The Best Man May Be A Pirate

I really do have an antipathy towards pirated movies and entertainment. This was published in the Business Daily on January 14, 2014, at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/The--Best-Man--may-be-a-pirate-in-era-of-high-speed-Internet/-/539548/2144634/-/1ot0boz/-/index.html

One of my all-time favourite movies is called ‘The Best Man’, a romantic comedy (don’t laugh) about a group of black, twentysomething friends learning to navigate the tricky world of career, romance and disappointment. The film was released in 1999, and I (along with many other fans) was waiting eagerly for a long-rumoured sequel. The sequel was duly announced for release in November last year, but to my disappointment, it was released in New York a week after I had been there, meaning that I had to wait until it was out on DVD – a matter of many months – before I could re-acquaint myself with the characters.

If you are like many Kenyan fans of ‘Best Man Holiday’, the sequel in question, the preceding sentence might sound faintly ridiculous. After all, if I really wanted to watch the film, there were very many ways to get my hands and eyeballs on it during the holiday break. I could have gone to the dozens of internet ‘torrent’ sites available and downloaded it for myself; I could have kept my hands a little cleaner and gone to my ‘DVD guy’ for a pretty good copy, or I could simply have rolled down my window at a traffic jam on Mombasa Road and negotiated to purchase a copy for as little as fifty shillings.

The fact that I didn’t, and am still waiting to purchase a legitimate DVD copy from Amazon or a similar vendor, is either testament to my naïveté or to my admirable sense of delayed gratification. Either way, the consumption of filmed entertainment in Kenya – and most of Africa – is a fascinating business case. If properly understood and legitimised, it could up-end the entertainment industry globally, and lead to fascinating new relationships between producers and consumers.

The first issue is the fact that Kenya is the country where entertainment revenues come to die. Every residential neighbourhood in our urban areas (and in many of our rural areas) is dotted with the aforementioned DVD vendors, who will readily provide you with the latest movies and television series. Their business model has also changed. Whereas before they had to rely on a supply chain that often began in some back street in China, they now have a broadband connection that they use to download the movies and series on demand. All of this is patently illegal, despite the fact that they proudly hang out their shingles and advertise their phone numbers. And this is also despite the unconvincing protestations of ignorance and innocence on the part of institutions such as the Kenya Copyright Board.

The second issue is that the voracious consumption of pirated and counterfeit content by Kenyans upends the business model of content distributors – primarily television stations and movie houses. If a television station airs a compelling first episode of a new dramatic series, it can be sure that its would-be fan base will quickly order up (or download) the entire series – often several seasons’ worth – and consume it all in one weekend. By the time the second episode airs a week later, the most committed fans have already sated their thirst for the show.

All of which begs the question – why haven’t movie and television producers in countries like the United States ever applied creative thinking to this problem globally? The fact is that the West – mainly the US – is the producer of the most eagerly consumed popular culture. The Internet has turned distribution and revenue models inside-out, but the industry still insists on treating the rest of the world as an afterthought. Movies and television series are still drip-released on the rest of the world in different time ‘windows’, and with licensing regimes that mean that even a well-intended attempt to purchase and consume content is rebuffed. (For example, Apple’s iTunes store, as well as other online distributors, still insists on segregating potential consumers by geographic region, forcing many to resort to creative workarounds). 

With the cost of broadband Internet coming down, and speed going up, there’s no reason why the market for filmed entertainment should not be an instantly global one. There is no reason for services such as Netflix and Hulu (two online distributors of entertainment) to either painstakingly roll out their services country by country, or lock out eager viewers entirely. Consumers have proved that they are willing to spend money (however little), and exercise limited patience to satisfy a craving that these content producers have generated. And keep in mind that this is not just a Kenyan issue – the illegal download/ piracy (or impatient consumption, if you’re being charitable) issue is a global one, worth billions of dollars.

Or maybe we’re looking at this backwards. Maybe African producers could create and market irresistible content, and distribute it quickly, and profitably, all over the world, leaving the Western companies flailing in their wake.

And as we ponder this and wait for a technological solution, I still patiently await a legitimate DVD copy of ‘The Best Man Holiday’. I know I will enjoy it.