Ordinary Gweilo

Interesting story from The Guardian about Kazaa. Apparently they have done a deal with an Indian film company to make films legally available for US$2.99. The idea is that the file cannot be copied and will self-destruct after being watched. Following on from the news last week of DVDs being available a few days after cinema release for US$1.00, this is a welcome sign that some companies are being imaginative and forward-looking.

I have never used Napster or Kazaa, and all the legal music download services are currently only available to US residents. However, I believe that within a year or two it will be very simple to access music, films, TV shows and other content from anywhere in the world. The benefit to the copyright owner is that they will get most of the revenue, and I think that outweighs the risk of the material being copied illegally (especially given that already happens). My view is that if something is available legally and easily at a fair price, enough people will pay to make it a worthwhile proposition.

As an example of how not to do it, we have the appalling service provided by a company called Premium TV on behalf of most of the clubs in the English Football League. I’d have thought that this had a lot of potential, but currently all that is available are a couple of minutes of low-quality video showing the goals (and possibly one or two other incidents) from selected matches, a couple of days after the game was played. The quality is not good enough to properly see what happened, and it is much too short to get any idea of the game as a whole. I am convinced that football fans would pay more for a better service, and surely there are enough broadband users to make this a worthwhile proposition.