I’m Not Usually One To Argue That Too Much Choice Is Bad, But…

Fragmented Streaming Landscape Keeps Piracy Relevant, Research Suggests
I could have told them this for free, had they asked. It should be obvious to anyone with a lick of common sense.

The streaming services are great, but the entire concept suffers from the same issue that made everyone hate their cable companies. A good streaming service, like a good cable package, will get you much of what you want to see. But inevitably there’s going to be something you want that isn’t available through what you’re paying for, and instead of just being able to spring for that one channel or show in this case, you have to shell out for an entire extra package (streaming platform) full of things you don’t care about just so you can have the one thing you do. You can only stretch this so far before most people are going to decide screw it and head for their nearest pirate site.

The part that isn’t obvious is how you go about fixing it. How, without establishing a monopoly that would have everyone over a barrel, do you come up with something that has the selection of the pirates, would bring in enough money to pay fairly for all the content and still be good for the consumer? No matter how I turn this over in my head I still come up with one giant, cash filled outfit buying up all of the rights, but maybe that’s what we need in the end. Most folks don’t care who owns what movie, they just want to watch the movie. That’s the appeal of the pirates. They have the movie, and you can watch it without sorting out all the legal mumbo jumbo. The various services could always license content to each other, but that just reinforces how much the world doesn’t need a million different options and brings us right back to where we started.

Industry has come a long way, but this shows not only that it still has a ways to go, but that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The vast majority of all surveyed consumers, 80.4%,  feel that they’re already paying too much for content streaming. At the same time, 64.2% of the people who took part in the survey are not willing to pay for any more streaming services this year.
Even more worrying is that more than half of all respondents, 50.8%, said they were likely or very likely to use unlicensed platforms to search for content that’s not available to them. In other words, they are considering to pirate video in order to get what they want.
“This research shows that people will inevitably seek it elsewhere via unlicensed platforms, but this does, however, create further opportunities for content owners to understand this audience with meaningful and valuable insights,” MUSO CEO Andy Chatterley notes.

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1 Comment

  1. Interesting you bring this up. I’m actually paying $10 a month more for Spotify than the rest of you guys, because when we’ve been going through Allen’s playlist, there have been a big handful of songs that will not play on Canadian Spotify because we don’t have the rights to them, but Britain does. So for me, it’s worth it to pay an extra $10 to get that British content, but of course now I wonder what Canadian content I can’t get, and you are right. It’s not like I can afford to have British and Canadian Spotify at the same time, so we literally download most everything. Also because it’s just easier to put through our broadcasting software as MP3s. But I’m glad people are still talking about this. No matter how hard people try, piracy will never die. Look at the pirate bay. It’s taken down all the time, and it comes back within minutes on a new domain.

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