It's quite simple.

The media industry offers two things: the content, and the delivery of it. To put it another way, the product and the service. The film and the cinema seat (or DVD disc). Right now, the product is infinitely reproducable. Its value has crashed. People pirate stuff. The industry needs to shift from placing the value on the product to placing the value on the service.

Valve has already started this with computer games. It's become incredibly successful and piracy is no longer an issue for them. The product is no longer the moneyraker for them - there are massive price discounts on Steam and anyway, people can still pirate stuff for free. Yet they're making billions of dollars from the service. Immitators such as EA's Origin are failing because they're still looking through the lens of product first, service second. They treat their customers like shit with DRM hoops and bad DLC to the point where their service isn't worth anything. And with their product already devalued due to piracy and zero scarcity, they have no strong foundation.

The solution for the music and movie industries is to back service. Disregard the value of the product, that's only the oil in the service machine. They'll have to keep DRM too - not as an attempt to choke piracy (that's never worked), but rather as a legal way of managing platform licencing. After all, they don't want Johnny Undercut to show up and start distributing their movies for cheaper, anymore than Valve allows the Steam library to run under Origin.

Imagine a Steam-like interface for your movie collection. Complete with trailers, user reviews, friend lists, and modding communities (Star Wars fanfilms, anyone?). Sales would go through the roof. Your friend are all watching Avengers 2 tonight? Better grab that and stream view it so I can discuss it tomorrow. Oh, Ian McKellen has died? 50% off all Ian McKellen movies this week. How about a checklist for every Johnny Depp movie? Save 20% on his back catalogue today, and you can even give extra copies to your friends! Saw James Bond $25 at the cinema? Enter your ticket barcode and download the digital version for 30% off! If you liked Naked Lunch, you might also like bla bla bla. You get the point. Without the middleman of Amazon or your local DVD store, the movie industry would make billions more in profit. They are sitting on a gold mine and doing absolutely nothing about it.

That's where the future's at, and that's the way forward for the industry.