No. Why would I watch content with ads when I can already watch the same content without ads?
Content middlemen: you've lost. The 21st century has no place for you. Distribution is now dirt cheap and dirt simple. You can't add any value because you don't solve any hard problems. All you've done for the last 10 years is make content harder to pay for.
Content creators: make content, add it to your website, charge $2 (or whatever) for a DRM-free download, and enjoy money forever. People will pay you for making things if you let them. No, you won't get a billion-dollar lump sum just for coming up with an idea. Sorry, those days are over too.
(Also, I'm not willing to share my 'net connection with big companies. You have money, buy your own bandwidth.)
$2 seemed way too little to me, but I just did some back-of-the-napkin calculations, and it looks like two bucks would actually be a huge bump in revenue for some TV shows...assuming they were able to maintain the same number of viewers.
Case in point (and I know these numbers are a little faulty, but...):
The Simpsons in October 2010 charged $253,170 for a 30 second spot[1]. Meanwhile, during the previous season, they had an average viewership of 7.2 million per episode[2]. This works out to about $0.035 per spot per viewer.
I'd pay for the certainty that what I download contains what I want it to contain, in the format that I want, at the download speed I want. Downloading torrents is a game of chance, where you regularly end up with a version you don't want at a much lower speed than anticipated. I also pay for Spotify.
Because, fundamentally, most people aren't assholes.
I vacillate between both sides of the piracy issue. I used to pirate, when I was 14 and had no money. About the time I turned 16 or so I realized it wasn't a good idea and pretty much went without if I couldn't buy it; I saw no reason why other people couldn't do likewise, and got pretty annoyed at the casual piracy at the time. Having graduated from college and moved into a nice job, I buy stuff pretty much on the basis of "it looks interesting and it's only two bucks," and I can't bring myself to care about the pirates at all anymore. They're not part of my worldview.
If you can make the process of buying something simple enough and pain-free enough, I think that most people who can afford it will buy it. Others will pirate it because they can't afford it, and I think that there's a compelling argument to be made that many of those will eventually become regular consumers when they've got the money to do so. There surely is a group of dyed-in-the-wool douchebags who will never buy anything they can pirate because they are, at their cores, Bad People, but them's the breaks--I've come to the gradual understanding that these people are shitty human beings who will screw others so long as they don't have to look them in the eye to do so, and all you can do is write them off.
But I think that, for the most part, if you treat your potential customers right, they'll do right by you. (The same is not true, I think, of "donate what you want"--I strongly feel that method of revenue generation encourages people to pay as little as they can rationalize, and what even nominally 'good' people can rationalize is really really small. But that's another topic.)
> Because, fundamentally, most people aren't assholes.
I think that the concept is that piracy is a symptom of a broken market, not the cause of a broken market.
If something costs more than someone thinks it is worth, or they have difficulty obtaining it in an 'easy enough' manner, they will revert to piracy. However, if something is available at an appropriate price point with easy access, then piracy will diminish (down to people who only think that everything should be free).
As far as the 'donate what you want' concept, Panera Bread has a few locations that are like this [1]. I can't remember the details, but I think that it all ended up evening out. They would give you a suggested cost, and you paid what you wanted/could.
People will pay money for convenience and speed. Media companies good delivery fast high-quality downloads with an easy one-click process. Joe User doesn't want to deal with slow downloads of torrents with unknown quality, sharing their bandwidth and possibly exposing themselves to malware.
Well, there's the whole "I'd rather buy it than pirate it" thing. Plenty of people want to buy content, it's just that the content makers are stuck in old-fashioned business models.
My issue was with jrockway saying "why should I download a file with ads for free when I can download it for free" and then saying that the solution is to charge for it... when it will also be available for free.
Content middlemen: you've lost. The 21st century has no place for you. Distribution is now dirt cheap and dirt simple. You can't add any value because you don't solve any hard problems. All you've done for the last 10 years is make content harder to pay for.
Content creators: make content, add it to your website, charge $2 (or whatever) for a DRM-free download, and enjoy money forever. People will pay you for making things if you let them. No, you won't get a billion-dollar lump sum just for coming up with an idea. Sorry, those days are over too.
(Also, I'm not willing to share my 'net connection with big companies. You have money, buy your own bandwidth.)