there. Thousands of television programs and movies are being downloaded every day.

Am I the only one who sees a market here?

Why don't video distribution companies leverage this? There's a low fixed cost, especially since most video is digitized at some point any way. There's a low variable cost, since BitTorrent users pay for their own distribution channel: internet access. A video distribution company who had the foresight to release high-quality digital copies of their content could destroy piracy of their content and increase their revenue in one fell stroke. Destroying piracy, that's easy to see. But how would they increase revenue? Well, they're not getting any revenue from downloaded copies anyway. So, release their copies with advertisements embedded in them. Or even, if they want to be less obstructive, on the website where you download the original .torrent file.

Now, at this point, a couple questions arise. 1) Why wouldn't people just skip over the ads? 2) Why wouldn't pirates strip the ads? and 3) Why wouldn't this distribution network cannibalize traditional television? Now, hopefully, some good answers will arise.

1) Apathy and the state of computer video viewers answer this quite nicely. Most people are so attuned to ignoring ads on television, I believe they'd just ignore them on their computers too. In addition, video software commonly available is not always easy to skip frames easily, due to user interface design. Sure, some people will skip the ads - but some people channel surf during ads too. I really don't think it's a big issue.

2) To answer the second question, we have to ask ourselves: what do pirates gain from distributing illicit media. Notoriety, "street cred", personal glory? What glory is their to be had in stripping ads from free video files? Right now, there's a certain romance to being a pirate, because you're "sticking it to the man," because you're doing something dangerous. Where's the danger in stripping ads? People will only flock to the stripped copies if it becomes easier to obtain them than the legit copies. To combat this, simple: make it easy for people to download legitimate copies by providing constant seeds, no registration requirements, on-time-release, etc.

3) I have no good answer for this. Yes, it might cannibalize it. That's unavoidable. But, TV marketshare and mindshare is already being eroded by piracy. Instead, video companies should work to realize the benefits of metrics cheaper, and possibly accurate, than Nielsen ratings, cheaper distribution, reduced oligopolistic tendencies of distributors, etc.

What's stopping them other than a rigid mindset? As a consumer, I'd be delighted to have greater access to on-demand content, without being tied to new, expensive hardware and poor service providers. Heck, I may even start watching the ads :)