Vuze: Our Users are “Hollywood’s Best Customers”

BitTorrent client ommissions study that proves “once and for all” its users are “avid entertainment fans” that buy more movie tickets and DVDs than the average person.

The crew behind the BitTorrent client Vuze read with disbelief last week that Sony Pictures CEO Michael Lynton said he couldn’t see “anything good having come from the Internet.”

“Period,” in fact.

Vuze says that part of the problem Lynton may have with the Internet is that although there is finally the technology to effectively deliver content online, “the industry has only begun to solve the business model side of how we productively monetize this distribution.”

It says that what Sony and other Hollywood execs need to do is adopt the “burning platform paradigm,” that is “experiment like your business is at stake.” Having already watched the music industry run itself into the ground for refusing to evolve and embrace digital content distribution, the movie industry ought to take heed and recognize that “consumers are changing.”

“Let’s change with them, and identify business models that embrace this change,” it adds.

To this end Vuze commissioned a survey that concludes that BitTorrent users, specifically Vuze, are “Hollywood’s best customers.”

According to the data, Vuze users were 34% more likely than average Internet users to have gone to the movies or rented a DVD, and 24% more likely to have purchased one.

“We’ve been making the case for years now that Vuze users are avid entertainment fans,” it observes, and it may just be right.

For TV producers the news is a bit grim, for 40% of Vuze users report watching less live TV and as a whole.

The report sampled 693 Vuze users and 606 “general” Internet users, so its conclusions are arguably a bit light.

However, the report does square nicely with other done previous that have come to the same conclusion: file-sharers consume more entertainment products.

“Consumer Culture in Times of Crisis,” conducted by the BI Norwegian School of Management, the largest business school in Norway, and the second largest in all of Europe, concluded that file-sharers actually buy 10 times as much music as they download for free.

“The Impact of Music Downloads and P2P File-Sharing on the Purchase of Music: A Study For Industry Canada,” a study commissioned by Industry Canada, a ministry of the Canadian federal government, found that for every album downloaded illegally legal CD purchases increased by 0.44, or by about half an album.

Admittedly both cover music and not movies, but that’s only because the issue hasn’t been as of great importance to Hollywood as it has been the music industry until recently as households acquire faster and faster Internet connection speeds.

Either way, the message to Hollywood should be the same, and that is that it needs to stay ahead of the game and listen to what consumers want. Right now it’s apparently ignoring its “best customers” at its own peril. Consumers, especially Vuze, or BitTorrent users in general for that matter, don’t mind paying for digital content so long as its fairly priced and easily accessible.

jared@zeropaid.com

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