The graphic above is a chart showing the different experience between a person who pirated a movie and a person who purchased it. It’s one of the best visualizations I’ve seen of why people pirate movies in a long time. Beyond that, I would add that accessibility of the media is the most-common reason for piracy.
For a long time I’ve thought that movie and television studios didn’t understand that a major motivator for people pirating movies (even ones they owned) was better accessibility to the media – streaming it in their house, watching it on a mobile device, putting it in the car for the kids, etc. But as piracy has raged on and the number of ads and unskippable promotions before movies on my rented DVDs and Blu-rays get longer and longer I realized – they do understand it, they are just too greedy to want to give it to us.
With the advent of streaming become more and more a reality (thanks primary to Netflix) I thought this would eventually be behind us. Netflix was providing greater accessibility to consumers for the content the studios were putting out. My understanding was that the studios would be thrilled with a new monetization platform; but that seems not to be the case.
The studios are actively blocking possession of their new releases by the big rental and streaming services (Netflix & Redbox) in an attempt to continue to force sales and marketing and ads on us in the form of disks we don’t want with scene after un-skippable scene of ads for more content we don’t want.
As the studios continue to rip the content we do want out of our hands and shove content we don’t want into them, they then shrug in amazement when we toss those items aside and looks elsewhere, sometimes nefarious places, for the content we originally wanted.
“Piracy is a problem!” they scream, no, you are.
Couldn’t agree more!