Media Distribution Windows: Is Hollywood Driving Consumers to Piracy?

By Karla Robinson
January 24, 2012

In response to the latest piracy debate, GigaOM blames the studios for forcing consumers to download illegally by not making it easier for them to find and pay for content.
“Hollywood’s windowing system is essentially keeping consumers from being able to access the content that they want to watch. Without a reasonable option to pay, many are left to pirate a film that they wouldn’t go to the theater for anyway,” the article states.
Most of the time, people pirate content that they can’t find in a legitimate way. That doesn’t mean, however, that they won’t pay if the content were available.
Hollywood is concerned about losing theater sales but, as the article points out, “there are plenty of consumers who won’t go to the local megaplex to see a romantic comedy or drama, but are happy to pay for the convenience of watching it on the TV at home or on another device.”
Hollywood continues to preserve the current distribution and windowing scheme despite the rapid evolution of content consumption. Although it has made some concessions with UltraViolet, “until those movies are available in a timely fashion — i.e., not months after they’ve already left theaters — there will remain a huge audience that the studios will never capture, whether it’s because they’ve pirated the film or because they’ve chosen to watch something else,” GigaOM concludes.

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