First study of piracy in emerging economies
piracy.ssrc.org
piracy.ssrc.org
They make it too hard to give them money
This is when I buy a $2 iPhone app. :/
Yes, it's "illegal", but that's the whole point: it's only illegal because people thought that a model based on making copying illegal would work. It doesn't, at least not in the 21st century.
No business model is going to fix that, "illegal" copying is here to stay. All we can do now is remove the "illegal" part and start finding entirely new business models that don't depend on such restrictions.
Itunes and Amazon Marketplace work so I don't see any reason why this couldn't. I'm not claiming it's pure gold (I agree that there are absurdly large barriers to cross), just arguing your reasoning as to why it won't work.
The study is about emerging economies. Itunes and Amazon Marketplace barely exist for them.
It's a lot easier to adapt prices of physical goods. It's not trivial to make a profit by buying a physical good in a low-price market and reselling it in a higher price market.
There's no such difficulty with digital goods.
Films are expensive to make because the costs are driven up to insane levels (who decided actors, producers and studio-execs should make millions on just one movie?), and because the huge profit margins encourage gambling rather than investing.
Most of the "duds" are movies that shouldn't have been made in the first place. Hollywood has been in a continuous bubble state for decades.
I don't know much about movies, but I know many games which were terrible until the last few months of development, who then went on to become a success.
It's possible that some movies are made or broken at the editing stage.
The movie industry did. This is no different than athletes making astronomical sums. At some point, people are agreeing to pay them. If there were universal opposition to the practice, it wouldn't happen.
Why is it so expensive to attend a professional sports event? Because the ticket prices keep going up, and people keep buying them.
Or, if you are dead-set on actually getting that market, you could get a local localisation firm to localise your product for the target market, using local resources, so the cost would be lower, then sell the localised version for much less than the US version. This still has the high potential of not working out, since people can just pirate the US version and get community-provided subtitles.
In short - if you can't think of something really ingenious, don't bother. When they reach a better level of economic development, you can start thinking (if you're still alive then, that is).
It's completely open in the midst of working-class markets. In lots of these places $10/usd a day give or take a few dollars is a normal wage; which makes legal media purchases basically impossible; let alone something like a Windows or Photoshop license.