What I will say in response to that is that I empathise with people who have no physical ability to access content. If the rightsholder doesn't have it available in a territory and/or no distributor is willing to carry it? Who am I to say it's wrong for it to be available elsewhere.
The contrast to that is that you're not obligated to watch everything out there and just because you can't watch something isn't an offense to humanity. It's leisure, not the top of the pyramid of the hierarchy of needs.
The real problem for us is with freeloaders, people who will steal to avoid paying for the work we put in. It's not some nebulous Scrooge McDuck money pit, streaming is really hard and costs a lot of money to do right. I get to see our cloud computing bill, it is eye watering. Then you have to employ people to build and maintain 30 different apps for every smart TV, smart phone, games console, set-top box, browser, tablet, etc. Then you need people to build and maintain hundreds of backend services to provide catalogues, account management, billing and metadata. Then you need people to run the media processing, encoding and distribution. Then you need an operational support team to ensure 99.999% availability because people are passionate about what they watch. You need a rights team to get the deals, you need a legal team to arrange contracts, you need a finance team to pay everyone, you need infrastructure and IT support for all that.
Oh, and to top that all off, I have to spend significant amounts of my time dealing with patent trolls who want a slice of the action.
One thing I am looking at is a way of removing DRM, by adding invisible watermarking which would attribute every leak to an individual. But when what happens? I turn off DRM and someone releases it online. I know who did it, but am I going to get my pound of flesh? Unlikely.
One of the main reasons I have DRM is because it's contractually required. It does certainly provide a mechanism to prevent casual piracy, it provides me a control point, somewhere I can restrict playback and attribute it to a certain situation. Most people have to jump through hoops to get around the restrictions provided by DRM and that's a good thing because it does reduce proliferation. I'd actually support an alternative to DRM, some kind of trust anchor where I can trust that code run in a browser is not tampered with so I could just use things like mTLS and tokens, but there's plenty of people out there who would block such a thing and instead we have to go with commercial solutions that sit outside the standards.
I don't have any desire to treat anyone but pirates like the enemy, and it's certainly not our intention, our intention is to make everything as friction free as possible within our contractual responsibilities. But when people just want to burn the whole thing down around you and have a wild west, it's not reasonable. If you want to argue, then show me how it can be done, show me how I can protect our assets without DRM? The group I am within the business used to be called the "Revenue Protection Unit", because ultimately it was about protecting ourselves. Not to make us rich, but to make the business sustainable and unless you've seen how hard it is to make a streaming business sustainable, it's really hard to appreciate it.
The contrast to that is that you're not obligated to watch everything out there and just because you can't watch something isn't an offense to humanity. It's leisure, not the top of the pyramid of the hierarchy of needs.
The real problem for us is with freeloaders, people who will steal to avoid paying for the work we put in. It's not some nebulous Scrooge McDuck money pit, streaming is really hard and costs a lot of money to do right. I get to see our cloud computing bill, it is eye watering. Then you have to employ people to build and maintain 30 different apps for every smart TV, smart phone, games console, set-top box, browser, tablet, etc. Then you need people to build and maintain hundreds of backend services to provide catalogues, account management, billing and metadata. Then you need people to run the media processing, encoding and distribution. Then you need an operational support team to ensure 99.999% availability because people are passionate about what they watch. You need a rights team to get the deals, you need a legal team to arrange contracts, you need a finance team to pay everyone, you need infrastructure and IT support for all that.
Oh, and to top that all off, I have to spend significant amounts of my time dealing with patent trolls who want a slice of the action.
One thing I am looking at is a way of removing DRM, by adding invisible watermarking which would attribute every leak to an individual. But when what happens? I turn off DRM and someone releases it online. I know who did it, but am I going to get my pound of flesh? Unlikely.
One of the main reasons I have DRM is because it's contractually required. It does certainly provide a mechanism to prevent casual piracy, it provides me a control point, somewhere I can restrict playback and attribute it to a certain situation. Most people have to jump through hoops to get around the restrictions provided by DRM and that's a good thing because it does reduce proliferation. I'd actually support an alternative to DRM, some kind of trust anchor where I can trust that code run in a browser is not tampered with so I could just use things like mTLS and tokens, but there's plenty of people out there who would block such a thing and instead we have to go with commercial solutions that sit outside the standards.
I don't have any desire to treat anyone but pirates like the enemy, and it's certainly not our intention, our intention is to make everything as friction free as possible within our contractual responsibilities. But when people just want to burn the whole thing down around you and have a wild west, it's not reasonable. If you want to argue, then show me how it can be done, show me how I can protect our assets without DRM? The group I am within the business used to be called the "Revenue Protection Unit", because ultimately it was about protecting ourselves. Not to make us rich, but to make the business sustainable and unless you've seen how hard it is to make a streaming business sustainable, it's really hard to appreciate it.