What’s really frustrating about Google’s decision to include DRM in its new video software is how unnecessary it was. Look at the content they’re offering: basketball games, reruns of “I Love Lucy” and “The Brady Bunch,” and music videos. This isn’t content for which there’s a strong aftermarket at present. People don’t, as a general rule, cruise eDonkey looking for copies of last year’s basketball game. Music videos are mostly played for free on cable. Shows like “I Love Lucy” have been available on Nick at Night for decades.
Moreover, these video files are too big to be easily and casually swapped among friends. It seems unlikely that very many people would download a 200 MB basketball game and then try to email it to their friends. Sure, a few would probably upload them to P2P networks, but much of this content was on P2P networks already, and it’s only a matter of time before someone hacks Google’s DRM and puts this content up anyway.
So exactly how would it have hurt CBS or the NBA’ bottom line to offer some of this content in a DRM-free format? My guess is: not one bit. They’d have lost a few sales to people who share the content with friends, but this would likely have been a small fraction of the overall sales. On the other hand, they’d increase customer satisfaction by allowing users the freedom to freely make legal uses of their content. Without the impediment of DRM, Google could easily implement seamless transfer of videos to iPods and other portable devices. Geeks like me would feel more comfortable knowing we could watch the videos with third-party video players.
Perhaps most importantly, in a year or two when consumers start to realize that they’re being locked into proprietary formats by Apple, Microsoft, and their ilk, it would be a fantastic marketing opportuinty to be able to point out that their products, in contrast, don’t lock them into one company’s proprietary products.
Unfortunately, Google instead took the easy way out and acquiesced to Hollywood’s demands. Google, Hollywood, and consumers will all be worse off for it.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
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