JamieG Analysis

This news item pooped up the other day.

“Porn barons face up to net threat”

This, to me, is a very telling article. The Porn industry has always been considered a window into the future trends of media consumption.

As the Internet has matured, porn content has slowly been pirated and moved into the UNRESTRICTED DOMAIN of online-video-sites and P2P/TORRENT download sites. This unavoidable trend has gone on long enough to establish a massive amount of content now resides in the FREE basket. Enough to keep most people happy without the need for a paid service.

Porn which has a low moral standpoint is an easy target for pirating, as, many would see, that being a deviant that likes to watch porn, is already considered having a low sense of morality. It is not a big jump to being a pirate. Both actions are usually done secretly in your room late at night.

Still, this is also a trend we must also concede will happen to main stream media. And as Vivid, a leading porn producer has indicated, the return on content production has been hit hard. They indicate that their return on production has been greatly reduced as users turn to FREE rather than paid content. I expect they are overstating the case considerably, however, this issue does exist. The fact it does is my main point here.

Being a big action film lover, this trend does worry me and my hobby of going to the cinema and watching big explosions on a big screen. Hollywood, being predominately made up from banks or accountants who’s job it is to work out the risk of an investment, will likely consider it harder to make money back on these big films making them less likely to get the GREEN LIGHT. Under the current media distribution models anyway.

There is no doubt that the switching of the guard from old to new media companies is going to cause some hurt. And the longer we hold on to the traditional crumbling business models, the more we actually hurt the industry.

I feel, with producer to consumer direct sales, we can archive just as much profitability for the original producers and a cheaper and more convenient experience for the consumer. It’s the gatekeepers in the middle that will suffer most.

However, to do this we need to take a leap of faith.

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To follow up on this, the writers’ strike is a good example of this. I hear every day now new production companies are getting investment. Usually involving writers from prestigious TV shows. The investors and writers are very much in tune with these issues. Good for them.