Get Your Gundam Here! (And Real Talk on Piracy)

It's been a less than happy week in the United States (and several other places), so here's some free & legal Gundam playlists from the GundamInfo channel at YouTube.

I'd like to offer some Macross playlists, but the folks running the Macross franchise haven't been talking to the Gundam people so they don't know how brilliant having an official channel is at cutting out piracy while simultaneously pushing both the hard media as well as the related merchandise. (Or Harmony Gold keeps fucking them in the ass, but that's nothing that couldn't get solved if they were so inclined.)

The only problem is the folks running the channel and its associated site only offer playlists for a time. The Zeta Gundam list is gone, which is a shame as once an official convenience is removed a unofficial one will arise to satisfy that demand. As the Gundam franchise is an international juggernaut, that will happen sooner than later- YouTube anti-piracy measures be damned.

Licensing and paywalls won't work either. No sooner does a Netflix series go live than I can find it on Putlocker or Solarmovie in its entirety with nothing lost. That rather undercuts the appeal of such businesses, and furthermore (for commercial TV series) there are no ads wasting my time; not only is nothing lost, value gets added by the pirates in terms of convenience.

This is where I'm going with the "throw in the towel" approach; you can't beat them and still make a profit purely by showing off the goods. You got to approach your streaming/VOD business as you would running a movie theater: you make your profits on the addons (in this case, the merchandise) and your show becomes a vehicle for the merch. You think this is alien or unworkable? See that Gundam franchise? All about pushing the merch! They do that and still provide high-quality escapist entertainment to an audience that, while its core remains in Japan, is still a global one and they are not slowing down.

Artificial scarcity in online audio and video does not work!. Scarcity in anything purely digital doesn't work; it may take a while, but all that shit gets cracked sooner or later so it's worthless to bother trying. Add your value where scarcity actually means something- Meatspace. That means merchandise, live events, and other things that take advantage of limited space, resources, etc. but tie into the show or film. (Yes, I just found a justification for the convention circuit.)

As for you one-eyed shitlords, keep seeding the torrents. You're forcing Big Media to adapt to you, so keep at it as we all benefit from compelling them to be easier to use and more convenient than what you lot offer.