In an eco­nomic sys­tem where con­sumer sov­er­eignty is famed to exist, such that there is suf­fi­cient choice across most mar­kets to per­mit a degree of choice by the buyer, for which mar­keters com­pete, the major stu­dios (this dis­course is lim­ited to movie pro­duc­tion, for rea­sons which shall be dis­closed) are doing some­thing hor­ri­bly wrong. Many would argue that the state of the movie indus­try at present does not hon­our the notion of con­sumer sov­er­eignty by virtue of the range/variety or qual­ity of con­tent avail­able — but I refute this; not only because it is untrue (the con­sumer is sov­er­eign, even if only pre­sented with fewer options), but also because there are far more sub­stan­tial mis­takes being made with regard to this, such that any offence in the afore­men­tioned man­ner becomes some­what irrelevant.

No, it is their dis­tri­b­u­tion meth­ods that are at fault here. I don’t mean to launch on the usual tirade regard­ing their appar­ent neglect of the exis­tence of elec­tronic global dis­tri­b­u­tion infra­struc­ture, although that cer­tainly plays a part of it (Peer-to-Peer and the role it plays is addressed fur­ther on, although hope­fully not in the usual rhetoric-filled man­ner we’re all learn­ing to ignore); I’m more con­cerned with the way in which, given the self-established impact (or claimed impact) of Peer-to-Peer tech­nol­ogy and the Inter­net as a dis­tri­b­u­tion tool in gen­eral, the stu­dios (I refrain from mak­ing locale-specific ref­er­ences such as the MPAA, etc.) per­sist in their old dis­tri­b­u­tion model in terms of their film to home con­sump­tion (VHS/DVD) release cycle.

It is clear that piracy is not greatly hin­dered by stag­gered inter­na­tional release dates, as DVD rips of most movies are imme­di­ately avail­able on Peer-to-Peer net­works after their release ANYWHERE, and stu­dio rips of many before then. As such, the notion of stag­gered inter­na­tional release gen­er­ally is now fun­da­men­tally flawed and is clearly detri­men­tal to the busi­ness prospects of the pro­duc­tion houses, more than “tra­di­tional” (read: VCD/SVCD Asian organ­ised piracy ring repro­duc­tion) ever was, if only by economies of scale (whilst a restricted num­ber of peo­ple from afflu­ent nations which present a tar­get to the pro­duc­tion stu­dios could con­ve­niently acquire these “tra­di­tional” pirate copies, now sig­nif­i­cant num­bers of peo­ple are con­nected via broad­band in these afflu­ent tar­get areas, pre­sent­ing an ever-increasing problem!).

The solu­tion to this, it would seem, is sim­ply to use co-ordinated Inter­na­tional release dates — this is not, how­ever, an absolute solu­tion, and is still flawed in that it does not recog­nise the degree of con­sumer sov­er­eignty that unde­ni­ably does exist. It is impor­tant that the stu­dios recog­nise that peo­ple do have access to file-sharing facil­i­ties, and release their prod­ucts accord­ingly. As such, the gap between VHS/DVD con­sumer release (n.b. NOT rental release) and the end (or even wind­ing down) of cin­ema screen­ing must be decreased to such a point as to be utterly incon­se­quen­tial — con­sumers have no rea­son to wait, as they enjoy sov­er­eignty (legal issues aside) over their access mechanisms!

It is clear that the time to release between the ces­sa­tion of cin­ema screen­ing and home release is now utterly redun­dant — pre­vi­ously, it existed to pro­tect the inter­ests of cin­e­mas, but now con­sumers widely have access to pirated resources as they wish, at or even before cin­ema release time! Clearly, in this present cli­mate, con­sumer sov­er­eignty is demon­strated by elect­ing to go to the movies rather than sim­ply down­load­ing them and watch­ing them at home. With this in mind, the respec­tive anti-piracy pro­pa­ganda mes­sages dis­played in coun­tries around the world at the begin­ning of movies are now even less rel­e­vant than they would have been five to ten years ago! Then, con­sumers made active choice to par­take in piracy — now, they make active choice not to, by patro­n­is­ing cin­e­mas at all!

It is clear that cin­e­mas, there­fore, have intrin­sic appeal in their pre­sen­ta­tion of con­tent, rather than any exclu­siv­ity of con­tent that may exist or be con­trived to exist as a result of manip­u­la­tion of releases by stu­dios. If this intrin­sic appeal is acknowl­edged, there should be lit­tle detri­men­tal effect in a minor over­lap of cinema/home release at the con­clu­sion of a screen­ing period, surely! Like­wise, the video and DVD rental chains would not suf­fer sub­stan­tially by chang­ing their busi­ness model to per­mit the sale as well as rental of con­tent — it is sim­ply a mat­ter of habit; habit which is proven to be out­dated and rapidly becom­ing irrel­e­vant in this new mar­ket of extreme con­sumer sovereignty.

I have a spe­cific exam­ple in mind when I write this arti­cle, but that isn’t overly rel­e­vant. Suf­fice to say, I have seen this movie at cin­ema release, and was going to pur­chase it from Video Ezy (a local rental/sale chain; there was con­fu­sion on their web­site regard­ing the respec­tive release for rental and sale of this movie) — but couldn’t. The movie is still in Overnight release stage, and I was plan­ning on study­ing this film for aca­d­e­mic pur­poses — some­thing that is finan­cially unre­al­is­tic given imposed rental con­di­tions, and some­thing which may be eas­ily cir­cum­vented through the use of peer­ing tech­nolo­gies. Will I buy it when it becomes avail­able? Most prob­a­bly. That’s not really rel­e­vant, though — I could elect not to, regard­less as to legal/moral obligations.

The fail­ure of major stu­dios to recog­nise this capac­ity for choice and adjust their strate­gies accord­ingly is appar­ently far more dam­ag­ing than the effects of piracy and human greed alone.

Tags: absolute solution, ANYWHERE, broadband, electronic global distribution infrastructure, local rental/sale chain, peer-to-peer, Peer-to-Peer technology, Video Ezy