Will Brit addicts cough up fiver to watch it or pirate it anyway?
I suspect there be a significant portion that do both.
I have a *cough* friend *cough* that has been a Netlfix subscriber since it became available in the UK, yet, at 11am this morning as soon as he noticed it had been uploaded he proceeded to download the latest ep to a USB stick. Netflix is great at off peak times of day, when no one else is using a broadband connection, and you just want to stick something on the telly., But once it gets to the evening and your bandwidth drops faster than a politician's promise after election day, there's no beating an actual mkv on a usb drive. Now, if Netflix would allow temporary download of its files (a limited quantity for a limited time period, a service similar to an ebook rental service maybe), then it might actually have something almost as good as many pirates are using.
Remember, a lot of pirates are paying customers, certainly paying more than £4.99 a month (they just don't pay the networks!). Networks don't need to give all their content away freely to beat piracy, they just need a reasonably priced alternative that pirates can put their money into instead. The only real choice we have right now is Sky at £50, you're joking right?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
