Name: Media giants vs. digital piracy
Uploaded: 2014-04-09
Duration: 5 min 6 s
Description: A Fortune Global Forum panel of media CEOs talk about how their industry can deal with growing online piracy.

[ MUSIC ] One of the things that the internet has, made it easy to do is pirate others content, right? You talked earlier, Joe, about wanting to protect your copyrights. Talk a little bit about, any of the three of you, on the, historical windowing strategy for movies and how that might change going forward, right? I, I think if you look at the way Windows evolved and the purpose they served to help generate alternate revenues it was a very good business model for its time. I think today, with consumer demand saying, I want it, I want it now. It has to be rethought. And I think you see that in terms of at least in the United States. You look at the duplication of programming that's occurring much more quickly between the broadcast and cable platforms. In some cases, the cable platforms back to the broadcast platforms. Some releases that are going to home video the same that that they're being released. the, a rental service or a for- sale service on on a DVD or stream product and I think it's very important that. Anybody whose producing content professionally is participating in every one of those windows. But to Tom's point about fewer big hits and, and, and more singles or doubles or cult like phenomenons at least in the film genre, I think scarcity excludes passivity. Is gonna mean a lot more going forward. And I think that's what creates demand. I don't think that Facebook with 500 million plus users and an $ 800 million revenue forecast, yes they have a lot of users but able to aggregate any big communities of those at one time. That can scale for a marketers interest is very tough. And I think there's a big role for aggregators. And I know we need to I know in our company we're adding more people and more capability for in the legal are for copyright protection. And, when you gave a very positive outlook for your businesses around the world, and and how things are going. What about the changing technologies concerns you, that you look at as both a challenge, possible challenge or a, a possible opportunity as we continue to change? Jimmy if I may just comment. Sure. On the previous point as well. our, our view is that. The movie industries for, going in for, at, a similar beating as what the, music industry went. The, the, the piracy has not been as rampant as it's been on music. I lived in Bangkok for five years. I never was able to find a single shop that sold CDs. Because you know, it's just so easy that you know, nobody even bothers to any more. But they still sell DVDs and I think the, the limiting factor there has been bandwidth and the price of bandwidth. And a lot of markets in the world you know, bandwidth was so slow and, and, and expensive. But I think the movie industry is gonna go exactly the same way you know, as the music industry. [ COUGH ]. You know the artists in the, the, you know, musicians are kept alive by doing you know, the live shows. We have now more artists coming to South Africa singing here and performing here than ever before I guess as a result of piracy. I'm not sure what the movie industries gonna do. but, but an analogy that we're quite familiar with is for instance the games industry. In Asia, nobody buys console games. Why is that the case? Because that way you don't need other people. In Asia, they play online games, and in American, European base game development companies have been extremely slow to move to online gaming. Because of the fact that they would protected by sufficient intellectual property legislation to in piracy control, et cetera. To protect them against piracy, and in Asia they were able to make good money. But in Asia, they were not able to do that. So, that's a way they found if everybody moved to online games. And you know, some of the games that we operate in China. Has at it's peak, and I think 4 million pre- concurrent users. Those are in most communities, so that, you know? So, [ INAUDIBLE ] capabilities. So I think the biggest development that will come in technology will be the increase input and storage capability of, of devices. Look at the IPads, what a wonderful device. I wish they launched that in South Africa already. And I mean we're all [ INAUDIBLE ] China I guess. [ LAUGH ] But I think that the real. The real growth will be coming, you know, in those two areas. And that will continue to pressurize the divisional media companies that is, you know, being protected by legislation instead of by consumer, loyalty and demand.

A Fortune Global Forum panel of media CEOs talk about how their industry can deal with growing online piracy.