Back in the beginning of January, I wrote about iiNet walking out of talks with Hollywood. The talks were Hollywood’s effort to strong arm Australian ISPs into spying on their customers to help “combat piracy.” The most compelling point that iiNet made was that the piracy problem is actually of Hollywood’s own making due to their failure to make their content available to Australians in a timely manner and at reasonable cost.
The Australians have a real beef. They can wait 6 months or more for a movie to released in their market and then expect to pay a premium. At least we here in the United States don’t have that problem. Oh…wait. Take a look at the chart at the link. Of the top 100 movies from 2012, only 7 of them were available on either Netflix or Amazon. On the other hand, 77 of them has been released to DVD.
Here’s a news flash for Hollywood: This is 2013 and people want to stream their movies. And they don’t want to wait 6 months to do it. We’re such whiners. But here’s the thing: whiners or not that’s what people want and they won’t be denied. They’ll just download the movie for free even though most of them would prefer to obtain them legally and pay for them.
Hollywood imagines they can get this genie back in the bottle but as they’re discovering in Europe, the better metaphor is not Aladdin but whack-a-mole. The sad thing is that they could pretty much solve this problem by getting rid of their outdated distribution policies.