Apr 09
28
Warners Moves The Goalposts
A couple of days ago there was an announcement from Warner Home Video that they are moving to day and date release of downloads and DVD's.
I checked in with a friend in Hollywood who is close to the action over there to try to find out what insights he could provide to add to the story.
His view – which I think is pretty informed – is that Warners will take advantage of whatever technology there is as it comes on stream – particularly improved bandwidth.
What we tend to forget is that while P2P may be an extremely interesting wild card issue for the studios, their reality is driven by the distribution and sale of product that has a strong quality assurance quotient. Whether it is standard definition or Blu-Ray or HD, all of the content can be relied upon to provide a high quality consumer experience.
On line in the P2P arena there is still so much truly pirated stuff (like movies shot in cinemas for instance) that is relatively poor quality that the motivation from consumers has to be to purchase the movie – regardless of “free”.
We are creatures of habit, and we are creatures of expectation. And we do expect to be able to consume content of a relatively high quality. In music where songs last for 3 or 4 minutes an mp3 is reasonably tolerable. In short subject film a lo-fi version still gets the message across. But if you are going to invest 90 minutes or more of your time into watching a movie, you want it to be of a decent standard. That is why I don't believe that free low quality is going to impact the movie industry anytime soon, and let's face it, that is what most of the P2P material is. Not all…. I know….
So this move by Warners has some interesting implications.
The move to a simultaneous date for download and DVD is in my opinion, indicative of a philosophy of wanting to move much more seriously into the download business. I wouldn't even be surprised if they announced an experimental new business model that involves P2P sometime this year.
Let's see.