Quality downloads can cut Net piracy

Nickhil Jakatdar.

Affordable, high-quality short-term downloading ability will be able to significantly cut down on the illegal Internet piracy of movies and TV shows, according to the CEO of one of the region's largest mobile video-on-demand providers.
Nickhil Jakatdar, the Indian-born CEO of Vuclip - which has a significant presence in the UAE and Egypt - said that customers would be willing to pay reasonable amounts for high-quality content, thus avoiding illegal downloads.
"I don't think there's a way to ever completely stop it. There will always be people who'll do it. But I think there's a way to reduce it," he said. "Once they (customers) pay for the content...they should be able to have access to it offline, because streaming connections might not always be great."
Jakatdar said that by not making short-term downloads available to the consumer, content providers created an incentive to illegally download material.
"The typical reaction in the past, which is changing, was that content providers would only give you streaming rights but not allow you any short-term download windows," he said.
"Then you go to the pirated sites and you can download anything you want, when you want it and where you want it."
"Effectively, it's almost as if you're encouraging the wrong behaviour," he added.
In Vuclip's case, the company found that making downloads available led to a sudden and dramatic increase in traffic to its site, coupled with a marked decrease in traffic to illegal download websites. "What we found is that the moment we did it, not only did consumption go up on our site significantly, as we expected," he said. "But when we looked at the unique user visits and ranking of those pirated sites, over time they started going down."
"Most consumers would rather do it on legitimate sites, as long as the pricing is not atrocious," he said. "Consumers are willing to pay for the convenience and the experience. So, what we've found is that the one way to reduce piracy is to give the consumers what they want and charge them something that they won't view as gouging them."
Jakatdar added that Vuclip was surprised to find that 66 per cent of viewers in the region use mobile devices are their primary means of watching content, rather than televisions.
"In the Middle East, the top 30 to 50 per cent of spenders may have broadband connections, desktops or connected TVs, but their behaviour is a lot more like consumers from emerging markets than consumers from developed markets in terms of their mobile usage," he said.
"That was surprising for us at the beginning. We expected mobile behaviour in the UAE to be more like the US but we actually found that mobile consumption in the UAE is very high."
"Through surveys we learned that for consumers in this market, the concept of personal space and privacy was super important," he said. "That's one thing inherent to a mobile device. It's just yours, whereas desktops can be shared, and TVs are definitely shared."
bernd@khaleejtimes.com

• UAE
• Dubai