Terminally Incoherent

This is priceless. zewrestler told me about it this morning, and now I just found this on boingboing. Apparently MPAA intends to sell movie downloads for twice the price of a DVD. of course we are talking about a DRM, crippled, windows only versions.

Brilliant! Abso-fucking-lutely brilliant! This will definitely put a stop to all that illegal downloading. After all, a free, uncrippled, platform independent version can’t compete with a locked down, super-expensive, windows-ony one… Er, wait…

Seriously, who does market research for these people? Do they even do market research at all? If they would offer the movies at 1/2 price of the DVD on account of the stupid DRM cripplage then maybe they would get some buyers.

Let me spell it for you: iTunes! The reason why they are so popular is because the songs seem to be cheap! They are not, but for an average Joe 99 cents for a crippled song sounds reasonable. In the same way, $5 for a crippled movie sounds semi-decent. Think about it - after you pay off costs of online distribution (which is incredibly cheap - you will usually pay a flat monthly fee for hosting and maintenance and bandwidth) it’s pure profit. They already did a killing in the box office, profited from DVD sales - and etc.. Online sales are just free cash for them.

But no… Free cash is not enough. They want to sell you downloads for twice the cost of the DVD even though it costs them less than a quarter of the DVD price to host it.

Ladies and gentlemen - this is exactly how corporate greed kills business. Sigh…

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 5:41 pm and is filed under activism, rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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