We’ve pointed it out numerous times in the past. Despite the rampant piracy, Hollywood and other entertainment industries continue to break revenue and sales records year after year.
In an excellent report commissioned by the CCIA, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has has made an excellent overview of how well things go in the various entertainment industry sectors.
The report titled “The Sky is Rising” was presented at the MIDEM music business conference earlier today.
A summary of some of the key findings:
* According to MPAA, box office revenues grew 25 percent from 2006 to 2010 from $25.5 billion to $31.8 billion.
* Data from PricewaterhouseCoopers and iDATE show that from 1998-2010 the value of the worldwide entertainment industry grew from $449 billion to $745 billion.
* From 1999 to 2009 music concert sales in the US tripled from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion
* Consumers’ choices growing as more movies are produced jumping from 5,635 films produced globally in 2005 to 7,193 in 2009.
* BLS data also show entertainment sector employment also grew 20 percent during that last decade and 43 percent for those identified as independent artists.
In addition to statistics, the report also lists many of the case studies that we’ve covered here at TorrentFreak, from Paulo Coelho to Louis CK.
In large part, the report is meant to counter the entertainment industry claims that their businesses have been ruined by piracy, and that the Internet has to be monitored and censored.
via What Piracy? The Entertainment Industry is BOOMING! | TorrentFreak.
Mostanra a hazai lakosság körében is megkezdődött a digitális televíziós videótár térhódítása, és a trend folytatódásával 2012-ben széles körűvé válhat az otthonról távkapcsolóval megrendelhető videótartalmak fogyasztása. Ez állapítható meg a UPC és az ITHAKA Információs Társadalom- és Hálózatkutató Központ online kutatásának eredményeiből, illetve a UPC saját VOD-statisztikáinak összevetéséből.
via 2012.01.19. – Feljövőben a digitális videótárak.
Recently, Senator Ron Wyden asked CRS if it could explore the state of the movie industry today as compared to 1995 on a variety of different criteria. You can read the full report embedded below, but here are a few key points. First off, despite the industry’s regular attempt to play up its contribution to GDP and employment, the report found that the combined GDP contribution of both the “motion picture and sound recording” industries was a whopping 0.4% in 2009. Back in 1995… it was also 0.4%.
via Congressional Research Service Shows Hollywood Is Thriving | Techdirt.
“Amazon’s released their list of 2011′s best-selling books, revealing that 40% of the best-selling ebooks didn’t even make it onto their list of the best-selling print books. The #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks of the year weren’t even available in print editions, while four of the top 10 best-selling print books didn’t make it into the top 100 best-selling ebooks. ‘It couldn’t be more clear that Kindle owners are choosing their material from an entirely different universe of books,’ notes one Kindle site, which points out that five of the best-selling ebooks came from two million-selling ebook authors — Amanda Hocking and John Locke — who are still awaiting the release of their books in print. And five of Amazon’s best-selling ebooks were Kindle-only ‘Singles,’ including a Stephen King short story which actually outsold another King novel that he’d released in both ebook and print formats. And Neal Stephenson’s ‘Reamde’ was Amazon’s #99 best-selling print book of 2011, though it didn’t even make it onto their list of the 100 best-selling ebooks of the year. ‘People who own Kindles are just reading different books than the people who buy printed books,’ reports the Kindle site, which adds ’2011 may be remembered as the year that hundreds of new voices finally found their audiences.’”
via Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff that matters.
One in three people in Switzerland download unauthorized music, movies and games from the Internet and since last year the government has been wondering what to do about it. This week their response was published and it was crystal clear. Not only will downloading for personal use stay completely legal, but the copyright holders won’t suffer because of it, since people eventually spend the money saved on entertainment products.
swissIn Switzerland, just as in dozens of other countries, the entertainment industries have been complaining about dramatic losses in revenue due to online piracy.
In a response, the Swiss government has been conducting a study into the impact downloading has on society, and this week their findings were presented.
The overall conclusion of the study is that the current copyright law, under which downloading copyrighted material for personal use is permitted, doesn’t have to change.
Their report begins with noting that when it comes to copying files, the Internet has proven a game-changer. While the photocopier, audio cassette tape and VCR allowed users to make good quality copies of various media, these devices lacked a in-built distribution method. The world-wide web changed all that.
Distribution method or not, the entertainment industries have opposed all these technological inventions out of fear that their businesses would be crushed. This is not the right response according to the Swiss government, which favors the option of putting technology to good use instead of taking the repressive approach.
“Every time a new media technology has been made available, it has always been ‘abused’. This is the price we pay for progress. Winners will be those who are able to use the new technology to their advantages and losers those who missed this development and continue to follow old business models,” the report notes.
The government report further concludes that even in the current situation where piracy is rampant, the entertainment industries are not necessarily losing money. To reach this conclusion, the researchers extrapolated the findings of a study conducted by the Dutch government last year, since the countries are considered to be similar in many aspects.
The report states that around a third of Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people don’t spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary.
The other side of piracy, based on the Dutch study, is that downloaders are reported to be more frequent visitors to concerts, and game downloaders actually bought more games than those who didn’t. And in the music industry, lesser-know bands profit most from the sampling effect of file-sharing.
The Swiss report then goes on to review several of the repressive anti-piracy laws and regulations that have been implemented in other countries recently, such as the three-strikes Hadopi law in France. According to the report 12 million was spent on Hadopi in France this year, a figure the Swiss deem too high.
The report further states that it is questionable whether a three-strikes law would be legal in the first place, as the UN’s Human Rights Council labeled Internet access a human right. The Council specifically argued that Hadopi is a disproportionate law that should be repealed.
Other measures such as filtering or blocking content and websites are also rejected, because these would hurt freedom of speech and violate privacy protection laws. The report notes that even if these measures were implemented, there would be several ways to circumvent them.
The overall suggestion the Swiss government communicates to the entertainment industries is that they should adapt to the change in consumer behavior, or die. They see absolutely no need to change the law because downloading has no proven negative impact on the production of national culture.
Aside from downloading, it is also practically impossible for companies in Switzerland to go after casual uploaders. In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled that tracking companies are not allowed to log IP-addresses of file-sharers, making it impossible for rightsholders to gather evidence.
via Swiss Govt: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal | TorrentFreak.
What would it mean in terms of revenue if ALL BitTorrent traffic moved to Netflix?If we assume that BitTorrent and Netflix users consume roughly the same amount of content again an assumption favoring the movie studios, then this is an easy calculation. Netflix would generate a third more revenue. Based on the shareholders report of the last quarter of 2010 where most of the torrent stats in this article are based on this translates into $198 million additional revenue for Netflix.Based on more recent stats contained in Netflix’s third quarter filing of this year, the increase in revenue would be $266 million for that quarter.
via MPAA Costs Hollywood More Than US BitTorrent Piracy | TorrentFreak.
A major new survey of American attitudes to online copyright infringement has found that 70 percent of all 18 to 29-year-olds have pirated music, TV shows, or movies. But almost no Americans are hardcore grog-swillers, and two-thirds of those who do acquire copyrighted material without permission also acquire content legally.The new research comes courtesy of a forthcoming report called Copy Culture in the US and Germany, and it was done by some of the same researchers who worked on the groundbreaking Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report earlier this year. Data comes from a Princeton Survey Research Associates telephone poll of 2,303 American adults during the month of August; a Google grant funded some of the research.The poll found that 46 percent of all Americans have engaged in piracy, but that young people skew the numbers significantly. And while it found that piracy is common, it also found that most is relatively casual. Only 2 percent of Americans are “heavy music pirates” with more than 1,000 tracks of infringing music; only 1 percent of Americans are heavy TV/movie pirates with more than 100 infringing shows or films.For most people, downloading music and video goes hand-in-hand with acquiring it legally; less than one-third of admitted pirates copped to owning an entire collection of illicit material. And large numbers of pirates have already altered their behavior in response to more attractive legal services for acquiring content. When it comes to music, 46 percent of American pirates said that they grab unauthorized music less than they used to thanks to legal streaming services and the survey was done before Spotify launched in the US. For video, 40 percent of pirates have already curtailed their activity thanks to legal alternatives like Netflix.As for video game pirates, they’re negligible. Only 3 percent of homes with game consoles have machines modified to accept pirated discs.The takeaway: Americans pirate, but few are engaged in some kind of principled War Against Copyright. Most just want easy access to legal material and are willing to pay reasonable fees to get it see the success of iTunes, Netflix, and the Kindle for examples of this in action. Indeed, only 16 percent of Americans believe that it’s acceptable to upload pirated content to sites where anyone can download it, only 8 percent say posting pirated content to Facebook would be acceptable, and only 6 percent think selling copies of pirated content is okay.Oh—and piracy isn’t gendered. The survey found that “men outpolled women by 2 percent or less” when it came to piratical behavior.
via It’s official: America a land of young, casual pirates.
BitTorrent is no longer the dominant player when it comes to file-sharing on the Internet. The five largest English language websites dedicated to swapping files are all related to centralized file-hosting services, also known as cyberlockers. The Pirate Bay and Torrentz are the only BitTorrent sites that managed to secure a spot in the top 10.
via Top 10 Largest File-Sharing Sites | TorrentFreak.
It’s been a week since Fox stopped offering free access to its TV-shows the day after they air on television. The TV-studio took this drastic step in the hope of getting more people to watch their shows live and thus make more revenue. TV-viewers, however, are outraged by the decision and have massively turned to pirated sources to watch their favorite shows.
 One of the main motivations for people to download and stream TV-shows from unauthorized sources is availability. If fans can’t get a show through legal channels they turn to pirated alternatives.
This is one of the reasons why Hulu drastically decreased TV-show piracy in the U.S. Viewers are happy with the legal streaming option it offers them, but not all studios see that as a success.
Starting last Monday, Fox began delaying the availability of new episodes on Hulu and Fox.com for 8 days. The decision goes directly against the wishes of the public but Fox will take this disappointment as collateral damage in the hope that the delay will result in more live viewers and better deals with cable and satellite distributors.
When the plan was first announced last month we predicted that it could lead to a significant boost in online piracy of Fox shows, and this does indeed turn out to be the case.
Over the last week TorrentFreak tracked two Fox shows on BitTorrent to see if there was an upturn in the number of downloads compared to the previous weeks, and the results are as expected. For both Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen and MasterChef the download numbers have surged.
During the first 5 days, the number of downloads from the U.S. for the latest episode of Hell’s Kitchen increased by 114% compared to the previous 3 episodes. For MasterChef the upturn was even higher with 189% more downloads from the U.S. For MasterChef; the extra high demand may in part have been facilitated by the fact that it was the season finale.
Aside from BitTorrent, there are of course many other options for people to catch up with a missed episode. YouTube for example, from where tens of thousands of people streamed the latest Hell’s Kitchen episode.
Instead of Hulu or Fox, the pirates get the praise. On YouTube and BitTorrent sites many users thank the uploaders for making the shows available.
“You so rock and allowed me to keep my promise to my son. I promised if he cleaned for one hour he could watch Hell’s Kitchen with me. He was excited and then disappointed that we couldn’t watch it on Hulu or Fox.com,” WithurShield writes.
“Thanks a lot for uploading these, Hulu used to be my go-to but alas, they have failed me,” minniemica adds.
On the other hand, several users who went to Hulu expecting to see a fresh episode left comments berating Fox (although most target Hulu) for their decision not to make the episodes available for free.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I went to Hell’s Kitchen and Master Chef. Right in the middle of the series idiot at Hulu decided to through in the pay services. At least have the decency to wait till the end [sic],” one commenter writes on Hulu.
“What I don’t like is up until now I have been able to watch the episode of Hell’s Kitchen the day after it airs and all of a sudden they now want me to pay for it?” another commenter adds.
There is no doubt that the Hulu delay is not in the best interests of TV-viewers. Although it might be a good business decision in the short term, one has to doubt whether driving people to ‘pirated’ content is a wise choice. To many viewers it is clearly a step backward.
Instead of artificial restrictions the public demands flexibility when it comes to entertainment. They want to decide when and where they want to watch something, and right now video streaming sites, BitTorrent and even the old VCR do a better job at this than Fox.
“I’m going to go buy a DVR or dust off my VCR and I will be recording my tv shows from now on,” a commenter writes on Hulu.
via Fox’s 8-Day Delay on Hulu Triggers Piracy Surge | TorrentFreak.
Yet piracy has not exactly swept the world. It is endemic in some countries but a niche activity in others. In some places the tide is flowing; in others it appears to be ebbing. In response, media firms are moving their resources from country to country, with potentially large consequences for the global flow of popular culture.
via Illegal downloading and media investment: Spotting the pirates | The Economist.
Joe Karaganis, from SSRC, points us to the news that there’s been yet another such study… and this one is from HADOPI, itself. Yes, the French agency put together to kick people off the internet for file sharing did a study on the nature of unauthorized file sharing, too. Not surprisingly and consistent with every other study we’ve seen on this topic, it found that those who spend a lot of money on content… were much, much, much more likely to also get content through unauthorized means.
via Another Day, Another Study That Says ‘Pirates’ Are The Best Customers… This Time From HADOPI | Techdirt.
Discovering behaviors and attitudes related to pirating content
Today’s consumers can access an astonishing variety of movies, videos, and television shows — on multiple platforms — faster than ever before. With so much content at their fingertips, what compels some consumers to commit online piracy by downloading or streaming content illegally?
via Speed of life: Consumer intelligence series.
Pachter predicts Netflix’s streaming content licensing costs will rise from $180 million in 2010 to a whopping $1.98 billion in 2012.
via Studios are starting to play hardball with Netflix – Jul. 11, 2011.
Industries that rely on fair use exceptions to U.S. copyright law have weathered the recent slow economy better than other businesses, according to a new study released by a tech trade group.
The fair use industries, including consumer device makers, software developers, search engines and news organizations, had US $4.5 trillion in revenue in 2009, up from $3.4 trillion in 2002, according to the study, commissioned by the Computer and Communications Industry (CCIA) Association. Revenue peaked at $4.7 trillion in 2008 and 2009, said the study, by Capital Trade, an economic consulting firm.
Fair use industries in the U.S. employed 17 million people in 2009, about one out of every eight U.S. workers, according to the study, released Monday. The employment numbers were down from 17.7 million 2008.
“The fair use economy really held its own” during the recent recession, said Andrew Szamosszegi, co-author of the study.
Fair use businesses make up about 17 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, according to the study.
The study shows the importance of fair use exceptions in copyright law, said Ed Black, CCIA’s president and CEO. While the entertainment industry and other groups push for tougher copyright laws, lawmakers should consider the impact of those laws on fair use and on its economic impact, he said.
via Study: Fair use drives large part of US economy – U.S. Department of Justice, Patrick Leahy, legislation, legal, Jared Polis, intellectual property, government, Ed Black, copyright, Computer and Communications Industry Association, Capital Trade – Computerworld.
“Mac sales rose 28 percent year-over-year during Apple’s last quarter, while PC sales declined 1 percent
There are now 54 million active Mac users around the world.
Mac sales have outpaced the broader PC market for 5 years, 22 straight quarters
Apple has sold 200 million IOS devices to date …
… which accounts for more than 44 percent of the mobile market
25 million iPads were sold in the device’s 14 months of availability
15 billion songs have been sold from the iTunes store …
… making Apple the #1 music retailer in the world
130 million books have been downloaded from iBooks
There are 425,000 apps in the app store
90,000 of them are designed specifically for the iPad
14 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store in less than 3 years
Apple has paid some $2.5 billion to developers building apps for the app store
There are 225 million iTunes Store accounts, all of them with associated credit cards and 1-click purchasing
There are 50 million Game Center users. XBox Live, which has been around for a lot longer, only has about 30 million
IOS users send more than 1 billion Tweets a week
To date, about 100 billion push notifications have been sent to iOS devices
The iPhone 4′s camera is the second most used camera on Flickr”
via Digital Stats.
At the D9 Conference this morning, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings credited his company with helping to beat piracy — at least in the U.S. Now, he says, the challenge is to outcompete copyright infringement in places like Korea, where it runs rampant.
“One of the things that we’re most proud of is we’re now finally beating BitTorrent,” Hastings told AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher. Thanks to services like Netflix, Hastings said most Internet video is now paid for in the U.S. The hard part for content providers, he said, was coming up with a service good enough that people were willing to pay for, rather than just searching for free content on the Internet. Netflix has been able to provide that service by making its streaming videos available across a vast number of devices, and giving subscribers access to a wide range of library content for a relatively low price.
Netflix has also enabled content owners to make money on shows they previously weren’t monetizing. Hastings offered up Joss Whedon’s Firefly as one example of a series that had a rabid fan base that couldn’t find it under legal means prior to appearing on Netflix. At the same time, he quelled any rumors that the company could bring Firefly back from the dead.
via Netflix CEO: ‘We’re Finally Beating BitTorrent’ — Online Video News.
People don’t necessarily buy Blu-ray players for the discs, but to access Netflix instead. However, once they take the players home, they apparently decide to buy a few discs and see what all the fuss is about. Despite the massive growth of Netflix, Blu-ray users are beginning to buy more discs than they did in the two previous years, according to NPD. This means that Netflix may actually help Hollywood to sell Blu-ray discs by moving away from shipping discs itself.
via Netflix helps boost Blu-ray player and disc sales — Online Video News.
American newspapers are in trouble, but in emerging markets the news industry is roaring ahead
Jul 7th 2011 | from the print edition
“WHO KILLED THE newspaper?” That was the question posed on the cover of The Economist in 2006. It was, perhaps, a little premature. But there is no doubt that newspapers in many parts of the world are having a hard time. In America, where they are in the deepest trouble, the person often blamed is Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist, a network of classified-advertising websites that is mostly free to use. Mr Newmark has been called a “newspaper killer” and “the exploder of journalism”, among other things. The popularity of Craigslist, the ninth most popular website in America, has contributed to a sharp decline in newspapers’ classified-advertising revenue (see chart 1)—a business where many newspapers have had comfortable local monopolies for decades. Sitting in a café in San Francisco, Mr Newmark looks an unlikely assassin. Did he kill newspapers? “That would be a considerable exaggeration,” he says with a smile.
 The internet-driven fall in classified-ad revenue is only one of the reasons for the decline of newspapers in America, which started decades ago (see chart 2). The advent of television news, and then cable television, lured readers and advertisers away. Then the internet appeared in the 1990s. A new generation of readers grew up getting their news from television and the web, now the two leading news sources in America (the web overtook newspapers in 2010 and is already the most popular source among the under-30s).
These technological shifts hit American newspapers particularly hard because of their heavy reliance on advertising. According to the OECD, a club of developed countries, in 2008 America’s newspapers collectively relied on advertising for 87% of their total revenue, more than any other country surveyed. The 2008-09 recession made things worse. Between 2007 and 2009 newspaper revenues in France fell by 4%, in Germany by 10% and in Britain by 21%. In America they plummeted by 30%. On top of that, a series of mergers and acquisitions in the American newspaper business left many companies saddled with huge debts and pushed several into bankruptcy.
For American regional and metro-area newspapers, further job cuts, closures and consolidation now seem likely. In retrospect it is clear that the industry became too dependent on local advertising monopolies. “The real trouble that a lot of US news organisations have is that they are defined by geography—by how far trucks could go to deliver papers in the morning,” says Joshua Benton, head of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. The internet has undermined that business model by providing alternatives for both advertisers and readers.
The health of newspapers is particularly important because they tend to set the agenda for other news media and employ the most journalists. In America, for example, the national television networks had around 500 journalists on their staff in 2009, compared with more than 40,000 for daily newspapers (down from 56,000 in 2001). But it would be wrong to conclude from the woes of American newspapers that newspapers and news are in crisis everywhere.
“The United States is the worst case that we see worldwide, and a lot of media news comes out of the US, so it is exceedingly negative. But the US experience is not being replicated elsewhere,” says Larry Kilman, deputy head of the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), an industry body. “There’s an assumption that there’s a single crisis affecting all news organisations, and that’s not the case,” says David Levy, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University. “There are different kinds of crisis in different countries, and some countries in the developing world are experiencing expansion rather than decline.”
Newspapers in western Europe are having to manage long-term decline rather than short-term pain. In Germany, the biggest market, a 10% drop in revenue amid the worst recession in a generation “is not a terrible result”, says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, a colleague of Mr Levy’s at the Reuters Institute and co-author with him of a recent book, “The Changing Business of Journalism and its Implications for Democracy”. That does not mean the German industry is immune to long-term changes. “But broadly speaking, the German industry has a large and loyal audience, strong brands and editorial resources to manage that transition,” says Mr Nielsen. Many European newspapers are family-owned, which helps to protect them in difficult times.
In Japan, home to the world’s three biggest-selling daily newspapers (the Yomiuri Shimbun alone has a circulation of more than 10m), circulation has held up well, in part because over 94% of newspapers are sold by subscription. But there is trouble on the horizon. Young Japanese do not share their elders’ enthusiasm for newsprint, and advertising revenues are dropping as the population ages.
The number of newspaper titles in Russia increased by 9% in 2009, but it might be no bad thing if a few newspapers died, particularly those “useless” titles that are merely mouthpieces for the local authorities that fund them, says Elena Vartanova, dean of the journalism school at Moscow State University. The Kremlin controls 60% of Russia’s newspapers and owns stakes in all six national television stations. In a country where newspapers were traditionally used as propaganda tools, online news sites offer an opportunity to break with the past. But there is a clear divide between the internet-savvy youth, who get their news online, and the old and rural populations, who depend on state-run television.
Hungry for news
There is certainly no sign of a news crisis in India, now the world’s fastest-growing newspaper market. Between 2005 and 2009 the number of paid-for daily newspapers in the country increased by 44% to 2,700 and the total number of newspapers rose by 23% to more than 74,000, according to the WAN. In 2008 India overtook China to become the leader in paid-for daily circulation, with 110m copies sold each day. Newspaper and magazine advertising expenditure increased by 32% in the year to June 2010, according to Nielsen India, a market-research firm.
Television news is also booming: of more than 500 satellite channels that have been launched in India in the past 20 years, 81 are news channels. The field is dominated by private firms with interests in both news and entertainment media, so the emphasis is on sensationalist, “Bollywoodised” coverage of celebrities, says Daya Thussu at the University of Westminster in London. Most news outlets are openly partisan. Thanks to India’s vast population, there is scope for growth in print media for years to come. “Indian publishers come to newspaper conferences and complain that it’s too focused on digital, not enough on print,” says Mr Kilman. But Mr Levy wonders whether the greater interest in news in fast-growing India and Brazil will prove to be a short-term phenomenon that will be undermined by the spread of internet access.
 China is another market where news media are growing rapidly, but the strict controls on them have intensified in recent months. A private media industry was allowed to develop only in the 1990s. The combination of social change, increasingly savvy readers, a booming advertising market and the need to reconcile credibility among readers with state controls has created a very confusing environment, says David Bandurski at the University of Hong Kong. Media firms must dance skilfully “between the party line and the bottom line”, in the memorable phrase of Zhao Yuezhi, an analyst of the Chinese media scene.
Officially the state permits watchdog journalism, known as “supervision by public opinion”, but in practice news outlets are wary of offending local party officials. One way around this used to be for reporters to expose wrongdoing in other provinces, but a ban on “cross-regional” reporting put an end to that. Journalists must identify areas where muckraking will be permitted by officials, or ensure that their own political connections will provide them with sufficient cover.
A new tactic, which became particularly popular in China during 2010, is the use of microblogging services to release information anonymously in small chunks, notes Ying Chan, dean of the journalism school at Shantou University in China. Twitter is banned in China, so this is done using local clones of the service. Microblogging works well in China because it can be done on mobile phones, which are widespread, and Chinese characters allow an entire paragraph to be packed into a short message. Moreover, microblog posts are difficult to censor because they may not make sense unless they are all read in order.
Ms Chan describes the future for Chinese journalists as “both promising and perilous”. Journalists elsewhere would agree, though for different reasons. Like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, all unhappy in their own way, the news business faces different problems in different countries. To survive, news organisations will have to make the internet part of the solution.
via How newspapers are faring: A little local difficulty | The Economist.
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