That's easy to say when the products you sell aren't as easy to pirate as movies and music.
Let's say a content provider created the perfect media service, exactly to your specifications - super easy, DRM free, etc. etc. Done and done; the service issue is gone.
Tomorrow, you want a new movie. On one hand, you have Provider X's new service, and on the other, you have piracy, which gives you pretty much the same content it always has but now is relatively less convenient in comparison to the service. Which are you going to choose? Oh yeah, by the way, piracy is still free, but Provider X is charging $19.99 for a movie, because that content service cost them millions. More importantly, they don't want to devalue their content. They don't want to live in a world where the street value of a first-run film is 99 cents.
Piracy is a value issue. The only reason it looks like a service issue is because there's a reasonable solution to that part of the problem and it's easy to point at content providers and blame them for not fixing it. But the reason they don't is because if they did, it would simply surface the other side of the problem, which they're not going to do anything about.
I would say its both, a value and a service issue.
I used to pirate a lot of music, but nowadays i rarely do it. Because in my opinion, it's just so much easier to quickly buy them. With only 3 accounts – Bandcamp, Soundcloud and Spotify – I can cover almost all my needs in this regard. This wasn't possible only a few years ago.
Compare that to the state of tv series. I wanted to watch some HBO content recently an typed "HBO GO" into search. First result says:
"HBO GO. It's HBO. Anywhere."
Anywhere, great! click
"To access HBO GO, you must reside within the fifty states of the United States of America."
I didn't even bother trying to circumvent that and went straight for a torrent site …
Of course, a lot of people use a lack of service quality as an excuse, when they just want free content. But for those who are willing to pay, service and availability is a problem.
There will always be people who will go to any length to pirate content, and there is nothing you can do about them. They are not, and never will be, your customers.
But for others, it is absolutely a service issue, and I am one of those people. I pay monthly for Spotify and I spend money on Bandcamp and iTunes because it's convenient and value-priced.
And it's actually easier than piracy, which is probably more important than the price..
Movie price should still be subject to market pressure rather than the false valuations of the content owners. Having every provider create their own competing digital standard for media distribution is as absurd as expecting them to all produce their own hardware for playing DVDs.
For efficient media distribution you need a common medium through which to publish it. Leave the creation of those platforms to others and charge a licensing fee for the content but let those services carry any content they can pay for. The customers will decide which services they prefer and you don't run the risk of funding a losing platform.
Popular movies will still be able to pull in millions on top of the box office earnings through licensing and a lot of also ran movies will likely make more than they do now as they are picked up by later audiences after they've come out from under the shadow of the big hits. I'm sure you could come up with some creative licensing terms that take viewership into account or go up for renewal on a regular basis so that they could be adjusted.
They already debut their content in the same theatres, why not a common home theatre?
There will always be people who will pirate no matter what. You can't do anything about that, and they will never be your customers. And for games, the percentage of the audience is probably higher than elsewhere because it is a mostly young and tech-savvy audience.
But the explosion of indie and smaller games on Steam should be evidence that their platform works, and that it makes economic sense to distribute digitally in that fashion because there are tons of us who want it, even with the ongoing piracy (that has been around since floppy disks and will never go away).
My Steam library has over 100 titles in it. I mostly buy during sales and via Humble Bundles mostly, but I also occasionally buy full-priced launch games that I really want to play. I can't remember the last time I bought a boxed game for PC.. Probably 2006? And before Steam I bought maybe 4-5 games per year? The service absolutely works.
One last thing: games piracy also has the added layer of protection cracking, which is pretty much a social contest in itself that incentivizes the activity (and leads to distribution as a measure of recognition etc).
I'd play a pirated version of a game before using the Steam version. Steam implements DRM and is generally obnoxious, trying to force itself all over games (popups), showing sdverts, etc. It just shows how terrible things are in game-buying-land. Look at the Xbox 360. A marketplace UI so laggy, you wonder how they technically able to make it that slow.
I'm surprised. Steam has been quite successful because for most people the intrusion is acceptable, the portability/redownloadability useful, the social side works acceptably, and they regularly offer big discounts.
It never ceases to amaze me how slow the steam store browser is, though.
