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.

Filed Under: convenience, paperless tickets
Companies: ticketmaster

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.

Filed Under: content, convenience, cw, fans, gossip girl, internet, tv
Companies: cw

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.

Filed Under: convenience, free, radiohead