Popcorn Time And Tech's Duty To Do The Right Thing
zachtratar.com
zachtratar.com
The Internet killed the music industry because the music industry was literally in the disc-and-tape business. They were all about distribution, only doing production as necessary to ensure there was something to distribute. The only chance the RIAA had was to whine and fight because there was no place for them in post-CD world.
Movies, on the other hand, are actually in the content production industry. The Internet and desktop software make movie production and distribution cheaper, but not by that much. It still takes thousands of people and millions to hundreds of millions of dollars to make a movie. This isn't likely to change in the next few decades. This incredible cost of production and large fixed overhead, combined with vast demand for the product, mean there will always be opportunities for movie producers to make money, even if the entire way we distribute and consume movies is turned on its head.
As for the emotional impact disruption: most of the disruption is happening on the financial side; the alleged reason these people are trusted with billions of dollars is because they can put on their big boy pants and adapt to changing business circumstances, because business circumstances are always changing. For the people in the trenches, stuff isn't changing that much. The percentage of revenue from PPV vs DVD sales vs Licensing only matters to a grip if they have a really bizarre contract.
But all media requires, first and foremost - and most scarcely in an economic sense - skilled creative people putting in the hours forging their craft. That never changes, regardless of where you extract value from (and you might as well just extract the value from the act of the craft at this point, by kickstarting or something else your albums / films / games / etc to be made).
Mind that by neglecting those markets the movie industry is losing even more money because people over here would actually pay for a service like popcorntime, but the bizantine system of regional distributors and studios run by people who don't even know how the internet works stands in the way of such a legal app.
I know because I was part of a team that once tried to do such thing: the tech part is easy, the legal part is impossible.
Thanks for the great info.
This is not to say that entertainment itself should become obsolete, of course! Only that the existing power structures of Music and Movies should be replaced with something that works, something that does not try to enslave and prosecute people.
Film and music are driving forces for society. We need them.
Their own ignorance and inability towards copyright form sucks. I agree. I don't think that should doom them into obsolesence. I'll also argue that wouldn't happen. They would, somewhat righteously, kick and scream until copyright law tramples on internet freedom.
Every single technological leap has been vehemently opposed by these dinosaurs. Without fail.
I don't know. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I believe less and less that the industry cartels' behavior is about simple shortsightedness and greed, and more and more that their behavior is about control of human culture and suppression of culture they don't control.
Don't equate the entire box office at the theater not being available right now on Netflix for $7/month as them being a dinosaur, it is because doing so would be terrible for their bottom line. No one would be paying $20 for a BluRay or $7-12 for a movie ticket if everything was available right now in HD at your house for a flat fee.
What example are you thinking of?
Think of it as the cultural equivalent of the patent minefield one steps into whenever they do something novel with some existing technology.
I'd think it's ideal to identify and stomp out overreach while it's still a smaller thing and before it's a much greater thing...
We don't need them.
Music has especially made some good strides in the last few years with self-published music. Not only that, but there are some publishers that don't belong to the RIAA. That may or may not make them better; I can't prove they're not lobbying right alongside the RIAA anyway, but I digress.
I'll admit that movies are a bit behind music in this regard. Blockbusters simply cost more to make than music. Still, even if studios are needed for the huge-budget movies, they aren't needed in our goddamned government. Besides, indie films (many of which receive numerous awards every year) are low budget affairs. I enjoy the brainless action movie as much as the next hairy male, but I'd argue society needs less of those and more of the kind that make you think.
That's something we seem to be forgetting how to do.
So, in order to defend our principles, we should surrender our principles? This doesn't make sense, except from a specific, non-principled point of view.
Absolutely, but you seem to have equated those creative activities with the current organizations built around the previous distribution models for the output. We need the creative activities, but we now have a huge number of ways to directly connect people creating film and music with people who want to watch them.
I don't mean that as an argument for or against taking it without the permission of the copyright holder, I mean that destruction of the current music production industry isn't going to take music away from society.
An important question for the future is how to make it profitable for studios to create media. If the revenue dries up, then so will the studios. I've heard Zuck likes Game of Thrones. In the future, there very well might not be anyone willing to invest money into creating Game of Thrones. Not at that level, anyway. The visual and epic experience that you're used to circa 2015 might not be sustainable circa 2035. Would Zuck fund Game of Thrones directly if needed? What are some ways that such an investment could make sense? Would crowdfunding make sense? The largest crowdfunding campaign still pales in comparison to the budgets required to deliver something like 7 seasons of Game of Thrones. Crowdfunding might not be the answer. There may not be any answer.
I am advocating for belevolent empathy towards those technology affects. I am advocating for action that helps people change with the tide, not prevent it.
Not only can we, but we did.
It's very natural to feel horrified with the events as they unfold, but there's really nothing that will stop it. Hacker culture is hardwired to prevent ostracization of the kinds of people who build Popcorn Time. In fact, they're considered noble.
What we should focus on is how to find new revenues to fund media creation. It's not a good idea to try to change the culture.
As other are saying, it's impossible to stop the march of technology. So to my mind the problem to solve is how & where we can create replacement jobs, or how do we tune our regulation of the economy to stimulate job creation?
Edit: spelling.
The popular consensus seems to be either a) great marketer or b) self-serving scumbag, definitely short of 'hero.'
My intuition is that patronage systems lead to undue influence. If Coke will fund your video series, they'll want something in return, usually advertisements. That then leads a subtle (or not) influence on the content.
I think the best way to avoid that ultimately is crowd funding on a more massive scale, i.e. 10s-100s of millions of dollar, but that comes with a whole bag of issues.
I'm not an art history guy, but my understanding is that Italy is littered with art with "cameos" of the wealthy patrons who commissioned it.
I think the point of all of these articles is that they should be available day one, for $1.99 or some other trivial amount, until then they are just being ignorant.
This is not going to happen. Early adoptor content will always be higher, just like it is for many other things. The new Stephen King book is going to be $25 in hardcover for a while before it is $5.00 in paperback because all of his rabid fans are happy to pay that much to read his new work immediately.
The same goes for media, there is going to be a premium price period, even if it is digitally distributed, because it makes business sense to do so overall.
NO. NO. NO. Where did you get this information? It might be that the US of A is nearing such a state of affairs, but over here in Europe, these services are either not available or devoid of content.
For instance, I like to follow Continuum, Justified and Game of Thrones. The only one of these that is available online over here is Justified.
"Watchever", the service that carries it, however, is crippled by weird licensing deals where seasons of TV series appear and disappear seemingly at random, because they only get the rights for a limited amount of time. So if I get a Watchever subscription, I _might_ be able to watch Justified _some of the time_.
As for the other two, they are just not available online. The poor sods that can stand to watch it in the dubbed version with commercial breaks will get to see both series on free TV with a delay of more than a year.
There is no reason to assume that watching Game of Thrones with a one year delay is problematic in any way. After all, everybody (in Germany) watches it at the same time, one year later, right?
For GoT there is actually a third option. I can get a subscription with Sky for 35€ per month, where I'll get tons of sports television and one TV series of interest: Game of Thrones.
Oh, and that subscription? First time you can cancel it is after 24 months. So if I want to watch two seasons of GoT, it'll cost me a mere 840€.
Do you see the problem here? If HBO were to shut up and take my money, I'd gladly pay ten bucks per episode to stream it. But that would be soooooo 21st century, wouldn't it?
> Do you see the problem here? If HBO were to shut up and take my money, I'd gladly pay ten bucks per episode to stream it. But that would be soooooo 21st century, wouldn't it?
Unfortunately HBO doesn't want your $7/month on Netflix to watch an entire season of Game of Thrones, then cancel. It costs $6 million/episode. They make more money by not catering to you as a customer even at $10/episode with no locked in money like they currently have via subscription model.
HBO is making money over here with licensing deals that cater to old-money television channels. This is short-sighted, since there are only two options regarding what can happen:
a) Everybody pirates GoT
b) There is long-term brand damage (to the GoT brand, not HBO), since the entire country is de-coupled from the viral GoT-hype.
I'd just like to point out that this is categorically untrue. What's available legally is a fraction of what's been produced, and even that fraction is fragmented across so many platforms with a lot of their own quirks and limitations.
And there is only one country in the world where it even approaches truth.
How did you get to this number? Its pretty bold to call them ignorant for pricing it this way if you don't have the economics to back this up. Fact of the matter is, content isn't cheap to produce and at some point either the cost to produce a Breaking Bad goes down, or there is a model that can keep the lights on for these studios.
Those long tail prices ($1.99/ep on iTunes and the like) are heavily subsidized by advertising during the airing of the show. Cable networks make almost more than half of their yearly revenue from advertising. The true price of each episode may be much more than $1.99 once you factor in how much is being paid by advertiser. A day one $1.99/ep may not even be economically feasible. The fact that television media costs so much more upfront has nothing to do with (consumer) price discrimination.
Not entirely correct. For one, hard cover books are viewed as a luxury item by most. They last longer, look better, are easier to read (bigger print), etc. That does cost extra money, although I'm fairly sure they do get more of a profit from hard cover books.
Second, there are types of media where what you're stating isn't true. Take music, for instance. The price of CDs don't generally go down as an album ages. In fact, I seem to remember stores like Best Buy typically selling them for cheaper the first few days of a release.
I think the point I'm making is that the movies and music you want to be available day one for $CHEAP is not going to happen just because price discrimination makes sense for entertainment which isn't a necessity.
In the USA.
The "media industry," specifically the companies involved in lawsuits against regular people don't deserve anything but to be gutted and killed. The situation has been beyond legislation or a decent solution for many years. You can't expect the same customers who you sued in court to come back and buy products from you, let alone figure out your industry's problems. The quicker they die the better for everyone involved.
If your world was flipped upside down -- say we had AI built tomorrow that could code. Would you deserve to survive?
I would say it would depend. If you're open to change and new opportunities, then yes, you deserve to survive. If the rate of change is great enough, sometimes you need help.
But no one's survival should hinge on a business model, this is a flaw of our economic and political system. You're conflating the two problems. If the 'music industry' has to survive in order to enable people to survive or art to propagate, this is the real problem.
There are plenty of companies whose products are no longer necessary. Do they have a right to survive? No. Not if they don't adapt and start producing useful goods. One example would be a company like Kodak who once made most of their money from analog cameras and film. If they hadn't changed their focus from their initial offerings they'd be in even worse shape then they are now. No one who doesn't adapt deserves to survive (in an economic sense, of course).
Companies whos products are no longer necessary? Hollywoods products haven't lost any value -- they're simply being copied, and thus their value diminished by illicit means.
The last few days, the Roku is rebooting multiple times per show. Content seems to be disappearing from Netflix streaming more rapidly than its appearing -- and no, I'm not interested in the episodes of yet another faux-reality TV show.
Although its not impacted titles I particularly care about, there has been a slowly increasing trickle of emails from Safari regarding titles "no longer available".
The cost of the pipe I'm viewing some of this over continues to rise far in excess of inflation. And the moment I stop paying my several monthly fees, it all "goes away" for me.
As much as anything, these and other limitations now primarily serve to get in my way.
So... look out, government-granted and ever-extended monopolies. "The People" are, I increasingly suspect and directly experience, about to tell you to go stuff it.
P.S. And on the other end, many of the people I care about seem to be ever more marginalized. Songwriters and musicians I both enjoy and can actually afford to see, who all have to hold down one or multiple day jobs. Special effects artists who, directly or indirectly, win Oscars while losing their jobs. Writers who... well, "writers" is a broad category, but there have always been plenty of good ones who live economically marginal lives.
The status quo is a money grab for entrenched interests. I no longer identify with those.
P.S. I get physical discs from Netflix, as well. Measured against my viewing habits, they make plenty off of me.
I have money, I have a job, I'm willing to pay for what I consume, I just am not willing to wait while low quality video buffers on my TV after struggling to find a source for the content I'm interested in.
The idea that technology is a threat to jobs is not a new argument. It's true that things are progressing more quickly now than in the past, but that should be to our benefit. The problem is not that technology is obsoleting certain jobs. It's that the profits from the increasing productivity of our economy are by and large not going to the average worker, but to the Larry Ellisons and Tom Perkinses of the world. So long as the middle class's income remains stagnant, so will the economy. Put the record corporate profits into the hands of the employees who made them happen, and they will jump start the economy. The richer the middle class becomes, the more jobs there will be. But so long as we allow the takers at the top to amass all of the rewards of our technological progress, we'll see high unemployment and stagnant wages continue at the bottom.
The whole post stems from this idea, yet there is actually no possible compromise. What these companies want is to make piracy hard, if not impossible. But if we have private user-to-user communication and user-controlled computing devices, it will always be possible to easily pirate. If a friend can privately send you a home movie, he can also send you a Hollywood movie. And if a friend sends you a Hollywood movie but you are unable to play it, that machine in front of you is either not a computer, or not your computer.
I believe private communication and computing is the much nobler goal, as this is the only way the power provided by technology will remain distributed throughout society rather than centralizing into too few hands. And I believe this regardless of how badly the resulting piracy ends up hampering creative production - there is no opting out of technology, and freedom/privacy/self-determination are simply more fundamental than professional creative works.
So to me, the "right thing" to do is in fact to avoid funding the content cartel's lawsuits/lobbying to further destroy the Internet. The right thing to do is to steer clear of anything that encourages the adoption of perverted technology like DRM. The right thing to do is to abstain from easy services like iTunes/Netflix, who sell the illusion of progress while recentralizing the Internet behind the scenes. The right thing to do is pirate and seed as much as possible, as the only acceptable distribution technologies are those completely under the users' control. The right thing to do is encourage adoption of encrypted p2p software amongst the general public, so that ISPs are less able to differentiate service based on type of traffic. And finally, the right thing to do is to support artists through ways that are sustainable in the face of every recorded work being freely available - eg concerts, public showings, tips, and crowd funding.
It almost seems like the entertainment industry is just extracting rent from the status quo.
I've been curious about volume collective licensing schemes and the like built into your ISP fee.
There must be a better way forward that doesn't stifle seriously useful technology.
Music industry revenue last year = $16B Banking inudstry revenue = $600B+
Entertainment makes money. That is not a bad thing.
But it seems like they are extracting rent by using lobbying to maintain control over the pricing and distribution schemes in order to maintain their wealth without generating any for anyone else.
Maybe it's not quite the right term, I'm not sure... it seems that way sometimes though.
Without government to enforce fair transactions, sustainable trade and innovation is not possible. That's not limited to digital stuff--it's true across the entire economy.
Plenty of people are making money off entertainment. Electronics manufacturers and ISPs are making very nice livings by selling products and services that enable digital entertainment.
No one protests paying $200 + $60/month for an iPhone, but ask them to pay $2.99 to rent a movie on it, instead of BitTorrenting it, and all of a sudden it's a massive protest issue.
Worse still are the cable companies (some of whom are owned by these very entertainment companies). I can forget about trying to watch that movie on CinemaNow in the evenings when my cable company shapes the traffic of competing video streaming services.
I'm not arguing that copyright is useful. I don't think I have the intimate familiarity with the various laws to argue that it isn't. I'm just surprised that things could be better, as demonstrated by Popcorn Time, and yet they are not so that an industry can continue to extract money from the status quo... a bar they set themselves with the legislation they create.
The takeaway in the article is to be mindful of our work, and feel (some) responsibility towards the PEOPLE whose lives it will change. The collective "meh" on HN to any person outside the tech industry is disgusting.
It's also just as controversial.
The distribution companies, aka Big Media (they don't create content, they profit over controlling its distribution), business model is no longer valid. They refuse to change, they deserve bankruptcy.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Pirates-Dilemma-Culture-Reinventing-Ca...
What new business models can we offer these guys?
I would say that Peter Jackson's days of making massive flicks are numbered....
Sure, doing the right thing would probably mean doing it again and again, even though "they" keep responding with erecting ever more barriers, and lobbying for ever more repressive legislation.
But personally, I'm tired of it. 20 years ago I believed we could bring them along, and I put a lot of time and energy into it.
Now I'm just hoping they'll disappear a.s.a.p., before they manage to destroy our civil liberties with what remains of their power.
Piracy is not a technology problem. It is an attitude problem. Some people straight up just want stuff without paying. Some people are willing to pay but don't want to wait. Some people are willing to wait but want it one click away.
http://ycombinator.com/rfs9.html
When they change their behaviour maybe I could do anything other than play cheerleader for popcorn time and its ilk, until then bring it on, give them a quick and merciful death.
I targeted the post towards the tech industry. I should probably make that more clear.
We need to figure out how society should work in the new conditions.
10 people can build a rocket engine, but only 1 person is required to explain how it works and why it's a good thing.
Human beings will never stop creating art. They don't need a Media Industry.
There is no "we", and none of us control the future.
We all control the future. We are the future.
Technology has reduced the cost of transmitting the information in recordings to the trivial level that serving someone a glass of water costs.
A combination of technology and prior capitalization has driven down the cost of studio recording, both lowering the necessary a prior knowledge to record well, and putting excellent mastering tools in the hands of many at low cost.
What precise value are the members of the RIAA providing today? Please demonstrate how these members provide an essential value that cannot be shouldered by individual artists (e.g. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis)
But as you point out, there's one big way you're wrong : reality.
Right or wrong, there's something people don't seem to understand. We have laws. We have morals. We have society. We have duties. We have rights. All of those are swept aside when reality wiggles it's toes 10000 km from congress.
Of course, there seems to be one tactic that would be trivial for the movie industry to adopt :
https://play.google.com/store/recommended?c=movies (ditto for amazon, iTunes, ...)
Divide all the prices by 100. Stop offering the "buy" button at all. Offer a per-month total access plan with compulsory licencing. That would help enormously.