NZ Study Yet Again Concludes That Piracy Is A Function Of Price And Ease Of Access

from the no-kidding dept

With rates of copyright infringement fluctuating year by year, and country by country, the end result is a debate that goes on as how to best keep rates trending downward. One side of this argument urges a never ending ratcheting up of enforcement efforts, with penalties and repercussions for infringement becoming more and more severe. The other side of the argument suggests that when content is made available in a way that is both convenient and reasonably priced, piracy rates will drop. A decent number of studies have been done that show the latter is the actual answer in this argument, including a study done last summer, which showed innovative business models fare far better than enforcement efforts.

Yet it seems it's going to take a compounding series of these studies to get the point across, so it's worth highlighting yet another study that has come out of New Zealand that concludes that piracy rates are a function of pricing and ease of access to content.

According to a new study commissioned by New Zealand telecoms group Vocus Group NZ and conducted in December 2018, this enhanced availability is having a positive effect.

“Legitimate streaming content providers are achieving what was impossible for Hollywood to get right: they are stamping out piracy by making available the shows people want to enjoy at reasonable cost and with maximum convenience,” Vocus announced this morning.

The company believes that “piracy is dying a natural death” as more locals choose to access content legitimately, via legal services that are both accessible and easier to use than pirate options.

“In short, the reason people are moving away from piracy is that it’s simply more hassle than it’s worth,” says Taryn Hamilton, Consumer General Manager at Vocus Group. “The research confirms something many internet pundits have long instinctively believed to be true: piracy isn’t driven by law-breakers, it’s driven by people who can’t easily or affordably get the content they want.”

We internet pundits have also speculated in past discussions that piracy rates probably have some sort of natural floor to them. In other words, rates aren't going to be 0% and it would be unreasonable both to expect them to be, or to attempt to conjure such fantasy rates into existence through legislative efforts. Instead, content providers need to figure out the sweet spot in pricing and ease of access that reaches or approaches that natural floor. Once they have done so, the job is complete. And, rather than having to worry about which enforcement effort to attempt next, content makers can spend their time instead both creating more content and counting all of their money.

And, as Vocus points out, this is already beginning to occur organically.

“The big findings are that whilst about half of people have pirated some content in their lives, the vast majority no longer do so because of the amount of paid streaming sites that they have access to,” Hamilton added in a video interview with NZHerald.

Indeed, the company’s study shows that 11% of consumers now obtain copyrighted content via illegal streaming platforms, with around 10% downloading infringing content via torrent and similar services.

“Generally the survey has said that the vast minority of people are undertaking piracy – it’s just too hard. People prefer to pay for good quality, cheap, legal content, so we think that’s the best way forward,” Hamilton said.

That convenience is the "RtB" portion of the Cwf+RtB equation. Convenience is worth paying for, as demonstrated by thousands of people that are demonized as just wanting something for free, but who nevertheless subscribe to all kinds of content services and otherwise buy all kinds of content. It's a contradiction worth noticing, assuming that creators want payment above control.

Meanwhile, Hollywood's New Zealand representatives instead want to pretend that none of this data even exists.

In January 2018, the Motion Picture Distributors’ Association, which represents the major Hollywood studios in New Zealand, said that “nothing” can be done to tackle piracy in the country other than site-blocking. Vocus, however, is opposed to this type of action.

That's the kind of lazy attitude only government lobbying could allow. In the real world, there is a great deal that Hollywood could do to tackle piracy, if only they were willing to try.

Filed Under: access, convenience, copyright, innovation, licensed services, price, studies

Evidence Mounts: UK Study Shows Better Legal Alternatives Pushing Pirates To Become Customers

from the yarrrr-forget-it dept

The theory that piracy enforcement is a far inferior method for combating copyright infringement when compared with better and innovative business models and offerings is certainly old hat for us here. And, while there have certainly been studies going back years showing that to be the case, it seems notable that the past few months have seen a wave of these studies all coming on top of each other. We had MUSO, of all organizations, essentially concluding a survey it did in the UK showing how much content "pirates" actually buy legitimately by saying, "Hey, content industries, get your shit together!" That was followed quite recently by a study performed by Dutch researchers that did an amazing and large-sampled survey that concluded quite clearly that user-friendly legal alternatives depressed piracy rates at a far greater clip than enforcement measures.

And, now, because good things always come in threes, yet another study in the UK has shown that once-pirates of music are morphing into very real customers due to convenient and user-friendly streaming services.

A new report from market research and data analytics firm YouGov only adds weight to that apparent shift. The headline stat from the company’s Music Report is that just one in ten Brits are currently downloading music illegally. That’s down from almost double (18%) that figure five short years ago.

It's quite obvious what coincides with that time period of the past five years that could contribute to this reduction in piracy and sure as hell isn't anything in the enforcement arena. Instead, the YouGov study suggests that the streaming services so many in the music industry have tried desperately to torpedo are responsible for this reduction. And, more interestingly, the report suggests that the trend line is only going to continue, if not accelerate.

More than six out of ten (63%) illegal music downloaders predict they’ll still be pirating in five years’ time but a significant 22% believe they won’t. Just over a third (36%) acknowledge that using unofficial sources for music is becoming more difficult but the summary doesn’t offer reasons why.

“It is now easier to stream music than to pirate it. And the cost is not prohibitive,” one respondent said. “Spotify has everything from new releases to old songs, it filled the vacuum, there was no longer a need for using [an] unverified source,” added another.

In other words, innovators solved the music piracy problem in the UK, as we always said would happen. John Marshall, the associate director at YouGov, was even more explicit in his conclusions, essentially stating that the public was now satisfied with streaming services and mostly had no use for piracy.

All of this is not to say that the music industry doesn't still have jobs in peril, of course. It's just that those jobs appear to be the ones involved in copyright enforcement, while the business of music itself should be doing quite well.

Filed Under: copyright, customers, licensed services, piracy, streaming, uk

No Shit: Groundbreaking Study Shows That Giving People 12% Of The Video Content They Want Doesn't Magically Stop Piracy

from the you-don't-say dept

When it comes to offering good legal alternatives to piracy in the entertainment industry, there are two types of arguments people make. One is that these alternatives, if properly done, will reduce the rate of piracy within a population set. The other is that these streaming options are great revenue sources regardless of the impact on piracy within the population and that increased revenues are all that really matter. What virtually nobody has argued is that if a streaming service barely gives people anything they want, even if that service is free, that piracy will cease to be.

And, yet, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Universidade Catolica Portuguesa sought to disprove this non-claim anyway in a recent study.

The researchers used a piracy-tracking firm to get a sample of thousands of BitTorrent pirates at the associated ISP. Half of them were offered a free 45-day subscription to a premium TV and movies package, allowing them to watch popular content on demand.

To measure the effects of video-on-demand access on piracy, the researchers then monitored the legal viewing activity and BitTorrent transfers of the people who received the free offer, comparing it to a control group. The results show that piracy is harder to beat than some would expect.

Subscribers who received the free subscription watched more TV, but overall their torrenting habits didn’t change significantly.

This summary sounds quite damning, particularly for those that would argue that good legal alternatives can reduce piracy. In this case, a free temporary subscription to a streaming service barely had an impact at all. The researchers found that overall TV consumption went up a few points and reduced torrenting practices by a few points. Neither change was a significant one. So what gives?

The video-on-demand service in the study had an average “fit” of just 12% with people’s viewing preferences, which means that they were missing a lot of content. But even Netflix, which has a library of thousands of titles, only has a fit of roughly 50%.

Right, except 50% is a fairly big jump from 12%. Even accounting for the gifted streaming service being free and Netflix carrying a cost, a streaming service that has 12% of what a consumer wants is only barely discernible from useless. The power of Netflix is in how much content it has and, by virtue of its quantity, how much the average person will find on the service that matches their tastes. What this is actually showing is how much damage is done by content providers cutting exclusive deals with streaming services and fragmenting what could otherwise be one-stop streaming services. The real question is what happens when a streaming service actually has the content people want. It's a question this same study actually answers.

“Households with preferences aligned with the gifted content reduced their probability of using BitTorrent during the experiment by 18% and decreased their amount of upload traffic by 45%,” the paper reads.

A nearly 20% reduction in torrent behavior over this short a sample period is really good. It's so good, in fact, that it should be the feature outcome of this study. A streaming platform that is strong on the content people want can cut piracy by a fifth in forty-five days. How is that not the headline?

The rest of the study makes much of how little the pirate households said they'd be willing to pay for a streaming service like Netflix, something like $3/month. This is presented as evidence again in refuting a claim that nobody made: piracy won't magically go away just because there's a good streaming service. But all this result really shows is that these people were never going to be reasonable targets for customership to begin with. Netflix has had a huge adoption rate where available and its been another pure revenue stream for content creators. Who cares what the habits of a bunch of people who can't even manage to pay $3/month for Netflix are? They aren't important. Or, at least, they can't be nearly as important as all of the people who are paying their Netflix subscriptions, resulting in revenue for content creators.

So, will good legal alternatives pop up to reduce piracy? Probably, if they're done well. Will they ever stamp out piracy completely? Nope. Does that matter? Not if the only focus is on making content creators more money, because the focus in that regard should be on making streaming options as successful as possible, which is not what the content companies are doing.

Why they aren't is the real mystery here.

Filed Under: competition, copyright, licensed services, piracy, studies, video