For years the entertainment and cable industry have wanted to eat their cake and have it too, insisting they want to stop piracy, then fighting tooth and nail when it comes to making their content available via low cost, high quality distribution platforms. When someone comes along and tried to make an Internet video service that was innovative (Netflix) they've tried their best to drive them out of business. When the industry does deem it worthy to offer that content, they offer it only to customers who already pay an arm and a leg for cable (aka the TV Everywhere walled garden) in a misguided attempt to protect legacy business models.
Danny Sullivan has an interesting letter to Rupert Murdoch urging that instead of supporting crap legislation like SOPA and accusing Google of being a villain, he might want to make sure he's actually competing in the space he's trying so hard to protect. Sullivan points out that while Murdoch bitches and moans about people pirating his content, News Corporation (and all the other major media companies) are doing their best to ensure that users flock to piracy by making watching his content as difficult as possible:
Despite paying for Hulu Plus (and DirecTV), I cannot watch The Simpson on any device like my Roku player that is designed to play The Simpsons direct to my TV. I gather this is because you don t want me to buy Hulu Plus and stop paying for DirecTV, right? I get that. But it s not like I have the same option to watch archived episodes on DirecTV, If they re offered on demand, they are impossible to find.
I can t even authorize my Hulu account to know that I m paying DirecTV already, as I apparently could if I had a Dish account. Why not? Who knows. You or DirecTV or Hulu are all probably fighting with each other over rights issues. But hey, it s not like I can get HBO GO on my Hulu, either. Despite paying for HBO through DirecTV, they don t let me enable my Roku with it, either.
In reality you simply cannot stop piracy you can only hope to slow it -- and the best way to slow it is to provide inexpensive, easy access to content so that piracy becomes a less tempting alternative.
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