P2P Research Institute Blog

Recently I purchased series one through five of the hit TV show MacGyver from amazon.com on DVD for roughly $14 a pop including shipping. The inspiration for this whimsy came from a $4 trip to my local rental place which resulted in a straight through viewing of disc 1 of season 1. Prior to making the decision to purchase I spent quite some time weighing up the plethora of media options available.

If I was willing to tolerate adverts and poor quality, AOL TV seemed like a reasonable choice. Amazon Unbox was another tempting “now” option, but what if I wanted some sweet MacGyver lovin’ on the bus home from work with my iPod? Unbox’s DRM does not support the iPod so I’d be SOL on that count. Besides these restrictions Unbox wanted to charge me $1.99 an episode which at roughly 24 episodes per season was quite a bit more than I was willing to pay!

How about NetFlix? Well I usually don’t watch that many movies a month so a NetFlix account would stay dormant at least half the time and its digital delivery services suffers from the same DRM problems that afflict Unbox. A quick search of all the main torrent trackers yielded nothing promising (a seedless Love Boat crossover and a French language version of MacGyver series 2) so even if I wanted to sneak into the show for free I’d have to wait an undetermined amount of time for something to appear. Taking all of the above into consideration and considering the totally reasonable price I decided to do it the old fashioned way and buy DVD.

This whole process of evaluation took more than an hour to complete and was way more trouble than your average consumer would be willing to put up with. With all of these catches it’s no wonder that piracy is so prevalent, if a good MacGyver torrent was readily available at the time I was about to click buy, maybe I would have thought twice.

BitTorrent is really good at catering to the latest trends, where it falls down is in catering towards the more obscure pieces of media. In my opinion it is this inconsistent nature which is the entertainment industry’s biggest opportunity to stem the tide in its losing battle against piracy.

Consider what I was doing in my survey of the media options available to me. I was looking for the best bang for my buck. If I went to Swedish BitTorrent site The Pirate Bay and tried searching for MacGyver and the only promising thing that came up was an advertisement for NetFlix or Amazon and the price was right I might have clicked buy. Certainly I was more likely to click on that on an advertisement for pheromones.

By not embracing BitTorrent aggregator sites the entertainment industry is missing out on a valuable opportunity to extract revenue from potential customers. Picture a service that trawled all of the major aggregators and provided an up to the minute search able index of every torrent available on the Internet. A Google for BitTorrent if you will. Now picture text advertisements on this service presenting you with the relative costs of all media available - free with advertisements, cheap DVD postal subscription, DRM streamed immediate download. In my opinion, such a service would be an excellent way to regain lost revenue from piracy.