Entertainment and the Net

I've written before that I'm a big fan of Babylon 5. I just watched the B5 movie In the Beginning online. I won't link to it; sooner or later Warner will find it and it will be taken down, and I don't want to help find it. But this illustrates a simple point about the relationship between the entertainment industry and the internet. Rather than spending the money and effort to scour the net for copies of their material, they should post it themselves on their own sites, in a way that helps them make money.

Warner is putting up B5 episodes online, a few at a time. The movies, none except the pilot. Why? Why not put the whole series online, along with the movies? It's stupid. Granted, B5 isn't a hugely popular show (not everyone has the my sophisticated taste), but still there are a lot of fans out there who want to watch the stuff. If Warner won't give the fans what they want, guess what? Those fans will go elsewhere.

This is the thing the industry has never grasped. The popularity of file sharing services like Kazaa and eDonkey isn't so much that they are free--though obviously that's part of it--it's that they give the consumer what he or she wants. For music, the consumer base has always been about the single. Back in the days before CDs, consumers could buy singles and get exactly the songs they wanted. Buying the album was optional, reserved for the real fans of the band who wanted to get not only the well-known material but the more obscure. Once CDs came out, the single was phased out and the consumer was forced to buy whole albums. The industry loved it, obviously. They were in control and gave out their product on their terms, and the consumer could do nothing about it.

But by the turn of the century, consumers could again get the singles through Napster and its successors and not waste their money on whole CDs just to get the one song they wanted. The consumer now had a response, so if the industry wouldn't give them what they wanted they would get it another way. How did the music industry respond? They eventually relented and came up with online services like Pressplay, that allowed consumers to download songs, on the industry's terms. You could download, but not burn the song to a CD or copy to an MP3. Some artists even went so far as to only allow downloads of whole albums. In short, they responded with the arrogance of still demanding that the consumer access their product on their terms, customer be damned. That arrogance only served to drive the non-sanctioned services to greater and greater popularity. Ultimately, it took a company not part of the business (Apple) to come up with a legal service that people actually wanted to use. And guess what, it worked because it gave the consumer what they wanted.

Yet, the entertainment world still hasn't learned. For some shows currently on TV, the producers are waking up and allowing distribution over the web. But plenty of other shows are not available that way. So, where does Fox, for example, think fans of The Simpsons who missed last week's episode are going to go? To fox.com? That probably the first place, but they won't find it. So it's off to other places where Fox doesn't want the consumer to go. For older shows, it's the same thing.

Honestly, it's very simple. If you don't want people watching your shows on YouTube or something, put them up on your own site. But why do I doubt they will get it?