Quote Originally Posted by basschick View Post
mickey, first off DRM means 10% less customers at the gate because no mac users can watch DRM videos. then you'll probably lose at least another 2% of other users who can't use DRM - and that reminds me, can the most common programs that play WMV in linux watch videos using DRM?

then whether webmasters like it or not, a lot of guys join sites not to watch the videos but to save the ones they like to their collection. they won't charge back, but a lot of them won't rejoin and won't rebill for as long because they're not getting something they want.

of course, a microniche site will fare a little better than a standard site on this. if you have the only site in a niche or one of the very few, you'll always do better because there's nowhere else members can go. but even so you'll lose around 12% off the top with people who can't watch the videos at all, and i'd be interested to see stats on these sites with and without DRM.
believe me i would say 12% at the moment is low as there are some well known problems with WMV DRM and WMP11 and/or Vista, so i would say you lose more than 12% if you go with a WMV DRM setup but as i said in my orginal post, i would never do WMV DRM now..

I sadly can not list the numbers for our niched sites when we went from no-DRM to DRM only movies a few months after DRM hit the scene but believe me when i say that we went up in retention and made more money using pay per view than before...

When i started my own site last year i didnt go for a DRM solution as i didnt want the trouble and i personally dont feel that WMV DRM is a workable solution anymore.. Will look into flasher DRM but with the price etc it might not be worth it for me at this point..