NBC Universal Admits Defeat; Returns To iTunes

from the about-time dept

NBC Universal keeps realizing after the fact that making it more difficult to find your shows is never a winning strategy. So, almost exactly one year after refusing to re-sign Apple's iTunes contract, claiming that it wanted to charge higher prices, it appears that NBC has realized that it needs Apple and iTunes more than Apple needs NBC. Among the various announcements coming from Steve Jobs at the Apple press event this morning, the most interesting may be NBC Universal's capitulation and return to iTunes. For years, people have been explaining to NBC that the more places and ways it makes its content available, the better, but NBC has struggled with that concept, preferring to control every aspect of its shows. At least it's starting to step back from that position.

22 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Convenience Matters: People Will Still 'Pirate' Content That Is Available For Free In Less Convenient Packages

from the stating-the-obvious dept

About a year ago, some commentators were positively shocked that tons of folks still got the latest Radiohead album via BitTorrent rather than the band's own pay-what-you-want site, which allowed people to get the music for free. However, the real point (which many seemed to miss) is that the reason people will often access the content via unauthorized sources isn't just because it's free, but because it's more convenient and doesn't require leaping over annoying hurdles. Plus, for many, it's a single interface and a single source for all the content they want.

So, it should come as no surprise at all that plenty of folks are still downloading unauthorized versions of TV shows that are available in authorized streams for free. First off, downloading the content lets users watch the content when and where they want -- and allows them to archive it or watch it on other devices. Second, it's just a lot more convenient for many users to get the content that way.

Once again, it looks like the entertainment industry got hung up on that whole "free" bit, when that's hardly all there is to the equation. Just because they put something up for free doesn't mean they've effectively competed with the alternatives. When the alternatives offer more and better "features" and much greater convenience, the "free" part is only one of multiple selling points. Simply putting content up for free without matching those other features means that plenty of folks are still going to get the content elsewhere. Rather than fighting it, it's about time companies learned ways to use this to their own advantage.

28 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Making Content Convenient Creates More Value Than Locking It Up

from the time-is-money dept

Megan McArdle sings the praises of Amazon's digital media strategy, noting that she can now get her music, movies, TV shows, and books all from one company and have them all neatly organized and made available to her. Amazon's digital store is convenient because it remembers which content she's purchased and allows her to re-download any of it on demand from anywhere (Update: Some readers are pointing that while you can re-download Unbox movies and Kindle e-Books, you can't re-download music from Amazon's music store. My apologies for the error.). That means that she doesn't have to worry too much about preserving individual media files; she just needs to remember her Amazon ID and Amazon takes care of the rest. One thing she doesn't note, though, is that while the MP3s are DRM-free, the Kindle books and Unbox videos are still crippled with DRM. That means that if she ever decides she dissatisfied with Amazon's service, there may not be an easy (or legal) way to take her content with her. And precisely because she's putting all of her digital eggs in one basket, it will be particularly painful if she ever needs to switch services. As nice as some of Amazon's services are, I'm not personally willing to subject myself to that degree of lock-in.

Megan's observation also illustrates what's wrong with the common argument that DRM is required for subscription services. It is often claimed that without DRM people would just subscribe to a service for one month, download all the content they wanted, and then cancel. But this ignores the fact that people's time is valuable. Most people don't want to waste a lot of time organizing, transferring and backing up their content. I think Megan is pretty typical in wanting a single place in the cloud to store all of their media. If the price of a subscription service is reasonable, most people will find it more convenient to just stay subscribed and download content as they need it. Of course, you'll have a few people who play the download-and-cancel game, but a lot of those people would probably have downloaded their files from BitTorrent anyway, so it's no great loss. And at the same time, ditching DRM creates a lot of new value because it eliminates compatibility headaches and gives customers the peace of mind of knowing they can switch if they ever need to.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

10 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Paperless Tickets: Inconvenience In The Name Of Convenience

from the up-is-down,-black-is-white dept

An interesting post from Braden Cox talks about how Ticketmaster's new "paperless ticket" initiative, which Ticketmaster claims is all about making the experience convenient for event ticket buyers, isn't at all convenient compared to traditional ticket buying methods. The so-called "convenience" is because ticketbuyers supposedly won't have to wait on a will call line to pick up tickets that were ordered. Of course, most will call lines only matter if you didn't order in time to get tickets sent to you. Furthermore, to get into the event, you now have to present both the credit card you used to make the purchase and a photo ID -- meaning that rather than just handing over a ticket, you need to hand over two separate cards, which then need to be scanned into a machine, slowing down the whole process. Also, if you bought multiple tickets everyone has to be there at the same time to get in and of course, you can no longer resell your tickets. This doesn't sound particularly convenient. Instead, as noted in the comments to Cox's post, it appears to really be about cutting out the resale market. Of course, Ticketmaster may find that this backfires on them. Part of the value of the ticket is its resale value. Remove that and you lower the value of the ticket, meaning fewer people willing to buy those tickets at existing prices.

24 Comments | Leave a Comment..

You Don't Win Fans By Limiting How They Enjoy Your Content

from the backwards-thinking dept

The CW television network, which is the massively struggling television network that was formed when the already massively struggling The WB and UPN merged seems to have a rather bizarre way of trying to get more viewers. It's making life more annoying for them. The channel's one popular show is apparently a show called Gossip Girl, which has a bunch of online tie-ins, considering that one of the main characters is an anonymous blogger. CW has been streaming the shows online, which found a big audience, as its target market likes to consume plenty of content online. The only problem? Advertisers aren't paying as much online, so the channel has decided to stop streaming it online, telling fans to watch it on TV instead. It's not hard to understand why this will fail. First of all, they're giving fans of the show fewer options in terms of how to watch it and they're taking away the preferred option. That's not exactly a way to win fans. The fans who really like watching it online will continue to do so, of course, but now they'll do it via BitTorrent or some other system, which the CW gets no revenue from. This isn't a captive audience that we're talking about here. If the channel makes it that much harder to actually watch the content, they'll move on to other content that actually caters to what they want. It's yet another attempt to force artificial scarcity where there is none, and in this day and age, that's not going to win fans. It's going to lose them.

14 Comments | Leave a Comment..

Convenience Can Be More Important Than Free

from the it-ain't-all-about-the-price dept

There's some buzzing about a recent Forbes article concerning the fact that even though you can get Radiohead's new music "legally" for free at their site, many, many people are still downloading it from unauthorized sources. This shouldn't be surprising or even remotely controversial. Of course people are going to download it elsewhere. They do so because it's convenient. If there's one thing that we've seen over and over and over again is that convenience is everything in this market. It can even trump price. The success of AllofMp3 had nothing to do with "free" music, but with the convenience the site provided. People are willing to pay for that convenience, even if it's free elsewhere. So, if it's more convenient for people to get the music from other sources, that should be seen as a good thing. That's why media companies have to learn to let go of the control and recognize that there are many, many different ways that people will want to get their content, and they should learn to embrace them all, rather than demanding that everyone does things their way.

The Forbes article on this (linked above) has some really odd quotes from Intellectual Property law professor Doug Lichtman, who seems to think that people downloading the album from unauthorized sites is somehow a bad thing that has hurt Radiohead's experiment. It appears that he, like so many others, seems to have ignored the full explanation of Radiohead's business model here. What they make from the digital copies is rather meaningless. They're trying to get the music spread as far and wide as possible, and then are trying to give fans a real reason to still buy the CD by providing many valuable extras. Lichtman claims that this shows it's hard to compete with free -- but I'd actually take the exact opposite lesson. It's easy to compete with free. If you provide convenience, flexibility and focus on selling services or tangible goods that are made more valuable by the free distribution of content, competing with free isn't that hard at all. Radiohead seems to be proving that quite well.

16 Comments | Leave a Comment..