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Redstone Asks Hollywood To Flex Price Movies

Sumner Redstone, chairman of Viacom, Inc. and CBS Corp., has called on Hollywood to create a more flexible approach to movie pricing to help combat piracy and intellectual-property rights. In a speech Tuesday, he said studios could charge a lower price for a single viewing of a film downloaded from the Internet, another for multiple viewings and a third for permanently downloading the film or burning it to a DVD. "I would argue that's where we've fallen down as an industry," Redstone said. Inflexible pricing is the reason the music business is faced with such rampant piracy, he added--forcing consumers to pay high prices for whole albums and resulting in illegal file-sharing. "Let's let the consumer decide what they want to pay and what they are willing to pay," he said. Warner Bros. has openly discussed the possibility of basing prices for film downloads on how soon a consumer viewed a film after its release in theaters. That's certainly one idea, but the bigger issue is making flexible pricing an option for consumers. Redstone urged media and consumer-electronics companies to up the ante in their efforts to safeguard their copyrighted content. His comments come at a time when online video sites like YouTube are empowering consumers to trade and re-edit copyrighted materials. No one is currently suing YouTube and others for this, and despite their efforts to encourage self-policing, more copyrighted content pops up on these sites every minute. While some media companies are turning a blind eye to the video-sharing phenomenon, citing the promotional value of having their content traded on the Web, others are enraged that online video execs sit idly by as their material is traded illegally. Redstone warned against "authorizing services that are unlicensed and undermine the economic model that supported the creation of content in the first place."

Read the whole story at Financial Times »

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