The escape of DRM-free video: stop yer lookin’ – you’ll never find it

After a long and drawn-out battle by many a tech enthusiast and digital rights management opponent, the utopia that is DRM-free music has finally arrived.  Proponents of a DRM-free music world finally sighed a breath of relief when Apple announced early in January that the entire iTunes music catalog will be void of the restricting and inconvenient technology.  But what about DRM-free video?  It looks like that’s an entirely different bowl of spaghetti: consumers aren’t interested in downloading video as much as they are in consuming it via streaming.  Here’s the lowdown.While DRM-free music has already stepped through our doorstep and is lounging comfortably on our iPods and PMPs, DRM-free video has not even made a speck on the horizon.  The only news that has emerged from Hollywood in regards to DRM-free movies is laughable at most: studios are set to offer segments of music videos DRM-free; just to be clear, those are segments we’re talking about – not the whole shebang.

Let’s face it: the reality of DRM-free video is so far away, it might never even arrive.  Why aren’t consumers rebelling copy-protection in downloadable video?

1. Different consumption patterns for movies and music
2. A certain hardware constriction
3. A young video market

Different consumption patterns for movies and music

Listening to music can be a passive activity.  It can take on an active form, yet most of the iPod-carrying crowd makes listening a passive form of consumption.  Think about it – take 1: you can do just about anything while listening to music (maybe not reading).  Video, on the other hand, is a medium that requires an active, participating consumer: to get the full effect of video, one must dedicate the eyes and the ears.  Video is simply a more demanding and engaging medium that requires “more” of the consumer.  As such, there is simply more time in a day for a person with what we can call a Western lifestyle to listen to something than there is to watch something.

Think about it – take 2: when can you listen and focus on what you’re listening?  While

• Driving
• Jogging
• Typing
• Reading
• Working out
• And performing a plethora of other activities

There is even a form of music called background music, which plays as you’re doing a task.   True, the afore-listed activities may be performed while consuming video content.  But how much will you, the consumer, get out of it?  That is an issue of engagement levels: what is your level of attention while doing one of the above tasks and listening to music?  How about combining the above activities and watching video?  Most likely, the results will show that either your attention to the video suffers or the quality of the task at hand degrades.  Example: drive while trying to watch Lost and I can tell you that good things won’t come of it.

Now that we have established the usage patterns as well as the engagement levels of the two mediums (auditory and visual), we can move on to buying habits.  Since consumption patterns and necessary engagement levels differ for music and for video, purchasing behavior patterns for the two mediums also differ.

Think about it – take 3: I can and will listen to a song while performing the above-listed activities.  But since the necessary engagement levels are higher for video, I won’t waste my time with a video during those activities – I know that I won’t get anything out of it.

Therefore, I will want to purchase a song to listen to multiple times but only rent a video to watch once.

As it turns out, video consumption is best served by renting content rather than purchasing it; music is best linked to purchasing content rather than renting.  Therefore, the ideal technology for renting is streaming, since there is no file residue left behind by a downloaded file: rent it, watch it, and it’s as if you never watched it: no file is left behind for auto-deletion.  No disc to return to Blockbuster.  I believe that this is the crux of why online video purchases are not as popular as music purchases: consumers would rather rent files; renting is best served by streaming rather than downloading.

In retrospect, the reason that video files haven’t lost their DRM protection is because they simply don’t need to: video files should not touch a user’s hard drive but should be delivered via streaming.  Streaming requires copy protection that is not seen by the consumer and is therefore a non-starter for DRM.

A certain hardware constriction

If you have ever downloaded a full-length movie that was of any decent quality, chances are you have seen the file sizes that such video brings with it.  A full-length high-definition movie

from iTunes comes in at just under 4GB.  While that might not look that scary by itself, consider these numbers: the 120GB hard drive in the $1299 MacBook – a typical machine of a regular consumer – can hold less than thirty of such movies (assuming there is nothing else on the drive – which is never the case: OS X Leopard takes up around 10GB alone!).  So even in today’s time of terabyte-sized hard drives, “regular users” will be quickly discouraged in the act of downloading movies to their machines: the storage space crunch is everpresent.  Streaming, on the other hand, produces the same final result as downloading, but does not carry the burden of file sizes with it.

A young set-top box market

As I have just described, streaming is naturally the best delivery method for video content; we don’t need to download feature-length movies.  There is an abundance of sources on the internet that provide high quality streaming video content (Hulu, Amazon video on demand, ABC.com to name a few).  The part of the market that is still in its infancy is the quality and marketability of set top boxes.  Thei

r purpose of these device is to bring content to the big screen in the the living room – the place where video content is consumed the most.  Netflix is taking this space head-on with partnerships that stream the Netflix back-catalog to set-top-devices such as the Roku, the PS3, the XBOX, and the Tivo.  New lines of TVs from certain manufacturers introduced at CES 2009 promise to have the ability to stream movies from online services built-in.

Yet as I have discussed previously on the TechNest Weekly Report podcast, I am of the opinion that the Apple TV is the perfect device to bring streaming video to the living room.  Why so?

1. Apple is a very high-profile and highly successful consumer company.  Therefore, people are more likely to purchase a set-top-box from Apple, something they would otherwise not even consider buying from other brands.  It’s something I call “Apple trust.”
2. Apple is in a perfect position to deliver streaming content from the iTunes store.  The very high-quality as well as efficient h.264 standard adopted by Apple can be utilized to accomplish this.
3. Apple can leverage the popularity of the iTunes store by promoting the ability to stream to the Apple TV and to the desktop.  Rent, stream, relax.
4. It would be amazing if Apple integrated other streaming services such as Hulu or Amazon VOD into the the Apple TV, but the chances of this happenning are slim: Apple has a profit center with iTunes the company wants to (and should) protect.

So in this rare case, the content is ready to be consumed.  It’s the hardware that needs to catch up.

Conclusionistic

What can we take away from all this?  One thing: DRM-free video downloads are not needed – it’s the wrong delivery mechanism.  What’s needed are easier, more streamlined ways to bring high-quality streaming content to the living rooms and computers of the public.  With streaming, the problem of DRMed downloads goes away.  Poof.  Gone.

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