Starting in 2013, yet another copyrighted creative work will be screened exclusively to consumers of a particular combination of products and services and exlusively to those who live in the contiguous 48 states of the USA.
Starting minutes or at worst hours after this, the rest of the world or those Americans who are not Netflix customers, will access the same creative work by infringing on the rights holder’s copyright. They’ll do this using Bittorent, or some sort of file sharing technology - whatever is easiest in 2013. The majority of those who watch and enjoy the creative work will do so without paying for the experience, and the show will be nothing like as lucrative as it should be.
A show will be shown in the US on Netflix only and everyone else will have to wait for the authorised distribution to them. But everyone excluded in the initial deal will just help themselves to the content using technology which is now easy and free.
The studio executives and rights holders will continue to be bewildered as they make less money, year after year. Some rights holders and studios will cease making copyrighted works like this, and will bitterly blame piracy for the now absent profitability. Perhaps there’ll be an aborted season of Arrested Development 3D and a multi billion dollar lobbying effort in Washington to criminalise piracy through trade agreements first, but they’ll eventually just stop and curse our names, when there was nobody to blame but themselves.
Day in, day out, we see content distribution companies continue to make decisions that are just bewildering. Why even attempt to limit the audience this narrowly? Why punish the purchasers of legitimate DVDs by placing anti-piracy ads and film trailers that cannot be skipped on there? Why include activation routines in software that annoys purchasers (dear Microsoft, I’m looking at you) and doesn’t deter pirates in the slightest?
As distribution companies cling to the past, disruption will come - maybe not from Apple and Amazon, but someone will come up with a better mouse trap.
