Not all of the MP3 files that users could once download from Napster were of listenable quality. Sometimes the songs were only fragments. Tone and volume were different from file to file. A download was likely to cut off in midstream, because you never knew when the person who was serving it might decide to turn off his or her computer. Or the download might stop because of network or software problems. Song and artist identifications were also inconsistent.
When you think about it from a quality of service point of view, Napster's offering was so far from commercial quality that if the MP3 files weren't free, it wouldn't have lasted a week.
Down the road in Gnutella-land, things were, and still are, a good deal worse. Peer-to-peer networks without a central directory make finding anything a challenge. Even if you can get the client software to work (newer offerings like Limewire and Bearshare are steps in the right direction), finding files is a hit-or-miss proposition. If you want something truly obscure, you're likely to have as much success with a search on a Gnutella system as you might have finding jewelry on the beach with a metal detector.
Given the current limitations on distributed file-sharing systems, it doesn't take much to see that copyright owners have a unique opportunity to compete in the one area where they can absolutely rule: quality of service (QOS). The only question is whether they can see that forest of opportunity through the trees of digital rights management (DRM), because the two are tied together in unusual ways.
QOS for Rich Media
It's difficult to deliver QOS without having the kind of control that contracts and copyright protection schemes afford. Unfortunately, these are precisely the controls that have bedeviled the free sharing and use of information.
As with any corporate quality initiative, a key component of delivering true QOS is maintaining control over the product from creation to delivery. It's more difficult to control end-to-end delivery when you're trying to distribute something over the Internet, but you can still get close.
For instance, in the case of online music, a copyright owner (by itself or through a licensee) can provide the same kind of centralized directory service that made Napster popular, but without the legal hassles.
Because they have legal rights to the source material and access to digital masters and original prints, copyright owners can offer a product that's digitized and encoded for online delivery in a standards-based, high-quality format. They can also control many aspects of the delivery chain, from their own servers directly to the point of receipt by the user, through contracts with services like Akamai or the users' ISPs. By controlling the servers and putting files closer to consumers, companies ensure that users can download an entire song without worrying about whether the PC in some teenager's bedroom is about to shut down for the night. Control over the product offering and delivery chain will become especially important as companies move from trying to deliver 4MB songs to 500MB videos. If copyright owners do things right, peer-to-peer will never compete with the level of quality that owners can provide.
Costs of Control And QOS
The first step in learning to compete on quality is to appreciate the costs involved. A company bears financial costs for providing QOS, but users may also face personal costs. For example, to deliver large video files on demand, you'll need some sort of identification to distinguish files and their contents. Companies are developing ways to differentiate packets carrying video from packets carrying an email message or other non-critical data. Delivery of packets needed to ensure seamless viewing of a movie, for instance, should take priority over an email message that can wait a few extra milliseconds. However, this means that the ISP that sends those packets to your house may know, at least in theory, which users are consuming video and music, and which aren't. On balance, I think it's a price that users will be willing to pay. But once an ISP has that data, don't be surprised to see pricing models change to better reflect resource use.
