Title: A FAILing industry Date: 13 April 2008 URL: https://ralovely.com/blog/2008/04/13/a-failing-industry/ Author: Raphael Campardou Archived: yes --- This is an old post, kept here for posterity. Some links may be broken, opinions may have changed, and technology has certainly moved on. --- There are [many](http://failblog.wordpress.com/ "failblog") [kinds](http://www.shipmentoffail.com/ "Shipment of fail") of FAIL. Some might even be quite funny (when you're not the one failing, of course). But there is one fail that bothers me right now, a whole industry failing: the Home Entertainment Industry. I'm fond of US fictions, TV or movies. But I live in France. So from Day 1, I bought most of my DVDs in the US. There was DVDExpress.com, and then Amazon. It gave me the 3-6 months my early adopter ego required. I remember the 1st season of 24. I had the DVD box set 6 months before it was even aired in France. Nobody even knew the show, I was already addicted. How cooler can you be ? Now, it's a whole different story. The cool guys are the ones downloading the show, 20 mn after it was aired, for free, making me _the dumb ass paying his DVDs, only to get them 6 months after every one_. So, I, who has been buying hundreds of DVD for years, who could afford to buy new ones, will now start to download illegally. I call that a massive FAIL. There are several reasons to this failure. Mainly due to the Studios. In a nutshell, they still don't know they have to adapt much faster. First, they think they can pull the _buy your video collection one more time_ with the Blu Ray, as they did with the DVD. So they throw little bones (iTMS, Amazon unbox...) to keep the tech-savvy guys calm, while they sell over priced Blu Rays to the others (not to mention those poor bastards who bet on the HD-DVD). Then there is the "world problem". Yes people, you have consumers outside the US borders. Please, explain how comes it takes 6 month for a movie to cross an ocean ?! You might want to start to think global. Last, they lack the technology. Studios (still them) don't want to entrust a Microsoft, nor an Apple, with their movies. They fear they will lose control. So they try their own method, and fail. Not everybody is a Steve Jobs, not every body can come up with a decennial plan to rule the world of medias and succeed. So, here is a shot: * Make movie premieres worldwide. * Thus, making DVD/Blu Ray releases simultaneous (while you're at it, drop DVD/Blu Ray zoning). * Make downloadable versions of movies, over an ITunes/Unbox/Whatever-non-microsoft, platform-independent, with the ability to store, organize our own collection. * Stop whining about your copyrights and everything: no one will ever pity you. Damned, I'm pissed ! --- For the humans reading the machine-readable version: hello. You're thorough. I appreciate that.