Iman Jalali

Dear Big Media,

Plain and simple, you’re acting like big bullies. The two of you on the playground that are being the most troublesome bullies right now are Warner Bros. and Viacom. Let’s start with you Warner Bros., bullying companies like Netflix and Redbox into doing what you “think” is right for business. Notably, Warner Bros. strong arming a deal with Netflix to implement a 28 day “sales only” period in which Netflix will now wait 28 days after a DVD/Blu-ray sales release before allowing customers to rent the movie. Netflix in return received streaming licensing rights to a large collection of Warner Bros. catalog. It’s a no-brainer that Netflix’s business model is shifting focus from physical media rental to online streaming and the movie studios know this. The studio heads think that by implementing this “sales only” period they’ll increase the sales of physical DVD’s, highly more profitable to studios than movie rentals. One problem… it’s a horrible idea. Thanks for making piracy look better and better everyday. Making people wait 28 days before renting a movie won’t make them more likely to buy, it’ll just make them more likely to pirate it.

When will the industry learn that people don’t like obstacles to accessing the content they create. We’re willing to pay for it, we understand you don’t do this for free, just make it easy for us to access it. There is a reason the iTunes store is so successful… you make it so easy to download a song, sometimes I don’t even realize how much money I’m spending, such a simple, quick process. I’ve even found myself renting movies from iTunes for $3.99 a pop just because it’s so easy and I don’t want to leave my place and walk downstairs to the Redbox.

Next bully is Viacom… Viacom this week announced that they’ll be removing all Comedy Central shows from Hulu. Hulu has quickly became the premier website for watching TV shows online, with over 40 million visitors a month. Two of the most popular shows on Hulu are “The Daily Show with John Stewart” and “The Colbert Report”, both Comedy Central/Viacom shows. From the looks of it negotiations broke down when Viacom demanded more share in the advertising revenue and Hulu couldn’t afford to do so. Typically content owners like Viacom receive 50 to 70 percent of any advertising revenue generated.

Again a horrible decision…I turn to Hulu for TV shows, because it’s user friendly, very fast content delivery and they have a wide variety of TV programming from different networks. I’m not going to seek out Comedy Central’s shows on ComedyCentral.com, instead I’ll watch something else on Hulu. I’m not sure what Hollywood is thinking, but the current thinking of pulling content away from the marketplace is not the way to go. Make content more accessible to consumers and their wallets will follow.

Sincerely,
A Viewer

P.S. Stop building around the wants of the advertisers and start building for the viewer… when you do so the advertisers will follow, I promise.