Quote:
Originally Posted by elfman
Good points, but when you say "no exclusivity agreements allowed" then you are having government get more into business. If a movie studio wants, for whatever reason, to only produce on one format, then they have that right. If they are paid to, then it make sense for their business, and is the right choice for them. This is not a classic monopolistic threat. This is a standards battle.
Not you, but I've seen so many Sony fans argue about the Paramount deal and they so easily ignore the exclusive BR studios. It's on both sides.
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Government has always gotten involved in business when business operated detrimentally to the overall national public interest, as in when business established oligarchies, trusts and monopolies. I fully support government involvement in trust-busting and monopoly-breaking, and in allowing a free-market system to encourage competition.
Exclusivity agreements are in fact classic examples of trust-building in order to create a monopolistic structure and here's why. A trust, as used here in describing anti-competitive behavior, is an organization of corporations and/or companies that are in basic agreement to control the discovery, licensing, production, manufacturing, distribution and sale of any given product, when that same product is unavailable by any other means.
In this case the discovery and product is any particular individual motion picture presented for home viewing. At this point, the term product shall refer to the motion picture, not any hardware player. The licensing of this product is done by the responsible motion picture studio and is protected by US copyright law, and the production and manufacturing is also done by the studio or by contracted manufacturers. Up to this point, all is fine.
The distribution and sale of the particular motion picture then becomes restrictive by any sort of agreement that the production company will exclusively present the product on one particular home viewing format to the exclusion of any other available format. The intent of this type of trust is to create a monopoly that forces a home viewer to purchase one particular company's format player in order to view the product, and essentially gives control of the product to the player manufacturer who should not have control of such product. This is in fact a classic example of trust-building.
In the past, production studios would present the film product on any format for home viewing that was available and that they felt would bring profit, and did not concern themselves with the manufacturer of the format player. This is a true free-market system which would allow for the hardware to succeed or fail on its own merits.
Sony had a hard lesson with Beta, which much of was their own fault, and now they want to reduce the possibility of that happening again, and so they devised a marketing strategy that basically tries to force-feed the general public their format by restricting product and retail outlets in their favor. Toshiba took this playbook and decided to use it as well.
What appears to the general public to be some sort of competition is in fact not a competition at all, but a battle between two factions that now strive to have absolute control over the home viewing market from top to bottom, thanks to Sony's methods. If Sony thinks BD can suceed on its own merits, why push exclusive product? And the same query to Toshiba and HD, except that they have become involved as reactionaries more than as instigators.
For a free-market and competition to exist, Sony should be made to split control or divest itself of its motion picture studio, and the exclusivity agreements should be made illegal, and the payments to create such arrangements should be called what they really are: PAYOLA, and also GRAFT, and should also be illegal.
This would allow true competitive forces to prevail and the production studios could be free
without obligation to produce in only one format or the other, or both if they wish, and then "they have that right", as you so stated,
without encumberment. That is the significant difference between a true free-market and what you describe as being free-market, which is actually just freedom to accept graft, payoffs, and mafia-styled influences.
And if this were indeed merely a "standards battle", then you would have seen the government step in a long time ago and set a prescribed "standard".