This post is (to some extent) a continuation of my previous post on the subject of digital rights management —in my opinion a crucial one for the entertainment industry— in the light of some important and recent events.
Looking back at October 2010, it wasn’t a good month for physical media. Sony announced the demise of the venerable Walkman portable cassette player after selling more than 200 million of the immensely popular devices since they appeared in 1979. Even though some Chinese firms have licenses to continue manufacturing them for parts of Asia and the Middle East, it’s hard to imagine that they will be flying off the shelves even there.
Meanwhile, the closest thing to an electronically delivered digital successor to the Walkman, the iPod from Apple, has already sold over 300 million units since it arrived in 2002. But as good as these numbers sound, the company is already reporting a gradual decline in sales. So what is the future of portable media, i.e. digital portable media?
Apparently Apple already has the answer (or thinks it does) and it does not seem to be a function of the decreasing cost and increasing efficiency of solid state (or any other type) of memory. It seems to be about “clouds.” The base model of the MacBook Air, the tiny laptop they feel is the future of portable computing, has only 64 gigs of storage so all those popular iTunes most probably won’t be residing therein.
This author’s opinion is that the handwriting is on the wall (or in this case the files are in the ether) and that sales of physical media and dedicated portable physical media players will gradually diminish until they become the equivalent of vinyl discs and players, audio cassettes and players, DATs, etc. We will move onward to the multi-purpose devices; the phones and tiny netbook computers and who knows what else that do just about everything.
But what happens when people use all these files streaming around on the Internet, as opposed to, in the good old days, all that physical media, to consume entertainment?
For instance: “An estimated 23.76% of worldwide internet traffic is being used for content that infringes copyrights, according to a new report. BitTorrent is the main culprit, with nearly 18% of traffic,” said a report from Envisional, which was commissioned by NBC Universal to analyze bandwidth usage across the internet with the specific aim of assessing how much of that usage infringed upon copyrights. “Video streaming traffic is the fastest growing area of the internet and is currently believed to account for more than one quarter of all internet traffic”.
Granted, there was piracy in the good old days also. But obviously, according to the previous quote, quite a large amount of Internet traffic is video being streamed illegally, so I think everyone would agree that today copyright infringement is a lot quicker and easier. Could anyone claim that 25% of physical media sold way back when was pirated?
“Piracy is the most threatening risk to have ever hit our industry,” Directors Guild of America president Taylor Hackford said during a keynote speech late last year. “We are losing $25 billion a year within the US to theft.”
So, what to do? “Today we have to be as much a digital rights management company as an entertainment production company,” said Greg Parkin VP Studios & Archives for EMI/NA. Wow! A paradigm shift in the thinking of a major entertainment company put pretty clearly into one short sentence. My expansion of this rather arresting statement is that EMI has realized that it does no good to create marketable product and then, in effect, give it away. That is of course never the intention, but in reality it can easily be taken if copyrights are not enforceable and intellectual property is not protected in this era of electronic digital delivery of entertainment product.
It’s pretty clear in this migrated to digital or born digital world that the owners of intellectual property had better be technologically prepared to sell it rather than allow it to be taken. That means using, for instance, standard systems such as AACS or BD for Blu-ray and proprietary solutions such as those from Verance, Fortium or others designed to work in concert with the standard systems to prevent copyright infringement.
Your thoughts and comments are always welcome.
Do you have questions about Iron Mountain’s solutions for the Entertainment Industry? Read additional Information Advantage blogs on this subject, or contact Iron Mountain’s Entertainment Services team. You’ll be connected with a knowledgeable product and services specialist who can address your specific challenges.
Related Links:
