Hello Digitalist readers! (Digitalists?) James and Sara asked me to guest blog, so I’ll be posting every now and then. I’m the Internet Marketing Manager for the U.S. side of Macmillan, and you can find out a little about me here. It’s best to imagine a flat American accent when reading my entries.
I’m very interested in the film industry’s experiments with online content and new revenue models, especially as they attempt to sidestep the failures of the music industry. The Criterion Collection has taken an interesting step forward, almost contrary to their “mission statement.” If you’re not familiar with them, think of them as a Taschen or Rizzoli of DVDs. They began creating laserdiscs of canonical films and lost classics in the 1980s, inventing both the Director’s Commentary and the supplementary materials that are now de rigeur in the trade. They’ve been producing top-notch DVD editions of world cinema for some time now, and they enjoy a well-earned sterling reputation. (I felt my own amateur film buff status validated when the Criterion edition of one of my favorite films appeared in 2006.)
Since each Criterion DVD is as much an art object as you’re going to get on a commercial scale, I would expect them to resist the digitalization of content. Well, surprise: with their website re-launch, Criterion is offering online rentals of a broad selection of their almost 500 titles. For $5 USD you get to watch the film as many times as you want for one week. A little like iTunes Movie Rentals or Netflix Instant, sure. But Criterion’s real innovation is your rental fee also acts as a coupon off the purchase of the physical DVD from their online store. They’ve found a great way to link the online and offline content experience.
They can do this across territories because all of their DVD releases are region-free already. In publishing, it would be like a UK publishing house retaining global rights.
Could this work for ebooks? The subscription model idea has been kicked around the industry for a while now – what if it was tied to an easily accessed online platform? A publisher doesn’t even need to experiment with rentals. Simply offer ebooks on mobile devices and dedicated e-readers cheaply, with the cost acting as a coupon toward a physical book purchase.
4 Comments
Ryan- very interesting idea, thanks for that. I confess, it’s the first time I’ve heard of this model and it seems very promising indeed. My first thought to ask is, what price do the DVds retail at? By the sound of it they have quite a high value, so it does seem to make sense. However I’m not sure people would ever want to hire, or have a subscription model to a Taschen book- they really are more about ornament than content (in many cases anyway).
To me it seems there are two ways of approaching digital retail outlets: as growth on top of existing or as sales to protect and maintain existing levels in a tough and potentially dangerous new environment. It’s clear that Criterion have gone for the latter, assuming that the USP of their existing offering coupled with the innovative new distribution will be able to forestall the allure of a free or excessively cheap download. For them digital is threat more than opportunity. However if publishers ever hope to create real growth from digital then sales will need to be incremental rather than supplemental.
Nonetheless I really like what this model does in bridging the tricky psychological disjoint apparent in people’s sense that buying a file does not equate to ownership in quite the same sense as buying a physical object. It’s like a down payment or an option on getting a DVD (could there be some kind of cultural stock market we could create?) An area where I could see this working is in the academic, aggregator and library space: libraries subscribe to the aggregators; the size and nature of the subscription would then feed into discounts on the physical books. I’m not sure if this is already going on but it would hopefully appease all parties in what is currently a fairly tricky, delicately balanced situation.
Anyway, cheers for the heads up on that one. Must say I do rather like the look of The Criterion Collection and can already feel myself desperately trying to hold back…and failing.
Here at Pan Mac we’ve discussed on numerous occasions what a kind of e/print bundle might look like, how the commercials would work and what the usage model would be. This approach is neat and reminds me of the way a top magazine exec described their digital strategy at a presentation I attended a while back. They decided to optimise the speed, currency, accessibility and searchability of the web versions (ie play to the strengths of the web) and to make the print versions even more high spec, lovely and object-y (ie playing to the strengths of the physical media). They recognised that the print versions now had limitations compared to the performance of the web versions but that both could work in a complementary way.
Excellent post Ryan, and I’ll look forward to reading more! Now that I’ve become a regular visitor at Hulu, online viewing is a pretty comfortable idea to me. I’m thankful that Criterion has rescued so many important films from obscurity or VHS-only availability (Mike Leigh’s mesmerizing Naked comes to mind). They’ve also released a couple bombs and duds here and there (I’m looking at you, Armageddon).
One of Criterion’s greatest strengths is that they hire excellent graphic designers! One of my favorite packages that they released recently is Vampyr. It looks so good, you’ll drool. So take a page from Criterion’s strategy and begin your business plans by putting time and care into your visual representation.
This model does seem to lend itself to more “highbrow” content, where the book object is of such value that it would be coveted as an object. Contrasted with, say, romance mass markets, which are treated as works to be consumed and discarded thereafter. Sara, your comment on the magazine editor reminded me of the print/web balance struck by Monocle magazine: http://www.monocle.com/ Their print version is of exceptionally high production quality, and they’ve quickly branched out into multiple web spaces. I find their subscription rate too pricey for my wallet, but what if they offered a web-only subscription model? Anyways, thanks for the great comments!