I 100% agree with this approach but what does it imply for the TV/Movie industry?
To me the problem is that they cannot control distribution. So one solution could be baking adverts into the tv/movie. Has the obvious flaw of poisoning art with advertising, but if done well might work?
What does everyone else see as the pragmatic solution?
They've definitely been baking advertisements into movies and television shows for years now.
My ideal pragmatic solution would be a platform (or two, or five) that acts like a dumb pipe for content providers to license their content to, and receive some form of compensation every time it is watched, prorated into the amount of the episode/movie is actually watched.
However, given the difficult licensing issues found for every country, that's probably not going to happen any time soon.
This solution is what the content creators want too: the problem is how to pay for it. Micropayments are the obvious choice, but they're currently impractical for a number of reasons (Bitcoin is promising but has yet to clear adoption hurdles necessary to hit the mainstream). I don't know that this will ever come to pass though. Micropayment tech is just too far off, and workable online distribution models are already in development.
Obviously, the cable/satellite/telco video companies of the world don't want to get disintermediated here; so most of them have been building IP video platforms for the last few years. It will still likely require a cable video subscription (though maybe with a slight discount as you won't need to rent a cable box.)
A distributed network is not well suited to micropayments. With every user it exponentially increases the resources used. Bitcoin can handle about 7 transactions a second maximum. Much less currently.
Yeah; there are technical limitations with Bitcoin that are well-known. I was referring more to virtual currencies in general; Bitcoin is unlikely to be the final evolution of virtual currency. My comment was more about how Bitcoin raises the promise, but I do know it's unlikely to be able to fulfill it.
The solution is to offer a lot more for a competitive price. Remove all barriers to user adoption, for instance, region-based airing (why would we wait 'till a show airs in the UK?), cable subscription (why would a user buy cable when they can download?), DRM (if we can get an MKV we can play anywhere, why get a shitty DRM'd file that only plays on verified TVs), spend a few ££ making OSS applications that download episodes automatically (or make streaming really good).
Basically, make a product that can actually compete with the solutions that piracy offers, from a technical and experience perspective, then price it at what people are prepared to pay.
Or you will die.
I'd be happy to trade in subscriptions to Usenet et all if there was something even several times the price of it if I knew my money was going to the authors (and even the middlemen that get it to happen, providing they are actually providing something good as opposed to being greedy and backwards).
Product placement is already doing that to an extent. If there were actual banner popups embedded into the video (like Youtube's but not closable) I probably wouldn't watch a movie, even if it were free. It's too damaging to the immersion.
