Moviepass Changed User Passwords So They Couldn't Use The Flopping Service

from the giant-mess dept

Originally, the Moviepass business model seemed like a semi-sensible idea, though we were quick to wonder if it would ever actually make a profit. Under the model, users paid $30 (eventually $10) a month in exchange for unlimited movie tickets at participating theaters, provided they signed up for a full year of service. There were of course caveats: you could only buy a ticket per day, and could only buy one ticket per movie. It also prohibited users from viewing 3D, IMAX, or XD films. Still, the proposal was widely heralded by some as a savior for the traditional, brick and mortar, sticky floor movie industry.

While it looked like the effort was going well, that appears to have been a ruse. A four month investigation by Business Insider (warning possible paywall) is well worth a read, documenting how the effort was bleeding money due to many of the issues Mike asked questions about back in 2012. The outfit went to great lengths to mislead investors that the effort was going well when it was really losing millions of dollars after blowing a fortune on trying to build technology that could easily and quickly geo-match users with theaters in their neighborhoods.

A 2017 price drop to $10 per month resulted in all kinds of breezy press coverage, but all but ensured the project would never make money. In reality, the outfit was struggling so much it couldn't even keep pace with the demand for membership cards:

"The company was overwhelmed by its overnight success and couldn't keep up with demand. A quarter-million new subscribers were signing up every month, and MoviePass customer-service lines were flooded with complaints from people who had been waiting weeks for their cards. MoviePass had lowballed the number of cards it would need after the price drop. It got to a point where the vendor making the MoviePass cards didn't have enough plastic and had to call on its competitors to fulfill all the card orders."

But way more interesting perhaps is some of the super sketchy practices the company engaged in to try and keep up the illusion of success. Like arbitrarily changing user passwords so they couldn't actually use the service they paid for:

"Lowe dreaded the company's power users, those high-volume MoviePass customers who were taking advantage of the low monthly price, constantly going to the movies, and effectively cleaning the company out. According to the Motion Picture Association of America, the average moviegoer goes to the movies five times a year. The power users would go to the movies every day.

"Before Mitch came on it was, 'How do we slow down those users?'" one former employee said. "With Mitch it was just, 'F--- those guys.'"

Per Lowe's orders, MoviePass began limiting subscriber access ahead of the April release of the highly anticipated "Avengers: Infinity War," according to multiple former employees. They said Lowe ordered that the passwords of a small percentage of power users be changed, preventing them from logging onto the app and ordering tickets."

Users on Reddit thought the errors were just another glitch. In reality, they were just being blocked from using a service they'd paid for by an imploding company that was losing at least $40 million every month by the end of July 2018. It's all another lovely example of executive incompetence, and the giant chasm that often exists between the illusion of success and actual success, especially for companies that prioritize splashy parties and marketing over fundamentals like basic customer service.

Filed Under: movies, passwords, subscription pricing
Companies: moviepass

Despite Spielberg's 'Get Off My Lawn' Moment, The Oscars Won't Ban Netflix

from the protectionism-by-any-other-name dept

A few months back Steven Spielberg had a "get off my lawn" moment in demanding that films from Netflix and other streaming services be excluded from Oscar contention. The sentiment isn't uncommon among old-school Hollywood types who see traditional film as somehow so sacred that it shouldn't have to change or adapt in the face of technological evolution. It was the same sentiment recently exhibited by the Cannes film festival when they banned Netflix films because Netflix pushed back against absurd French film laws (which demand a 36-month delay between theatrical release and streaming availability).

We'll note that shortly after Spielberg's rant, he could be found pushing streaming services at Apple, which suggests a dash of...inconsistency in his arguments. Regardless, Academy members don't appear swayed by Spielberg's request, and have announced that current rules for Oscar contention will remain unchanged. More specifically the Academy will retain "rule two," which says a film is eligible to be considered for an Oscar so long as it has a seven-day run in an Los Angeles area theater. So sayeth the Academy:

"The Academy’s Board of Governors voted to maintain Rule Two, Eligibility for the 92nd Oscars. The rule states that to be eligible for awards consideration, a film must have a minimum seven-day theatrical run in a Los Angeles County commercial theater, with at least three screenings per day for paid admission. Motion pictures released in nontheatrical media on or after the first day of their Los Angeles County theatrical qualifying run remain eligible.

“We support the theatrical experience as integral to the art of motion pictures, and this weighed heavily in our discussions,” said Academy President John Bailey. “Our rules currently require theatrical exhibition, and also allow for a broad selection of films to be submitted for Oscars consideration. We plan to further study the profound changes occurring in our industry and continue discussions with our members about these issues."

Some of that was likely impacted by the DOJ's odd (given its apathy on countless antitrust issues across a universe of sectors) letter warning the Academy that such a ban might run afoul of antitrust enforcers.

Amusingly, the New York Times has subsequently published a piece largely fueled by anonymous friends of the director, attempting to strongly walk back Spielberg's original efforts to have streaming services banned from contention. The piece tries to suggest that Spielberg's opposition to streaming has been largely overhyped and misreported, despite his clear, documented preference for a rule change that would have kept services like Netflix from winning awards. In talking to the Times, Spielberg's anti-streaming positioning has softened dramatically:

"I want people to find their entertainment in any form or fashion that suits them,” Mr. Spielberg said in an email in response to queries from The New York Times. “Big screen, small screen — what really matters to me is a great story and everyone should have access to great stories.

“However, I feel people need to have the opportunity to leave the safe and familiar of their lives and go to a place where they can sit in the company of others and have a shared experience — cry together, laugh together, be afraid together — so that when it’s over they might feel a little less like strangers. I want to see the survival of movie theaters. I want the theatrical experience to remain relevant in our culture."

Sure, ok. The problem is that simply wanting to preserve the traditional brick and mortar film experience is one thing. Taking active, protectionist steps to prevent streaming competitors from winning awards or fairly competing with them is something else entirely. The consumer is driving this particular train, and if consumers ultimately decide they no longer want to go to a physical location and overpay for popcorn and sticky floors that's their prerogative. It's how competition, and evolution, works.

Filed Under: movies, oscars, steven spielberg, streaming
Companies: netflix

Watch: The Latest Avengers Movie Is Already On Torrent Sites, But That Won't Stop A Torrent Of Sold Theater Tickets

from the enjoy-your-money dept

Way back in 2012, the Washington Post published an article entitled 'Why Hollywood Is Doomed'. The thrust of the post is that the major movie studios were entirely too focused on restrictive copyright laws and draconian enforcement efforts when any simple look at Hollywood revenues would show that great movies make great amounts of money. That is the correlation that Hollywood should be focused on, not imaginary stances that every instance, or even a majority of instances, of piracy represents lost ticket revenue. The author's example of this was the original The Avengers movie, which is nearly universally accepted as just a fantastic flick, but which was also heavily pirated. Despite the piracy, the box office take worldwide for the movie was $1.5 billion, on a budget of $220 million. It was such a triumph, in fact, that it solidified the MCU series of movies that have made so much money that throwing actual numbers around at this point is pointless.

Fast forward to today, when Avengers: Endgame is set to release in America this week, but where it was initially released in China. The strategy behind releasing to China first was explicitly to minimize the effects of piracy in that country. That strategy doesn't appear to have worked all that well, as the film is already on torrent sites ahead of the US release, due to several cam-versions of the film being created in China.

In anticipation of this somewhat inevitable event, TorrentFreak sources put systems in place to check for the movie being shared on BitTorrent. Between 4:00pm and 5:00pm local time, those triggers went off, indicating the jewel in Marvel’s crown had already hit the Internet.

Within minutes of the initial seed appearing, dozens of exclusively China-located users began sharing a 1.2GB torrent of the movie. There are also other variants, around the 2GB mark. We are currently unable to confirm the quality of those releases.

Copies of these files quickly moved to English-language torrent sites, ahead of the US release. Subsequent uploads of the films alleviated the major concerns over the first files, which had poor quality due to the nature of camming a film in a theater, subtitles showing up that most folks won't want, and a wonky angle from which it was filmed. The later files were of a much higher quality.

But here's the thing: it won't really matter. The only real question around Avengers: Endgame is just how insane an amount of money will it rake in? Will it finally unseat Avatar for the highest grossing film ever, or will it only be the fourth Avengers movie to settle into the top ten of all time? When these are the questions revolving around a film that is pirated before its release in major markets, it's hard to see those questions as representing a real problem that requires legislation and strict enforcement, no matter how understandably frustrating this is to the movie makers.

Why piracy is no threat to this movie is also easily understood. First, the Avengers movies are generally just great movies. People want to see them. And they want to see them in the best way possible. Which brings up the second point: these pirated files are generally not a substitute for the theater experience for a movie like this. The bigger screen, the sound, the social aspect of going to see this film with your friends and family; these are not things that can be replicated with a computer and a home theater setup. And that's the formula: a great movie and a theater experience. That formula is why nearly every movie in the top-ten grossing films of all time was released in the internet era. Piracy doesn't keep the revenue from pouring in.

None of this excuses piracy, of course. That isn't the point we're making. It's a matter of the focus and level of emphasis the studios, the MPAA, and their well-captured legislators are putting on the "problem." The Washington Post had it right: focus on making great films and the problem is minimal.

Filed Under: avengers, box office, china, copyright, leaks, movies, piracy

The Sky Is Rising: The Entertainment Industry Is Thriving, Almost Entirely Because Of The Internet

from the and-things-keep-getting-better dept

Announcing The Sky Is Rising 2019: a new report offering a detailed look at the entertainment industry.

A funny thing happened on the way to the internet supposedly destroying the entertainment industry. It saved the entertainment industry instead.

A little over seven years ago, we released our first Sky is Rising report for CCIA. At the time, the key point we found in looking at the state of the modern entertainment industry was that the parts that were whining the loudest about how awful the internet was for content were only representing a very small part of the actual content industries. Recorded music may have been struggling as a business, but every other aspect of the music business was thriving. More music was being produced than ever before. More music was being consumed than ever before. More people were spending more money on music than ever before -- just not in the traditional ways. Ditto for video. And books. As we noted back in that original report, if you focused on the supposed true purpose of copyright -- to "promote the progress" of content production -- it was clear that the internet had made that possible a lot more than "copyright" law ever did.

Today, again in partnership with CCIA, we're releasing our brand new Sky is Rising report for 2019, again looking at the state of the global entertainment industry. And, once again, it's thriving. But something big has changed in the past decade or so: even the legacy parts that were struggling when we put together the last report, the parts that were most impacted by the transformative nature of the internet, are now thriving as well. And in basically every case it's because of the internet that the legacy companies have shunned and complained about (not to mention demanded a continuous, never-ending, new set of laws to "tame" the very internet that is saving them).

A few tidbits from the report, though I recommend reading the whole thing. Despite the doom and gloom statements from the industry about how consumers were just "getting stuff for free" and no longer interested in paying for content, the data shows that consumers continue to increase their spending. There was a temporary drop off... but it coincided not with the rise of the internet, but with the 2008 financial crisis:

The recorded music business is often the poster child for an industry "wrecked" by the internet. And you could potentially have made that argument a few years ago if you totally ignored the fact that more people were making and releasing music than ever before. But certainly, "recorded" music revenue had dropped... until, starting around 2014, that turned around. And it's entirely due to streaming music, which last year accounted for nearly half of all recorded music revenue, and continues to grow at an astounding clip. Anyone who says that the internet has destroyed the recorded music business is lying to you:

But, that's not all. As we detail in the report, all other aspects of the music business have continued to thrive -- with much of it being because of the internet. The live music business has continued to grow. Music publishing and performance rights have continued to grow. Music merchandising has become a massive business in its own right. It's literally nearly impossible to find any part of the music business that is struggling these days, despite what some folks in the industry will tell you. Of course, if you're wondering why the RIAA and others changed their talking points from complaining about "piracy" to the made up concept of "the value gap," this is why. They realized that things were going great, and all their talk about piracy killing the industry was increasingly going to ring hollow. So they invented this purely fictional concept of a "value gap" which is basically just whining that other industries are too successful and need to be forced to hand over more money. This too is an old playbook for the RIAA labels, who have spent decades trying to squeeze every penny out of any successful online service, continually insisting that if anyone else makes a dime off of music, it should instead go to the labels.

The video world is another fascinating realm. Netflix and other streaming video providers have helped created the golden age of TV-style programming these days. We detail in the report just how much Netflix, Amazon, and other streaming video services have been spending on content, leading to massive growth in original scripted TV programming. But, it's not just the online streaming services. The number of original scripted TV programs on broadcast, basic cable and premium cable has also risen over the past decade. And this is all happening despite so much competition from other things people can do with their free time:

On the movie side of the coin, box office revenue continues to increase, both in the US and abroad. People are continuing to go to the movies, and more movies than ever before are being created around the globe. There was so much data here, we finally just had to stop adding more to get the report out.

In the past, some people argued that just talking about box office numbers was unfair, because where the internet was really having an impact was in destroying the home video market. There was some amount of irony in that given just how loudly and fiercely the MPAA itself had fought against there ever being a home video market (cue former MPAA boss Jack Valenti's famous Congressional testimony, in which he declared: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."). That wasn't true back then, and it's certainly not true today either. A few years after Valenti said that, the home video market brought in more revenue than the box office -- and that's still true today. The home video market is growing fast -- and it's almost all because of the internet. Note how much of the market is now subscription based, rather than transactional. That's Netflix's innovation, not the movie studios.

And then there's books. Once again, rather than destroying the market, the internet has saved it. More and more books are being published. Interestingly, in the book market, the story was a bit different than elsewhere. While ebooks and audiobooks are now a significant portion of the book market, physical books seem to be making a bit of a comeback -- and a lot of that has to do with the ability to buy them online.

Indeed, what we found in our research is that a tremendous uptick in new books is coming from authors self-publishing (in 2017, over a million self-published books were released for the first time -- a massive increase over the past decade). Believe it or not, most of those self-published books are available as paper books, rather than ebooks, thanks to internet services like Amazon CreateSpace, Lulu and Blurb.

Indeed, as we saw back in the 2012 report, a huge part of the story of today's entertainment industry is how much is now being driven not by the old gatekeepers, but by the fact that anyone can make use of the internet to create: whether it's video, movies, music, books, or video games, lots of people are using the internet to create, to build an audience, to distribute globally... and to make some money. So many of the new "stars" are coming up via the internet, rather than waiting for some legacy gatekeeper to discover them. That hasn't made those gatekeepers obsolete, but it's certainly taken away some of their leverage.

Back in 2011, we noted that so many people kept referring to their being some sort of "war" between Hollywood and Silicon Valley, but it struck us as odd that Silicon Valley kept coming up with the "weapons" that seemed likely to help Hollywood thrive. Eight years later, the evidence is in: the entertainment industry is thriving. The sky is rising. And Hollywood should be thanking the internet, rather than continuing to attack it at every single turn.

Go check out the full Sky Is Rising 2019 Report for a detailed look at the state of the entertainment industry today.

Filed Under: books, hollywood, movies, music, sky is rising, tv, video, video games

DOJ Warns Academy That Being An Anti-Streaming Luddite Could Violate Antitrust

from the get-off-my-damn-lawn dept

So roughly a month ago you might recall that Steven Spielberg had a "get off my lawn" moment in demanding that Netflix films be excluded from Oscar contention. The sentiment isn't uncommon among old-school Hollywood types who see traditional film as somehow so sacred that it shouldn't have to change or adapt in the face of technological evolution. It was the same sentiment recently exhibited by the Cannes film festival when they banned Netflix films because Netflix pushed back against absurd French film laws (like the one requiring a 36-month delay between theatrical release and streaming availability).

You'll notice there's never much solid supporting evidence supporting these banning recommendations; just some vague arguments that films from streaming services can't be considered good because these companies push back against traditional and often counterproductive business tactics that haven't aged well in the internet era (like those antiquated release windows). And while Netflix's catalog certainly has its share of duds, there's an ocean of awards for films like Roma that suggest the entire sentiment is little more than old man protectionist nonsense.

Granted shortly after Spielberg's comments about how terrible streaming services were, Spielberg came out in breathless support of Apple's new undercooked Apple+ streaming service, suggesting that perhaps streaming services aren't so bad if Steven's backing them.

Curiously however, Steven's grumpy vision of a streaming-free oscars may not come to fruition. Reports this week surfaced that the Department of Justice has actually told the Academy to tread carefully in terms of excluding streaming services from contention, as they could run afoul of antitrust guidelines:

"According to a letter obtained by Variety, the chief of the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, Makan Delrahim, wrote to AMPAS CEO Dawn Hudson on March 21 to express concerns that new rules would be written “in a way that tends to suppress competition.”

“In the event that the Academy — an association that includes multiple competitors in its membership — establishes certain eligibility requirements for the Oscars that eliminate competition without procompetitive justification, such conduct may raise antitrust concerns,” Delrahim wrote."

While that's actually makes some since for the DOJ, it's an odd issue to single out given all the other massive monopoly problems facing the US in the wake of years of eroded antitrust enforcement. After all, the DOJ just showed how feckless and toothless US antitrust protections are when it did a face plant in trying to stop AT&T's $86 billion merger with Time Warner, a deal that immediately resulted in significantly higher prices for both consumers and competitors alike.

So while the DOJ is correct in that the barring of Netflix and other streaming platforms from streaming contention is idiotic and anti-competitive, it's an interesting problem to be singling out given how useless and apathetic US antitrust enforcement has been on a wide variety of monopoly problems facing the US tech sector, from the cornering of ad markets to the vertical integration issues caused by telecom giants controlling both the content and the conduit to the home.

Filed Under: academy awards, doj, hollywood, movies, oscars, steven spielberg, streaming
Companies: apple, netflix

Report: In Bollywood, Movie Piracy Is Largely Carried Out By Rival Publishing Houses

from the inside-job dept

To hear it from the film industry writ large, a certain picture is painted in one's head when film piracy is discussed. That image is of a person, typically young, perhaps living in Mom and Dad's basement and covered in Cheetos dust, illicitly downloading film after film for their personal enjoyment, cackling evilly all the while. And, hey, personal downloading that amounts to infringement is certainly a thing.

But it's not the only thing. In India, where Bollywood has often put out the same old story about the evils of piracy, and where the government recently ramped up criminal penalties for recording or transmitting films and audio, one newspaper has comments from within the industry that suggest much of the film piracy in question is specifically enabled by rival publishing houses.

According to a Tamil cinema DVD seller, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, piracy is mostly an inside job. The source explains that movie companies are leaking each other’s films, as a competitive move.

“People from rival production companies or those from the creative department secretly release the movie online or circulate it as DVDs to hit the collection at the box office,” the source said.

This sounds like a Wild West story, but the allegations don’t stop there. Another source said that the local censor board and distribution houses are also on the piracy bandwagon.

“Another industry source said insiders in the censor board and distribution houses sell these copies for up to `5 lakh. The copies are uploaded on private portals that have dedicated passkeys,” the Times of India reports.

None of this specifically excuses downloading a film illicitly, of course. However, it most certainly does call into question the industry claims that piracy is by and large harming the wider film industry. If that were true, then these industry insiders uploading cam-footage and other films of recent releases would be committing self-inflicted wounds. Doing so would make little sense, were the larger claims of the industry true.

Amazingly, this goes even further down the chain, supposedly. These insiders work with theater owners to get these recordings, rather than movie-going citizens.

When it comes to recording video and audio at movie theaters, it is believed that some movie industry insiders work in tandem with theater owners to leak high profile films. As a result, some films appear online just hours after their official premiere.

So we have multiple layers of India's film industry facilitating the infringement of that industry's films to harm the competition, all while the studio heads and government say that it really hurts the entire film industry. If all of this is true -- and it's definitely an "if" --, it would appear that Bollywood is very busy harming itself for reasons that can't be explained.

Other than to say that the industry's hand-wringing is overblown, of course.

Filed Under: bollywood, competition, india, movies, piracy, studios

Movie Torrents Shown To Actually Boost Box Office Sales For Post-Release Movies

from the buzz dept

With what is now many, many years covering issues of piracy and intellectual property, it will come as no surprise to you that we've specifically dived into the intersection of copyright infringement and the film industry over and over. What is something of a counter-intuitive notion, however, is that we also have a decade-long post history pointing out that, despite all the fear-mongering about how piracy is killing the movie industry, box office records keep getting broken on the regular. The easy point to make is that obviously piracy is not killing the film industry, given how many movie tickets are being sold. But perhaps, according to a recent study, we should have gone one further and explored whether box office records were being broken in part because of piracy.

Researchers from the University of Houston and Western University dug into the effect of The Pirate Bay's offline status in part of 2014 and came away with some surprising findings.

Movies shared on The Pirate Bay are the main focus. The researchers use the Pirate Bay downtime following the 2014 raid to measure its impact on word-of-mouth promotion and box office revenues.

Based on a sample of hundreds of movie torrents and data from most popular movie review sites, Lu and his colleagues estimated this effect. Their results are rather intriguing.

And, as you might expect, those results are also more nuanced than either "Piracy bad!" or "Piracy fine!" mantras. Instead, the research suggests that having pirated copies of a film prior to release has a definite negative impact on box office numbers. But, importantly, the opposite is true when a film is made illicitly available after release.

This changes when the researchers look at post-release piracy. That is, piracy which occurs after a film has premiered at the box office. In this case, there’s a positive effect on box office revenue through an increase in word-of-mouth promotion (WOM).

“We find that the volume of online WOM mediates the impact of piracy on the box office. Based on counterfactual simulations, the WOM-effect from post-release piracy on the box office increases revenue by about 3.0%,” they write.

In other words, when The Pirate Bay went down, box office revenue dropped as well. This effect is significant and not linked to seasonal changes, as it wasn’t there in previous years. The positive effect is strongest during the beginning of a movie’s release and differs per genre.  Action movies, comedies, and thrillers, benefit more from a positive piracy “buzz” than dramas, for example.

So what does this mean? Well, for starters, it means that the MPAA's myopic notion that piracy is always bad, full-stop, is refuted by the data. Instead, the data suggests that movie studios could make very good use of piracy in the right circumstances, or at the very least they could focus their enforcement efforts only in the areas where piracy appears to cause actual harm, rather than where it helps sales numbers. This would be the logical course to take, given that post-release piracy appears to be a boon to box office revenue.

“Pre-release piracy can have a substantial negative effect, in our data this overwhelms the positive effect we look at. That is, the overall effect of piracy is still negative,” Lu tells us.

That said, there is an interesting lesson to be learned. Based on this study, copyright enforcement should be mainly targeted on early leaks. If these are dealt with, the main problem is ‘gone.’

“Our findings suggest approaches to target scarce anti-piracy resources, such as focusing on tackling damaging pre-release piracy,” the researchers write.

Makes sense. Hollywood, however, has never shown itself to be capable of this kind of nuance. Instead, sledgehammers are preferred over more precise approaches, with lobbying power dedicated to broad policy statements that apparently would at least in part be a detriment to sales revenues. And if that isn't stupid, I don't know what is.

Filed Under: advertising, box office, copyright, movies, piracy, post release, studies

Hollywood's Kinder, Gentler DRM Didn't Even Last A Decade... And Is Still Screwing Over Movie Fans

from the because-of-course dept

Stop me if you've heard this one before: the legacy entertainment industry embraces a "new" DRM that it insists will change everything, and everyone will love it. And then, because of various reasons, they kill it off and people get screwed. Yeah, it's happened over and over and over and over and over and over again. It's one of the points we've raised from the very beginning on this site: buying into DRM means that you are relying on a company to continue to let you have access to the content you legally purchased a license to, and there's no requirement that they have to continue giving you access.

And here we go again, with Ultraviolet. If you don't recall, we first wrote about Ultraviolet in 2010, when most of the major movie studios (notable exception: Disney) stepped up to support what they tried to pitch as a kindler, gentler DRM that wouldn't be so damn annoying. Of course, from the beginning it basically sucked and the studios started trying to give away bad movies to get people to sign up. And then, a few years later, they tried giving away more movies. The only other time in the last decade we mentioned Ultraviolet was that time that it pissed off the backers of a super successful Kickstarter project by making it difficult for thousands of people to watch the movie they'd backed.

Anyway, Ultraviolet is now dead. The studios are killing it off and most people won't miss it. Of course, as with some of those previous stories, there is a half-hearted effort under way for the few people who actually used Ultraviolet to have a method of retaining access to the films they purchased, but you have to keep them tied to a specific retailer now. Of course, part of the reason for the shutdown of Ultraviolet is that Disney (who, as you recall, never joined UltraViolet, and went its own way) has built up its own system, Movies Anywhere. However, as the article above notes, Movies Anywhere is a bit of false advertising, as it's only available in the US. People outside the US are... pretty much screwed as of right now.

As with many past DRM shutdowns, this really won't impact that many people, but that's kind of besides the point. It will still be a pain in the ass for the people who actually "did the right thing" according to the industry, and paid up. And they end up paying for a really annoying experience that could possibly even end with them no longer having access. Punishing the people who actually want to pay and want to support you seems like a really dumb way to run a business -- but here we are. This is yet another reason why some people who would otherwise want to pay end up pirating works anyway: they don't have to deal with this shit because they're not reliant on big, dumb studios deciding to keep DRM servers up for more than a decade.

Filed Under: copyright, drm, movies, movies anywhere, piracy, ultraviolet
Companies: disney

Study Shows That No, Netflix Isn't Killing Movie Theaters

from the synergistic-not-cannibalistic dept

It's odd how conventional wisdom usually isn't all that wise. For example the entertainment industry for years has proclaimed that piracy was killing numerous business models, despite record profits and a steady parade of studies showing that pirates routinely buy more legit content than their non copyright-infringing counterparts. The entertainment industry willfully ignored for years (and often still does) that many of these users were engaging in copyright infringement because owners and distributors were failing to provide this content at a reasonable price via legitimate means.

The chicken-little argument then mutated over the years to imply that streaming services like Netflix were also killing traditional brick and mortar movie theater attendance. That, too, simply isn't true.

For example, a new study by EY’s Quantitative Economics and Statistics group (funded by the National Association of Theater Owners) found that young people that stream a lot of content at home are also more likely to go see movies in brick and mortar theaters, showcasing how different methods of media consumption are complementary, not automatically cannibalistic. More specifically, the study found that users who visited theaters nine times or more in the last 12 months consumed more streaming content than consumers who visited a movie theater only once or twice over the past year:

"The message here is that there’s not a war between streaming and theatrical,” said Phil Contrino, director of media and research at NATO. “People who love content are watching it across platforms and all platforms have place in consumers’ minds.”

This study also showcased how claims that young people specifically don't go to the theater because they have more choices and a better experience at home (as if that would be such a bad thing in the first place) aren't true either. In fact, the study found that survey takers between the ages of 13 to 17 went to a mean of 7.3 movies and consumed 9.2 hours of streaming content -- notably more than any other demographic. The lesson, again, is that most media consumption sources are synergistic, not cannibalistic. That said, the study does try to suggest that there's an area where home streaming is having a notable impact, and that's on traditional TV and the rate of cord cutting:

"There’s data to suggest that one way they’re cutting costs is by cutting the cord. The number of consumers who have ever cancelled cable or other pay-TV services in 2018 is projected to climb 32.8%, to 33 million adults, according to recent estimates from research firm eMarketer. Contrino said he thinks that’s where streaming’s influence is clearest. He argues its upsetting the balance in the home entertainment space, not in the theatrical realm."

But even here there's a number of reasons that people are cutting the traditional TV cord (apocalyptically bad customer service, high prices) that has nothing to do with them having more options. The traditional cable industry could also operate synergistically with the rising tide of streaming options if they were simply willing to compete more seriously on price and listen to consumers. But here too, entrenched industries would prefer to hyperventilate about the end times instead of simply realizing there's still ample money to be made all over if you're willing to be competitively flexible and adapt to voracious appetites.

Filed Under: movies, streaming, theaters
Companies: netflix

You Don't Own What You've Bought: Apple Disappears Purchased Movies

from the bad-apple dept

Once again, copyright and the digitization of everything means you no longer "own" what you've "bought." I thought we'd covered all this a decade ago when Kindle owners discovered that, even though they'd "purchased" copies of the ebook of George Orwell's 1984, their books had been memory holed, thanks to Amazon losing a license. After there was an uproar, Amazon changed its system and promised such things would never happen again. You would think that other online stores selling digital items would remember this and design their systems not to do this -- especially some of the largest.

Enter Apple and its infamous iTunes store. On Twitter, Anders G da Silva has posted a thread detailing how three of the movies he "purchased" have now disappeared and how little Apple seems to care about this:

My guess is that with this tweet getting lots and lots of attention, Apple will eventually back down and "fix" the situation. But it shouldn't take going viral for you to not have the stuff you bought disappear thanks to a change in licensing. Indeed, it does seem like Apple telling users that they are "buying" content that might later disappear due to changes in licensing agreements could potentially be a deceptive practice that could lead to FTC or possibly state consumer protection claims:

Last year we had a podcast about a new book by two copyright professors about the "end of ownership" due to excessive copyright usage, and this is just yet another unfortunate example of what has happened when we lock everything up. You don't own what you've bought.

And, yes, it is not endorsing or advocating for piracy to note that this is one of the reasons why people pirate. Content that people pirate doesn't magically disappear when licenses change and giant multinational companies decide to reach into your library and memory hole your purchases. Don't want people to pirate so much? Stop doing this kind of anti-consumer bullshit.

Filed Under: buy button, consumer protection, copyright, deceptive practices, disappearing content, itunes, licenses, movies
Companies: apple