After completing
a work of art, whether it be a book, film, TV show, video game, etc., comes the
time to make back the initial investment. Over the past few decades, Publishing
and Distribution within the entertainment industry has drastically changed due
to the “third wave,” a.k.a. “The Information Era.” Today’s society is one that
expects information to be made available almost immediately. Decades ago, these
entertainment products were only available via physical mediums. This included
books, CDs, VHS, DVDs, Video Game cartridges, etc. Today, on the other hand,
everything is moving to the digital platform. This has, unfortunately, opened
doors to piracy and set the expectation to consumers that they can find these
products at a much lower cost, sometimes even free.
Since piracy has
had such an impact on the industry, it has caused a trickle-down effect to
which all members of the industry have had to make cutbacks. For instance, “An
11-employee Independent U.S. film distributor, Wolfe Video, has had its profits
halved due to piracy and costs to mitigate damages from piracy” (Strauss,
2013). This has led to slower wages and salaries across the board. The real
issue is that, currently, there are too many people committing piracy and there
is no way for the content providers to keep up with the convicts. Every time a
site a closed down, due to piracy, there are more that takes it place. The
ability to shut down these sites can be difficult if they are located in other
countries. In the end, what content providers should be doing is to provide
their content in a much easier fashion.
The birth of
instant streaming has allowed members of the industry to recoup their losses
due to online piracy. Netflix, Hulu and Amazon are great examples of companies
that have successfully changed the direction of the industry. In the same
article, Mr. Strauss states that “the rise of streaming video content hubs like
Netflix and Amazon has, to a certain extent, recaptured some users that may
have resorted to piracy because in previous years there was no other way to
find an instant feed of a movie or show without resorting to piracy” (2013). Eventually,
this could be the perfect way to retain audiences and re-engineer how money is
made (i.e. physical sales vs. subscriptions). This is good news for indie
filmmakers, on the other hand. Since self-distribution is slowly becoming more
and more popular, this has become a great way for the indie filmmaker to
promote and distribute their films. It will be interesting to see what will
continue to happen going into the future.
References:
Strauss,
K. (2014). TV and Film Piracy: Threatening an Industry? Forbes.com. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/03/06/tv-and-film-piracy-threatening-an-industry/
