Why doesn’t the Movie Industry Adopt a Steam-Like Platform?

Seeing the latest news on the new Ultraviolet platform, it appears to be a bit of a mess.  It is pretty sad to see the movie and television industry lurching so painfully into the future.  I have no idea how things are going to shake out, but it seems to me that there are really two viable models (or some combination of the two) that will win out.  But first, let’s just stipulate that cable tv is dead.  Maybe it’s not yet, but it’s dying slowly and certainly.  The idea of turning on the television and not being able to see exactly what you want when you want it will be seen as a true curiosity to the generations after us just as stories of the milk man are to this generation.

As I said, I only see two models surviving the coming tv apocalypse, a subscription-based, cloud-based, Netflix-like service where the advantages are that you have access to a broad library of media for as long as that subscription is active.  Unlike Netflix though, I think that these services will ultimately be offered by the content creators (the studios) themselves as cloud-hosting becomes easier and cheaper to perform and the middle-man’s profits are absorbed into the content creators.  I see this type of service appealing to customers that consume significant amounts of media and don’t want to be limited in choices.



On the other hand, I see the alternative model – one which I think was considered in the creation of Ultraviolet in which movies and television programs are simply purchased digitally.  In practice, this wouldn’t necessarily behave all that differently to Netflix in that your library will still be stored on the cloud, but you would only have access to those purchased movies or shows.  Of course, the primary advantage of this method would be pricing flexibility.  And by this, I of course mean that they should adopt a model similar to beloved Steam in that pricing should be standardized at first but after enough time on the market, prices should be slashed aggressively.

I think the reason for this can be found in the most excellent example of all: me, of course.  When I buy Steam games on a discount, there is never a situation where I buy it because I need a new game.  Most (read: all) of the time I have dozens of games that I still need/want to play, but I purchase the game because I like purchasing the option to play something else – an option that has real value to me.

Given the amount of gaming I want to do and the amount of real responsibilities I have already, I find myself with very limited time to watch television or movies.  In fact, I watch so little that I don’t even find the desire large enough to subscribe to Netflix/Amazon Prime.  Adopting a platform like Steam would give the studios an outlet to reach people like me (and over time, as options for entertainment increase, there will be more and more people like me).  You see, I may not watch a lot of television or movies, but I certainly do like having the option to do so.  Not so much that I will sign up for a monthly subscription to something like Netflix, but what if I could otherwise get that episode of Dexter that’s a couple of years old for $2.50?  Sure, I might bite and watch it whenever but know it’s mine when I get to it.

Is that kind of pricing ridiculous?  I don’t think so really.  New games regularly come out at $60 and after a year or two can usually be found for $5.  New seasons of television usually start at $30, so by the same logic, the pricing works.

Perhaps we’ll never get there, but I view that as a perfect fit for me, and I think there are certainly others out there as well like me.  The creation of Ultraviolet I think is a pretty clear sign that the TV and movie industries think there are too.