Video Content Licensing Fail?

As a content and intellectual property creator I have a keen interest in all things content licensing. Of course I am also a voracious content consumer, so I feel I have a good handle on both sides of the equation, while obviously having no better solutions than anyone else at this point.

In most cases I shake my head with dismay at the crazy people of Hollywood, but on some occasions I can see people getting this stuff right and it makes me glad.

Catching up on my feeds, I had both experiences on the same day.

First of all comes the good news. I read that MTV has released a new service that aims to show every music video. They are in effect putting the Music Videos back on top, like when they launched as a TV channel, after years of reality tv and other non-music nonsense.

This service can be found at MTVMusic.com and it certainly looks slick.

Now the first of the bad news. I can’t view it.

MTV Fail

This is a real shame, and I can’t really think of a good reason why they would want to restrict who views the music, especially in this day of instant iTunes downloads. It seems a prime opportunity to ditch the region release idiocy and have an immediate worldwide market. Yes, new music needs to be rolled out and promoted, but old already released music?

My daughter and her friends love going to YouTube to check out music videos, but they have to be supervised for obvious reasons! While they would still need to be supervised going to MTV, I am sure there would be fewer opportunities to click into video nasties, once my part of the world is allowed to view it.

So onto the other bad news, those crazy hollywood folks are at it again, this time it’s Redbox accusing Universal of trying to grab a big share of their DVD rental kiosk business via what seems like a procedure that the Corleone family might have balked at.

It would prohibit Redbox from selling used DVDs, require Redbox to wait until 45 days after a DVD is released before offering it for rental, limit the number of movies that can be distributed through the kiosks, and would force Redbox to give Universal 40 percent of its total gross revenues.

Consumer-friendly, eh?

Now obviously this is going through the courts and we only have one side of the story, but on the face of it this does not seem the behavior of companies with the end customers best interests in mind. More the “sue grannies and small children for downloading nursery rimes” kind of Hollywood that we are growing to know and loathe.

So how could all this be made good?

Perhaps a leaf out of MTV’s book, but with better distribution. People obviously like and use these kiosks. Killing the distribution model is not a solution, you just get bitter customers who turn to illegal downloads. Give people what they want, how and when they want it, at a fair price, otherwise they will route around you. First to YouTube, then to the P2P download networks.

Or am I wrong? What do you think? Please share in the comments …

Posted on October 30, 2008 by Chris Garrett 
Filed Under Content Licensing

Comments

Leave a Reply