I no longer buy the "under-served" customer concept, unless by "under-served", you mean they're waiting for "I want it delivered exactly when I want, in the format I want, to do with as I want, for free" to be "served" to them. I'm sure there is a some truth to it, but the fact that the "Pay what you want" Humble Indie bundles are pirated, along with thousands of $0.99 mobile apps, indicates that many people won't pay even a pittance for content they clearly want, no matter how convenient the delivery or noble the causes.
15 years after movie has been released and no more US DVD copies available, only DVD available in Spanish markets with no English (and of course no Russian) soundtrek. Of course cool and patient me would learn Spanish... (not that i have anything against learning and even plan it eventually as well as Chinese. Ni-hao-ma? do-shao-t'en? ni-dzao-sha-ma-minz?)
And speaking about really under-served - there are deaf people among us.
>15 years after movie has been released and no more US DVD copies available, only DVD available in Spanish markets with no English (and of course no Russian) soundtrek.
Sure -- but the most popular torrents are always the latest hollywood films (not to mention screeners or rips before they are even released on a DVD).
The case for "15 years old movies with no US DVD copies" are not really representative of the majority of cases. The long tail, maybe.
And those movies come from torrents, more often than not, (even worse, subtitles are actually made for specific rips, with respect to frame rates and sync, and say so in their metadata).
Can't there be both? Certainly there's lots of people that pirate to avoid paying (either from greed or limited budget). Or they pirate for moral reasons: not wanting to support companies that are lobbying against personal rights.
But "underserved" still exists. I'll discuss Netflix as I have the most experience with them, but I think most of it holds true for iTunes, too. FWIW, Amazon's video service seems a bit worse than Netflix.
Pirating movies offers a far superior playback experience. Netflix usually has shitty subtitles: limited languages, sometimes ALL CAPS, no choice of hearing-impaired versus speech, no rich overlays (like some anime subtitles, where they'll overlay translations next to signs, etc.). The audio channels are also limited - many shows only offer terrible English dubs.
There's no easy way to take advantage of your sound setup. With normal players on Windows, it's trivial for me to divert low-frequencies to my subwoofer (using the simple on-motherboard audio jacks). No special hardware required. On Netflix? Uh, use the Xbox (ugh) and hope the movie has a 5.1 track.
I can't control quality on Netflix. Switching to HD is a crapshoot, even with a solid connection, and sometimes HD just isn't available. Jumping around, even to parts I've already watched, requires buffering again. And if a show is too dark/light, I can apply video corrections, too.
Oh, and if you're travelling? Enjoy the library of content randomly changing, and then you'll find certain shows lose their English audio/text and require <geo-located country's> audio or subtitles. Not to mention being able to copy a file over to a tablet for a drive or flight.
Plus, DRM doesn't get in the way. My folks have Netflix on an Apple TV (with a shitty Toshiba LCD TV). They regularly get HDCP errors, that seem to go away at random (change HDMI cables, restart things, try different HDMI ports on the TV).
Netflix wins purely on that it makes discovery and management easy and the UI is simpler (duh). The actual core playback product is terribly subpar.
I pay for Netflix and Hulu, and still download the content they offer to avoid these problems. I use Netflix mainly to check out a new show when I'm literally too lazy to pull over my wireless keyboard and grab a torrent.
Netflix, studios and TV would be terribly upset if someone bothered to write a torrent search/download/manage/playback UI that was as slick as Netflix.
99 cents, once, is a pittance. When it's repeated over and over, it stops being a pittance. The app stores are flooded with minimum-price apps that are useless trash. I completely understand people that pirate cheap apps when there are no demo features.
