Rights.. again

In recent weeks I've spent a lot of time on a project abroad, which has taken up much time.

It's also got me thinking about rights again.

A lot of people in this industry spend a lot of time analysing technologies and platforms and alliances but rights rarely gets a look-in. And as for boring stuff like metadata well...

I'm very much a believer in getting content out there. It's not that I don't care about rights - every content owner should be able to protect their intellectual property and take appropriate value from it.

But when the attempt to protect property runs head-first into consumer behaviour then it's the rights that have to change.

I say this because on one of several flights and facing long hotel stays I picked up a box-set of James Bond DVDs. It wasn't until I tried to watch it on my laptop that I realised it was a Region 1 (North Am) DVD and both me and my laptop are Region 2 (Europe).

I was graciously granted the right to switch between regions but only four times... gee thanks. I might not even make my way through the box set if I watched Region 2 DVDs in between. Clearly this causes a problem, not least of which is choosing between Goldfinger and The Man With the Golden Gun.

But the main problem is that I am now being penalised for apparently reasonable consumer behaviour. In this day and age of frequent travel and movement, let alone digital access, the idea of geographical restriction is outrageous. I've paid a substantial amount for the DVDs and even more for my laptop, software licences etc. So the owners have made their money but I will be left holding a useless DVD.

So what am I going to do ? Obviously find some way to crack the encoding software or download the movies illegally instead. There's only one pirate in this scenario.

Rights and wrongs

At first glance it would seem to me that a service which allows you to set up an audio feed through your phone (or VOIP) would not be something that should cause too many rights issues.

I was alerted to Gabcast by Jonathan Marks on his Critical Distance blog and signed up with the idea that as I will be spending quite a bit of time on the road over the next few months it would be nice to record some book chapters for my kids to listen to. My son Gabriel loves being read classics like Treasure Island and King Solomon's Mines.

But in signing up to Gabcast's T&Cs I agreed that anything I record will have all rights cleared and that I grant the use of the material to Gabcast in a worldwide licence.

Now I don't for a moment imagine that Gabcast is going to take my audio books recorded for limited private use and release them as a worldwide podcast. My reading voice charms my children but that's about it. Nor do I think that publishing houses are going to start chucking War and Peace through my front window.

I know the platform has to pretend that they have no control over rights and it's all my fault if something goes wrong, and I know I have to pretend that I know all about the rights and have a file of waivers and clearances somewhere and I know that publishers have to pretend they really care about people reading their editions as if it would stop them buying books.

It's just a bit silly.

Anything which can be digitally reproduced and copied is essentially valueless, in so far as value lies in the actual product. The value lies in the brand and the advertising and community opportunities it generates. And maybe it would get people to buy some analogue versions, better known as books.

Cycling TV - a niche model ?

Everyone has their own niche, or several, and Cycling is one of mine.

So I have mixed feelings about Cycling.tv which has just been sold to JumpTV for more than US$4 million, as reported on DTG.

On the one hand it is a model niche play. A strong and loyal interest group, poorly served in traditional media (outside Europe anyway) and a large industry of potential advertisers. It is often held up as a great success story for Narrowstep, the distribution platform.

But I've never subscribed to it, and nor have all but a tiny handful of my cycling friends - people who seem to spend most of their time either on-bike or on-line.

It's the subscription model that I have trouble with. I know it is nice to have a reliable income, especially as they have to acquire rights from sports organisers. But I'm just not going to part with $30 on the off chance I might have time to watch a live stream of Paris-Roubaix next summer. On the other hand I can think of half a dozen times I might have watched a report or a race and been exposed to advertising.

On some rough calculations Cycling.tv would have needed 40 million views in a year at a CPM of $40 to cover their costs, and that's not easy. On the subscription model they would have needed nearly 50,000 subscribers, and they had just under 20,000, so that wasn't a no-brainer either.

Maybe there's room for a mixture of subscriber and open content as there is in traditional television but I hope the steady increase in online advertising revenue will see more niche players able to support free access.