In a recent CNET interview Pink Visual’s Q. Boyer pontificated on the piracy problems plaguing the industry, some quotes:
“The company hopes to out-market, out-promote, and out-innovate illegal file-sharing services. The plan is to make content so easily available at such a fair price that piracy is less attractive to the company’s audience,”
“You’ve had a lot of companies, both in mainstream and adult entertainment, who’ve been kind of stubborn on the question of access and convenience. They want people consuming their content the way the companies want it consumed. They want to monetize it the way they want to. About two years ago we began to see that as a losing battle.”
“I don’t want to paint them all [pirates] with the same brush. I think that’s the mistake that some in mainstream entertainment have made, and I think that mistake’s being replicated in the adult industry. I certainly understand the frustration that rights holders feel. We experience the same frustration. But at some point you have to be pragmatic and say, “OK piracy is a fact of life. It’s been there for a long time. Now what?”
I’m sorry, I don’t have anything against Pink Visual one way or the other but this isn’t really a viable approach, and certainly not the solution I would expect from a self proclaimed industry leader in anti-piracy.
If you really want to listen to an industry leader you should be listening to Eric and Nate, these guys are doing it every day, and they aren’t crowing about every piracy site they shut down, Eric shut down a huge one last week, this one was way under the radar but got massive traffic, it’s gone for good now.
But that’s the here and now, as an industry if you don’t get it that the internet IS the future then yer about to be road kill on the proverbial information super highway.
The answers lie in encrypted streaming, for a good proof of concept look at Netflix instant streaming, it’s damn near impossible to rip off those streams. Couple that with a streaming video player that watermarks the video on the fly with the users IP address and login name and you have the makings of a real solution to piracy.
Those are the kind of innovative approaches that the content protection retreat should be talking about not whoring cheap content….that’s what got us into this mess.
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[New Post] Pink Visual Offers No Real Solution – via #twitoaster http://www.mikesouth.com/piracy/pink-vis…
You would just have to say we don’t crow about things the same day I put out my first press release. lol
Quentin is a really smart guy, having spoken to him a good deal. What I read from that interview was that he was making a lot of PR-friendly general statements, all well intentioned and not going into a lot of specifics. PV is trying a lot of interesting things and it will be interesting to see the results.
Pink Visual has been really out front in trying to get studios to step up and use services like mine or Eric’s and to just do something…anything…period. They’re definitely one of the good guys in this fight.
All the stuff you suggested Mike are really great ideas. Just needs to be a company out there that wants to take the lead in implementing them. By the way, I’ve spoken to a great many studios about streaming-only vs downloads in their members area. While it’s great for protection, it does hurt them a lot in the membership numbers, that’s the trade off they aren’t willing to accept right now.
I know you can’t attend the Content Protection Retreats that Pink Visual has sponsored (which have been really good by the way), but you’re friends with several studio heads, you should give them your suggestions and have them bring them up at the next retreat.
The problem isnt so much streaming vs download its what we have conditioned our customers to expect.
stripperfacials.com is doing well for me and its streaming only
southernbukkake does extremely well and its streaming only for HD content…downloadable is way way lower quality neither are hurting because of the changes.
if porners would quit whoring themselves and place more value on their content then consumers would see the content as having more value.
The business model is broken, and piracy is just a small part of it….giving away years worth of content for the price of a one month membership is a retarded model to begin with and it was destined to fail. But when people saw the internet as a place to dump cheap content it seemed like a good idea, now that it’s the main place to monetize your content it’s has come around to bite us. If we as an industry can’t get our act together and fix it, it’s gonna fail and something new will arise….and when it does I bet it will be more like my stripperfacials site than like buying an issue of Penthouse Magazine and Penthouse in return sends you every issue ever printed to go with it…
Ironically enough, something The Pirate Bay has been working on for a while now was p2p streaming. So you wouldn’t even have to stream the video yourself using your own bandwidth (though you’d want to be there as a backup just in case) but the other people who downloaded that video would stream it.