Fighting Piracy with Fair Accessibility
With movie piracy soaring at an estimated annual US$ 25 billion in the US alone, the demand for anti-piracy measures has long been a key theme for the world wide movie industry.
However, as a considerable number of top Hollywood movies are never made legally available in developing countries — partly due to loss of revenue stream control by producers and piracy, illegal access is often the only way to reach this high demand content.
With the utilization of blockchain technology and smart contracts the CryptoFlix platform ensures that content owners will receive their royalties instantly, making the platform the first of its kind to address the problem of non-transparent revenue streams. This benefit has already been acknowledged by numerous content owners who have approached the team in order to establish output deals directly with the platform.
Lack of availability is key to understanding why piracy in the home entertainment sector is so widespread. Another reason is that pricing on subscription based services makes these out of reach for most people. Subscription prices in the developing countries are not very different from prices in the developed countries. And with Internet infrastructure and consumption devices often limited to slow and old, these subscriptions make little sense for the vast majority.
Therefore piracy — often DVD based is widespread and the only realistic option for people.
In India e.g. trains are teemed with hawkers selling illegal DVDs. The Railway Police, who are supposed to apprehend these pirates, will happily ignore them for a modest bribe. The government owned Internet service provider, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL), which controls and sells all the bandwidth, receives sizable data revenues from illegal movie downloads. The BSNL website even promotes illegal downloads, advertising how one can get free movies on the Internet. According to a 2013 article in WIPO Magazine (the journal of the World Intellectual Property Organization) the Indian film industry loses around INR 18,000 crores (US$ 3.34 billion) and some 60,000 jobs every year because of piracy.
This is what the CryptoFlix pricing and royalty reflux models challenge.
The unique combination of an attractive platform for content owners to release their movies on and a pricing model that will make entertainment available at prices competitive even with physical DVD pirate copies, offers a double win situation. Adding to this — with free Internet not being available in most of the developing world — the concept of delivering movies in YourDef, which will ensure as low data use as possible, the CryptoFlix platform will be able to challenge even digital piracy as the trend for pirated movies available online is higher and higher file sizes just as on legal services.
Finally, CryptoFlix will feature state of the art digital anti-piracy measures such as invisible watermarking to protect the content owners’ rights and make the platform yet more attractive.
Instead of fighting piracy with threats and by limiting releases to the developed world, we help fighting piracy through accessibility and fair pricing for all.
