Speaking of archaisms, especially in case of video/film content, there's also one other thing... exclusive licensing.
Seriously, exclusive licensing has absolutely no place whatsoever in the digital market. Yet they're still generally bundled with physical licenses like DVD rights and whatnot and then you end up with digital stores region locked to a single country because they haven't "licensed" it to stores operating in other countries or they have licensed it to some entity in said country that doesn't give the slightest toss about serving people in a nice digital manner.
Think about it: if exclusive licensing didn't exist for digital distribution, all TV shows and whatnot would be given out to any interested party. It could actually be feasible to have some real competition on what entity gives you the best service instead of what entity has the most content licensed. Sure, we have that now too, but I'm fairly certain that this would accelerate it quite dramatically.
And the biggest reason why digital exclusivity is completely dumb is because it isn't actually exclusive. If your content is popular, it's bound to get pirated, and they sure don't care who or what might happen to have an exclusive license for legitimately streaming or selling that particular show in whatever particular country an user might be downloading from. Keeping up this game of pretend about "exclusivity" does ultimately no good for anyone.
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Speaking of archaisms, especially in case of video/film content, there's also one other thing... exclusive licensing.
Seriously, exclusive licensing has absolutely no place whatsoever in the digital market. Yet they're still generally bundled with physical licenses like DVD rights and whatnot and then you end up with digital stores region locked to a single country because they haven't "licensed" it to stores operating in other countries or they have licensed it to some entity in said country that doesn't give the slightest toss about serving people in a nice digital manner.
Think about it: if exclusive licensing didn't exist for digital distribution, all TV shows and whatnot would be given out to any interested party. It could actually be feasible to have some real competition on what entity gives you the best service instead of what entity has the most content licensed. Sure, we have that now too, but I'm fairly certain that this would accelerate it quite dramatically.
And the biggest reason why digital exclusivity is completely dumb is because it isn't actually exclusive. If your content is popular, it's bound to get pirated, and they sure don't care who or what might happen to have an exclusive license for legitimately streaming or selling that particular show in whatever particular country an user might be downloading from. Keeping up this game of pretend about "exclusivity" does ultimately no good for anyone.