Sep 09
28
Counterintuitive Thinking Driving Revenues For Video
I bumped into Tom Kennedy the other day.
He was telling me that his company owns the DVD rights in Australia for a TV program called “Madmed”. Its a great show, by the way.
He told me that his company had released the DVD of the two series way before the program was broadcast in Australia. It had sold respectably. And then the broadcast started. And the program took off. DVD sales increased out of sight and iTunes downloads took off like a rocket. So this is empirical evidence that visibility generates sales, even though, as Tom pointed out to me, the broadcast represents the ability to access the content for free whereas the DVD requires a purchase. In other words free access does not inhibit sales, it increases them.
Now remember, Tom's company owns the rights to release at retail, not the broadcast rights, so they don't have any control over the timing of the broadcast nor do they receive any revenue from it.
The fact is that we now have empirical evidence that the ability to access content for free drives the sell through of the same content. It is a counterintuitive thought, but it is absolutely factual.
And if we take the hypothesis one step further, the ability to access content on P2P networks does exactly the same thing as broadcast. It offers people the ability to “try before they buy”. And more importantly, in the case of really good content, such as “Madmen” it help build the word of mouth.
It is true that a lot of people don't like to download stuff without being able to pay for it. These people are absolutely paranoid that if they download something they may be accused of stealing it, so rather than have to deal with that concept they would rather pay for it and have a legitimate version of the content – even though it may possibly be legal to download a version of the same piece of content. Imagine it: people want to pay in order to feel that they are 'doing the right thing'
Amazing how well programmed people have become, isn't it?