Sweeney spoke these wise words in her keynote address at the Mipcom festival

“We understand now that piracy is a business model, it exists to serve a need in the market for consumers who want TV content on demand. Pirates compete the same way we do – through quality, price and availability.”

She continued:

“This time two years ago, Disney was congratulating themselves at the end of a season that saw lost and Desperate Housewives make it big. But at the end of the meeting, the head of operations and engineering presented a high-quality, ad-free version of DH that had been put online less than 15 minutes after the show aired. That was a defining moment for the business. We we don’t like the model but we realize it’s competitive enough to make it a major competitor going forward.”

Wise words. The keynote is very similar (if not the same) to the one she gave at the Progress & Freedom Foundation’s Aspen Summit in August where Sweeney explained that Piracy was the main cause for Disney’s iTunes move.

Apparently the HD-rip of Desperate Housewives made quite an impression.

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Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Disney doesn’t see itself as just a broadcaster or a cable channel, but as a provider of content and will do all it can to make that content available to its viewers in whatever form they prefer

However, it seems like Disney is only taking action once they start losing money. At least, that’s what I make up from the following passage in Sweeney’s talk.

Coming “face to face” with the high-quality, commercial-free pirated version (of desperate housewives) told Disney that it was not just competing with other broadcasters, but with digital pirates and as such was an experience that prompted us to do the iTunes deal with Apple.

So it looks like it were the Pirates that motivated Disney to progress. Anyway, it’s a step forward. I’m wondering how many pirated movies it takes before the first Disney blockbuster movie premieres online.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.