DRM: Affiliate opinions, please!

[mickey]

The logic behind it to me is flawed. Those surfers that "steal" content were never going to buy memberships in the first place. So exactly who are you protecting the content from ?

I'm going to market my site as DRM FREE !

sadly, in my experience, this is not true.. depending on the niche and the avalibility of quality movies in the niche people will share them with their friends or make them available on torrent sites etc.. And its not just people who access your site using a stolen password that will do this, regular members will do so.. perhaps not right away but when their membership has been expired for some time etc they will..

DRM has helped increase retention for some big sites in some of the fetish niches, i have been going over the numbers with a friend of mine who works for a big fetish site, and their retention is way way better since they introduced DRM.. their movies are locked after membership expires..

There are ofcourse tech issued, the loss of mac users and general hate towards DRM from the surfers side, but their numbers shows me that the extra retention outweighs the lose they suffer from the hate and tech issues etc..

I am not saying that DRM is the way to go as its a bitch to get to work on some computer etc but if you have a small niche and have quality movies, its worth thinking about and testing the waters for sure..

If anyone needs a good DRM provider let me know and i can "spam" on in this thread..

[gaybucks_chip]

As a DVD studio who has our content with VOD providers, I absolutely want our content DRM protected. Otherwise, a customer can pay $1.50 (15 min clip at 10 cents/minute) to download and keep one of our scenes, which is not what we want... if we are going to give them the right to keep the scene, we definitely want a larger amount of cash from the customer, such as a $25 membership or whatever.

If you had some old content that no one cares about (I'm thinking one of the defunct 70s studios that somebody bought the rights up cheap) then sure, make that un-DRM protected, but otherwise, I'd say leave everything DRM protected in the VOD model.