Jun 09
15
The ABC, RAGE and P2P Marketing
We have blogged about P2P, we have blogged about illegal
file sharing and we have blogged about the economy.
What we haven’t blogged about is how it all ties together.
So tonight, I though I thought I would like to tell a fairy
story.
The hero of our story is Jim [not his real name].
Jim is a vet. As in returned soldier. He would rather not
say from which war, as that would identify him; mainly, because Jim came back
in a wheel chair.
Jim lives in Oz and has a wife and three kids.
Jim is like parents all over the world, constantly trying to
find meaningful ways to connect to their kids; except Jim feels he has to try a
little harder due to his lack of active physical participation in the majority
of his kid’s activities.
So Jim makes up for it by making sure his kids have the
latest music on their Ipods which he bought for them when he received his wheelchair
allowance, “house refurbishment cheque” from the Government.
Here’s where it starts to get interesting.
Jim used to use Bit-Torrent, “but it became too hard to get
the real files” he said. “So I just taped it off the ABC”.
“You mean digitally captured it?” I prompted.
“Yeah yeah. I used to record Rage on the IQ and then the
next day rip it off song by song.
But now I capture it straight to an AVI file. The Foxtel box
didn’t have enough hard disk storage. So I bought a special hardware capable
capture card. Cost me 1200 bucks.”
“So you get all the kids music for free from the ABC?”
“Well yeah, and I make sure I share it with everyone and
when it’s up on the server I tweet my mates the name of the video clips.”
There it is. Every Friday and Saturday night, the ABC RAGE
programming is copied by Jim, ripped into individual songs and posted on the file
sharing networks for his mates, also no doubt returned service personnel, to
download and enjoy.
The interesting thing is that Jim doesn’t record music only,
he’s only interested in the quality video productions.
Apparently his kids like showing their mates that they have
all the hottest video clips on their Ipods.
And of course, what happens when the kids peer groups see
the clips? They want the music. But of course, they don’t have a Jim at home
with nothing else to do with his day.
They probably buy it from iTunes.
So there you have it, a happy ending to our story.
Jim wins points with his kids,
Shoves it to the man, (he thinks)
And consequently assists the music industry in promoting
their digital music sales.
I wonder if Jim could claim a consulting fee for marketing
from the music biz guys.
Because we know that Jim’s activities added to the economy
by at least two thousand dollars in initial capital costs and then all the
bandwidth utilisation on the cell and broadband networks afterwards.
The bandwidth utilisation is considerable – Jim only makes
VERY HIGH QUAILTY recordings averaging about 300 MB each (for a 5-8 minute
video clip).
Therefore for each download of one of Jims RAGE HD clips,
$0.75 cents changes hands at the retail level (based on 20 GB per month from
the ISP for $49.95) and a further $0.16 cents at the wholesale level.
According to our metrics the 136 files have been requested
an average of 16 times each since we’ve been keeping statistics. That means
that Jim has inserted $2009.47 plus GST of $200 in under two months.
Not bad for a guy in
a wheel chair.
Plus he had the hedonic parental enjoyment value of being
able to obtain something that isn’t available from anywhere else.
What value can you place on that? Priceless.
There's a lesson in there, music industry.
Remember, this was a fairy story…. But if you’re curious,
just search for {Rage HD}
(Including the Curly Brackets).
In case you can’t search – here’s an example.
“ed2k://|file|{Rage%20HD}%20B-52's%20-%20Rock%20Lobster.mpg|374415364|1ED6DA339D1A3E2F39321F50F1B3A877|/”
{Rage HD} B-52's – Rock Lobster.mpg
The peculiarity about this story is that up until Jim made
the file available to the public via P2P networks, he was operating within the
legal parameter of the copyright act. Essentially he was time shifting FTA
content for the benefit of members of his household, a perfectly legal
activity.
The world probably needs more Jims and probably more ABC's.
Thank-you Auntie – without you – where would we get our
twenty year old video clip of Ring my Bell……….
Aaaaaaaaaagh I hate that song – hate it hate it Bet you no one would ever put
that on the p2p networks…….
Who said the ABC didn’t help the economy ?
References:
http://www.abc.net.au/rage/archive/s2596533.htm