Borderless Media

The film, TV and music industries need to get their act in gear and realise media can no longer be divided by borders.

Take, for example, the video I posted about yesterday about the Okinawa Churaumi aquarium. The author has been very careful to put links to the band site for the music he used. He has also implored people to buy the music on iTunes. It's been working too, the band have seen a boost in sales and have posted a thanks response.

Which is great. Apart from the fact that while you can get this on iTunes in Canada (and I assume the US) and on Amazon.com mp3 downloads, you can't get it in the UK. So while Barcelona may be shifting copies, they could be shifting a lot more as this video does the rounds (it's already over 600,000 views on YouTube and north of 400,000 on Vimeo), but no one outside North America can buy it.

What does this mean? Piracy. If people can't get what they want legally they'll get it illegally. These sorts of things typically have a short shelf-life so missing the boat is costing a lot of sales. It's time the media industries understood that they can no longer control how and where the media is consumed. We want it available immediately in a convenient format.

So DVD regions and staggered releases should be made a thing of the past, all movies, singles and TV shows should be available in every territory from the day of release. I know there's legal and technical issues to overcome here, but this isn't beyond the wit of man, get it sorted so we can legally buy things when we want otherwise you'll never shake piracy.