Commentary: How Many Times Can the Same Content be Monetized?

Though I don’t claim to know the answer, my intuition is that I would use the internet as a rental source, not as a purchase source—unless the quality was the highest available (DVD or HD) or the content was exclusive. I would gladly, however, pay a few dollars to rent anything available, assuming the experience was in the comfortable iTunes womb and showed up on my TV. I just don’t want to litter my hard drive with mid-resolution versions of movies I’m not going to watch again for a couple of years.

My own enthusiasm for new technology has already stung me in the audio realm. I have recently started suffering from "downloader’s remorse," the feeling that I should have bought the hard copy of a digital asset. I found a new band I liked and, after getting a couple of their early CDs, I bought their whole catalog from iTunes. Now I wish I had a stack of CDs just like I have for the other artists whose collections I’ve completed. Thus, when I recently saw a re-release of a CD I had to have in the iTunes store—bundled with downloadable video tracks—I instead went over to Amazon and began to order the hard version with the bundled DVD. Then I changed my mind again—and went to my local CD store and bought it. I just didn’t want a low-res incomplete clip when I could just buy the media and rip it myself if I have to have it on my iPod (and consider this a legitimate "personal-use" case of copying).

The main benefit I can get from the internet—and which I’m not challenging—is instant gratification, and, in following, time savings from not having to do my own ripping and converting. I suspect that for the majority of consumers who don’t know how to "rip," it will be the only way they can get the content on their computers and portable players.

But if they had convinced me that I could by a mid-res version for my iPod—for less—and then months later given me an even better (and different) experience on DVDs or Blu-ray/HD DVD, I would have bought both versions because of my loyalty to the artist in question. There are two possible extremes: One copy, recorded on DVR, paid for by mere subscription, played everywhere through some DVR-to-go technology. The other extreme is paying for the content over and over and over in each new incarnation.

You can use technology to stop consumers from moving their "one copy" around. Or you can make each incarnation of the content slightly better—to make the consumer voluntarily purchase it again. But one way or another, inventive and aggressive remonetization of content is the key to shrinking windows without obliterating them entirely.