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limpid

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The various media industries are embracing the digital age, and will only do so more avidly as it becomes a norm for people to consume media from a computer (in one form or another). At the moment, however, it still hasn't gotten there. IMO the only reason music got to that stage is a combination of the rise of the mp3 player, and the passive nature of music for a lot of people (by which I mean it's something you can do whilst doing something else). It makes sense, if you've got an mp3 player or spend a lot of time at a PC doing other things to have a library of music sat there to access and you also get the added benefit of not needing somewhere to stick a stack of CDs. It was easy for businesses to tap into that. Visual media is different, the computer (for most people) isn't the ideal place for watching a film or the latest episode of your favourite TV show. You want to be lounged on the sofa with the big screen, not hunched over a keyboard at your desk, or on a small screen on your lap (though with the bizarre rise of tablets that's changing). This will change as we computerise TV, which is happening at a rapid speed - instant streaming from LoveFilm and Netflix is the next normalising step, following on the footsteps of On Demand offerings from the TV services.

Piracy will die when the deal for the legitimate avenue beats the deal piracy offers. Obviously they will never beat it on price (who can beat free?) but offer a decent price and many (not all, and never will be all) people will pay, especially if they also outdo piracy on ease of access and are fair with the use of whatever you buy. Pirating something can be a pain in the arse, especially if you rely on certain methods over others, and of course theres all the risk involved. Offer an easy way of purchasing something in a fair deal (price and use) and people will go for it. Unfortunately at the moment in most cases, because the switch to fully digital has not happened for many media types and in some cases won't for a while yet, there's not enough pressure on business to change the deal, and instead they've attacked one pillar of why people pirate and attempted to make it more difficult (in some cases successfully).

It'll come.

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The various media industries are embracing the digital age, and will only do so more avidly as it becomes a norm for people to consume media from a computer (in one form or another). At the moment, however, it still hasn't gotten there. IMO the only reason music got to that stage is a combination of the rise of the mp3 player, and the passive nature of music for a lot of people (by which I mean it's something you can do whilst doing something else). It makes sense, if you've got an mp3 player or spend a lot of time at a PC doing other things to have a library of music sat there to access and you also get the added benefit of not needing somewhere to stick a stack of CDs. It was easy for businesses to tap into that. Visual media is different, the computer (for most people) isn't the ideal place for watching a film or the latest episode of your favourite TV show. You want to be lounged on the sofa with the big screen, not hunched over a keyboard at your desk, or on a small screen on your lap (though with the bizarre rise of tablets that's changing). This will change as we computerise TV, which is happening at a rapid speed - instant streaming from LoveFilm and Netflix is the next normalising step, following on the footsteps of On Demand offerings from the TV services.

Piracy will die when the deal for the legitimate avenue beats the deal piracy offers. Obviously they will never beat it on price (who can beat free?) but offer a decent price and many (not all, and never will be all) people will pay, especially if they also outdo piracy on ease of access and are fair with the use of whatever you buy. Pirating something can be a pain in the arse, especially if you rely on certain methods over others, and of course theres all the risk involved. Offer an easy way of purchasing something in a fair deal (price and use) and people will go for it. Unfortunately at the moment in most cases, because the switch to fully digital has not happened for many media types and in some cases won't for a while yet, there's not enough pressure on business to change the deal, and instead they've attacked one pillar of why people pirate and attempted to make it more difficult (in some cases successfully).

It'll come.

Totally agree. But the big companies need to be less greedy. The new system of delivering media is SO much cheaper for the industry, once they've set up the initial technology - no producing CDs and their packaging, no fleets of lorries (and drivers), no shop rents, no sales staff, etc.

So let's a have a "Pile it high and sell it very cheap" approach, please.

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Clearly you aren't a musician. Spotify is the devil's work if you actually create music, the paybacks per play are so poor, it's obvious it will kill participating music within a generation. Spotify is evil.

Bands need to make music from gigs. Not from record sales. The world has changed. Music no longer has the share of media consumption it used to have . So like everything else it needs to evolve.

I love dance music, djs put out sets to advertise their gigs. They make most of their money touring. The free sharing of their live sets is how they promote themselves. This is the model for the future.

Singles sales are an archaic legacy from a now dead era.The new world is a worlsworld where Google gives things away and gets revenue back from advertising. The entire industry is moving to subscription services.

Subscription keeps steady income and reduces the threat of piracy.

Of course the movie and tv industry will have to be dragged kicking a screaming to this new reality. But it is the way it will end up. Like the way the music industry has ended in Spotify.

Consumers win. Which I am all for.

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Let's compare buying digital media with smartphone apps. Everything has its price. If you have a library of all tv shows and movies online. They all have pricing and if priced right you will have people buying larger quantities of tv series and movies due to the perceived value of it.

Apps are so cheap compared to software on computers. So we can gorge ourselves in games and apps and believe it's such an impulse buy. That the cost is negligible.

That's what we need from iTunes and Google Play. They need to get the content on there so we can buy movies for 3 quid to watch. Or tv shows for 7 quid. The convenience of having access to all my content from my phone, from YouTube and tv. It's where we are going and we need those two companies to break the media companies. Stomp them into submission.

I want everything on demand and competitively priced. We'll get it, but it'll take a while yet.

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Exactly right CVB. The Apps is a great example.

The main thing, apart from cost obviously, is convenience. As smart TVs and home media servers become more and more common (which will happen as the 'digital generation' become the home owners) then the media in a convenient, quick and reliable format is the way it has to go. It's there at the moment with the iTunes store, but at the moment their pricing just overshadows the convenience.

I love how you can go into the iTunes store with your Apple TV, find the film, download and play in minutes - and they automatically slots itself into your library, all categories for you for future use. I don't love how that costs £14.99.

That's on par with a High Street shop, where they've got to pay for the physical production, packaging, transportation, and then you've got the wages of all involved in that process, and of the shop assistants, shop rent and bills...

If they work on the systems to make the delivery of that media file efficient, then there's surely no reason they can't make tidy profit out of selling it for £3-4. They'd also sell 10 of those, instead of selling one and having 9 people get it from Pirate Bay.

At the moment the industry has a view of 'this is what the media is worth' rather than 'this is what we can sell it at'. And the industry values what the media is worth far more than the consumers do. Apps don't tend to have that issue because they have been born in this digital media age, their target audience has always been 'people who will impulse buy because it's only 59p'. It's not worth getting a pirated copy of Angry Birds because the time and hassle involved is not worth 59p. Angry Birds is, in my opinion, every bit as good a game as some of the console games which sell for £10+. But at 59p they sold tens of millions.

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Angry birds is free. But in here we get where we can go with media. Google advertise. So if you agree to watch 5 mins of adverts before watching your film you can lower the cost. With Google being the best advertisers in the business they can target specific movie ads at the user.

This is the model people want. Look at Ryanair, it's a huge company because they lowered the base line for the price of a flight and changed the airline business.

This is what will happen in media. It will go through fundamental change to the point where we are buying media on our tvs with the ease and impulse way we buy apps on our phones. Our tv will know what we will want to watch and give us lists of movies that fit our taste and we watch 5 mins of advertising before we start all to lower the cost and keep us buying.

It's a clearly successful model and it's what is coming when enough people move to the tv box world.

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Yes, that's an option. It's all options. Ad supported is a way to lower costs. You can update choose ad free or ad supported. Like you can get with apps, pay for them and they're ad free. Get them free and their ad supported.

I'm oblivious to ads, I completely don't even see them even though they're there. So to me ad supported is great.

But again, it's an option.

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Bands need to make music from gigs. Not from record sales. The world has changed. Music no longer has the share of media consumption it used to have . So like everything else it needs to evolve.

I love dance music, djs put out sets to advertise their gigs. They make most of their money touring. The free sharing of their live sets is how they promote themselves. This is the model for the future.

Singles sales are an archaic legacy from a now dead era.The new world is a worlsworld where Google gives things away and gets revenue back from advertising. The entire industry is moving to subscription services.

Subscription keeps steady income and reduces the threat of piracy.

Of course the movie and tv industry will have to be dragged kicking a screaming to this new reality. But it is the way it will end up. Like the way the music industry has ended in Spotify.

Consumers win. Which I am all for.

Apple though are pretty much unalterably opposed to that (see their legal battle with Amazon over the Kindle store)...

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That's not entirely true levi. Apple are rumoured to be starting a rvial to spotify which incorporates peoples iCloud library. So they have all their own music there and a spofity style free/subscription service merged together. So music not available in their streaming service can still be purchased or played from your own existing library.

It's a good idea and will be a success.

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I'm not sure about an app inspired future for media. Isn't there an argument being made that the app 'economy' is basically broken - the 99p app being unsustainable and there needing to be a change in what people are prepared to pay for developers to assure their future? A similar model for movies (not 99p but 'notably cheap') I do not believe would last. The price needs to come down (and it will - the bizarre idea that a download service can charge the same as a retail copy of something will die soon enough) but I don't think we'll get to the point were downloading a movie, or a tv show, is so cheap they basically become disposable.

I'm also not particularly sure that, long term, the ad enabled model will work either - I think in the coming years the... financial gains of modern day advertising are going to be reassessed and given a kicking imo, companies cottoning on to the fact that it doesn't really justify the costs. I think that runs for everything though, not just media.

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The difference between an app and a movie is a movie is consumable. I think in the app world, there is a difference between the booming gaming market and the 'broken economy' app. Also Microsoft's entry with Windows RT and WP8 will result in more expensive apps but ones that are far more useful and functional than the essentially smartphone apps run by iOS and Android.

As for media like movies and tv shows. I totally see movies being bought for watch anytime within 30 days for as low as 2.99. Also with all kinds of promotions, like buy 3 for 2 now and watch within 30 days. Also my ad supported model is an almost certainty in Google Play at some point. The cycle of cheaper movies with actionable ads prior to the movie, tailored for the individual user will result in new purchases before the current purchase is even watched.

Also there is subscription services, where you can say subscribe to 5 movies a month, or 10 movies etc.. from a near exhaustive selection. This keeps a constant revenue stream and lets a consumer get exactly what they want. Movies to watch. Also a TV show can give the first episode free and then at the end give a discount one off chance to subscribe to the rest of the series.

Once media is considered in this fashion, once the powers in control agree / are broken by Apple, Google, Microsoft and of course Amazon who are by a distance leading this group in the US. Then we'll get what we want. Access to media at its value today, not it's old value from the 90s.

I have many ways to entertain myself in the current world. The era of video rental and CD purchasing is dead and gone. The internet consumes more of my times than those two ever did. As such my value of those things has decreased. Just because the vested interests in those things don't want it to be this way doesn't mean it isn't this way.

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That's not entirely true levi. Apple are rumoured to be starting a rvial to spotify which incorporates peoples iCloud library. So they have all their own music there and a spofity style free/subscription service merged together. So music not available in their streaming service can still be purchased or played from your own existing library.

It's a good idea and will be a success.

I must have quoted the wrong post... I meant to reply to Qwpzxjor1.

The Kindle store sets their own ebook prices, so they're generally a lot cheaper than print. Apple's book store, though, lets the publishers set the price; most publishers set prices virtually indistinguishable from the bricks and mortar prices.

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  • 1 month later...

It depends on your specific kit though. If you've got a decent cd player, but your computer is using a standard on-board sound, the CD player will win.

Stick a decent sound card in your PC and it'll compete with the best CD players out there, though.

Years back I had a Harmen Kardon amp with JBL speakers , was a decent bit of kit , great for playing music loud and the quality was noticeable

Nowadays I listen to everything on mp3 through my iPhone/iPad /pc/ car

I guess where 20 years ago I cared about the quality I'm not that bothered any more and it's more about portability

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Bands need to make music from gigs. Not from record sales. The world has changed. Music no longer has the share of media consumption it used to have . So like everything else it needs to evolve.

I love dance music, djs put out sets to advertise their gigs. They make most of their money touring. The free sharing of their live sets is how they promote themselves. This is the model for the future.

Singles sales are an archaic legacy from a now dead era.The new world is a worlsworld where Google gives things away and gets revenue back from advertising. The entire industry is moving to subscription services.

Subscription keeps steady income and reduces the threat of piracy.

Of course the movie and tv industry will have to be dragged kicking a screaming to this new reality. But it is the way it will end up. Like the way the music industry has ended in Spotify.

Consumers win. Which I am all for.

I read on another sight that Tulisa had only sold 7000 copies of her new album by midweek and that was after a pretty high profile on X-factor. Now putting aside the fact she is a chav and I cannot stand her music or the X-factor that figure still seemed incredibly low.

Price and convenience will be the driving factor for films / tv series to not be pirated. Make them available quickly enough and cheaply enough through legal avenues and they will sell, charge the same price as it costs to buy in HMV or Sainsburys and Piratebay and their ilk will remain king.

I wonder if Sony are happy winning the battle of Blu-ray v HD-DVD at such a high cost (they literally through billions at studios to ensure they signed up to bluray rather than the competition) and its entirely likely that digital streaming will be the winner.

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What I dont understand about this copying stuff is that people and companys make a big deal out of it ( and I can see why, I also understand why ) but what I dont understand is why they dont do something about countries like Thailand ??? It seems to me that the whole economy of the country is based on copying. I mean, fair enough you should not copy something BUT surely its more important to go after companies or organisations that copy stuff before worrying about individuals.

Lets get our priorities right.

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What I dont understand about this copying stuff is that people and companys make a big deal out of it ( and I can see why, I also understand why ) but what I dont understand is why they dont do something about countries like Thailand ??? It seems to me that the whole economy of the country is based on copying. I mean, fair enough you should not copy something BUT surely its more important to go after companies or organisations that copy stuff before worrying about individuals.

Lets get our priorities right.

There are no companies or organisations out there pirating movies or music, it's carried out by individuals and distributed for free in the hope that other individuals will do the same. You know, file sharing. I'm not entirely sure what you mean?

If you're talking about websites that facilitate the sharing such as Pirate Bay, then I have to disagree. Punishing people for breaking the law is one thing, taking away their right to do so is something else entirely.

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If you're talking about websites that facilitate the sharing such as Pirate Bay, then I have to disagree. Punishing people for breaking the law is one thing, taking away their right to do so is something else entirely.

You don't have the right to break the law. That's nonsense.

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