I think that piracy overall isn't a simple issue: trying to put every pirates in the same bag isn't going to work, because not everyone has the same set of motivations: some have issues with packaging, some with price, and perhaps there are other kinds of issues?
What can be done on the other hand, is to figure out what are the main reasons for piracy (ie, on average, what are the driving factors), and what can be done to remove them.
Packaging in the music industry took a while to adjust: they first fought really hard against Napster and the like, when the customers were quite ready to accept digital content, but the DRM solutions were mostly in the way, or the network technology wasn't quite ready. Nowadays, everyone takes for granted that music is bandwidth cheap, and content owners realized that removing the packaging issue did remove a large part of the piracy, because those who pirated for lack of good delivery didn't have to anymore, and with this market share acquired, the revenues increased, which meant that prices could go down, and thus another chunk of the piracy crowd became customers as well.
I guess that my point is that price isn't a completely solvable problem, but it's not entirely orthogonal to the other issues.
Clearly, price cannot be reduced down to zero, there will always be people finding this or that to be too expensive for what it is. Note that ads do not reduce cost to zero for the consumer in the case of digital streaming: they still have to pay in ad view time, which leads to ad blockers, yet another form of piracy.
> If Netflix was working so well, all those other services wouldn't exist, because they'd have no customers.
Even if Netflix is working perfectly well, they can't have the monopoly of creativity. They might produce good content (something you seem to disagree with, I personally don't have an opinion on that), but they cannot prevent other distributors to do the same. The main reasons for this are that:
- again people cannot be put all in the same bag: what one will be interested in might bore the next,
- "topics" can be exclusive (GP alluded to that): For instance, Disney owns "Star Wars", and if you want to watch some of that stuff, you'll have to go to them.
You're right on price, there's definitely a certain nuance to be had there. I tried adding it to my original post, but it only diluted my point, so I kept it about convenience.
You won't ever get rid of piracy, but you can reduce it to negligible levels by offering what people want: a reasonable price & a good user experience. Music offers this currently, and piracy is pretty much a solved problem for them: only 2.9% of piracy is music [1]. I'd argue most people prefer having access to all the music they want on the device they want just a click away, for 10-15$ per month, than tracking down & downloading a good-quality torrent that won't give you a virus. Ad-sponsored versions are also an option here, and broadcast TV & radio's rich histories would indicate that's a pretty good business model. Just don't get greedy & do both (looking at you, Cable TV).
What can be done on the other hand, is to figure out what are the main reasons for piracy (ie, on average, what are the driving factors), and what can be done to remove them.
Packaging in the music industry took a while to adjust: they first fought really hard against Napster and the like, when the customers were quite ready to accept digital content, but the DRM solutions were mostly in the way, or the network technology wasn't quite ready. Nowadays, everyone takes for granted that music is bandwidth cheap, and content owners realized that removing the packaging issue did remove a large part of the piracy, because those who pirated for lack of good delivery didn't have to anymore, and with this market share acquired, the revenues increased, which meant that prices could go down, and thus another chunk of the piracy crowd became customers as well.
I guess that my point is that price isn't a completely solvable problem, but it's not entirely orthogonal to the other issues.
Clearly, price cannot be reduced down to zero, there will always be people finding this or that to be too expensive for what it is. Note that ads do not reduce cost to zero for the consumer in the case of digital streaming: they still have to pay in ad view time, which leads to ad blockers, yet another form of piracy.
> If Netflix was working so well, all those other services wouldn't exist, because they'd have no customers.
Even if Netflix is working perfectly well, they can't have the monopoly of creativity. They might produce good content (something you seem to disagree with, I personally don't have an opinion on that), but they cannot prevent other distributors to do the same. The main reasons for this are that:
- again people cannot be put all in the same bag: what one will be interested in might bore the next,
- "topics" can be exclusive (GP alluded to that): For instance, Disney owns "Star Wars", and if you want to watch some of that stuff, you'll have to go to them.