Pricing

Mark Suszko: Yes, it's easy: pre-sales, with a minimum order number and deadline to make them. Below minimum orders, you do not release a single copy, but instead refund the deposits. Everybody has to be very aware of this up-front. This is near-foolproof when combined with a basic fee from the school up-front at booking time. It turns the moms and dads and faculty from pirates and bootleg buyers into your personal sales force and security enforcement staff, goading each other into coughing up the minimum number of pre-orders, and tracking down and stopping anybody that might mess with the program and ruin it for everybody. Leaving you free to do the actual WORK.

Or... you price the DVD's so low it doesn't pay to pirate or copy. I can't give you a hard and fast figure, but it might be between $7 and $20. If you can't make the money on the dubs that way, you would need to add a fee from the school up-front for your main expenses and profit, then the DVD fee would just cover duplication expenses with a little margin left over. Or, you can subsidize the DVD thrugh sponsorships from national or local businesses, like the Yearbook does. "Your recital, brought to you by your Anytown Coca-Cola Bottlers... and try VAULT!!!" You have space to sell on the printed jacket and disc, you can put an actual commercial on the opening menu, or between chapters, you can put additional stuff like URL's to a web page that prints out discount coupons on there... there are many possibilities. The money from that lets you make your nut, yet keeps the DVD dubs cheap enough to discourage anybody from a profit motive.

Those are Sociology-oriented solutions.

Every other technical means someone offers you is either cumbersome to you to employ, or costly, or renders too many of the honestly-bought discs unplayable by even authorized users. And they can still be circumvented without too much difficulty, particularly by the parent's tech-savvy kids. Some folks are so desperate to not pay, they will settle for taping off the LCD screen of someone's portable DVD player or computer, rather than pay.

You can't defeat them all, you can make them work for it, and discourage the casual thieves, but it only takes one, more "dedicated" pirate to kill your margin. The kind of DRM that itunes can attach to your MP-3's is not yet easily available for DVD short runs. Macrovision for small runs is not a good ROI in my opinion, as it is too easily defeated these days. My $30 imported DVD player lets me make VHS copies of anything I care to play, Macrovision or not.

So I say don't try for a technical soultion; bank on human nature, it never fails.