[michaelmrose]

0.4% of Iphones are jailbroken. Let us suppose that 50% of individuals with jailbroken phones who were prospective buyers decided to download it instead a fantastic unbelievable percentage. You would expect a 0.2% decrease in sales.

What you are describing is aprox 500x the effect. Your hypothesis is fantastic let me propose some alternatives.

- The same release that removed the DRM also introduced changes in the application which you didn't regard as in any way negative but which turned off users.

- You introduced changes in your price structure to account for the rampant piracy you expected and killed your sales.

- You in some way offended people and they decided to stop buying from you.

- You serve a niche and either saturated that niche, the portion of the niche that was interested in your solution, or the portion of the second group your advertising was reaching and sales dropped off

- You have an exposure problem. You experienced a positive but not permanent bounce that only coincided incidentally with removal of DRM

- Other players entered the same space diluting your market

Any of the above are more reasonable than supposing that all your users are jailbreakers.

[wswope]

No, I was similarly skeptical at first because modern jailbreaking is so rare. He’s telling a true story… but leaving off that his story was from the 2008/2009 era.

https://www.tivocommunity.com/threads/iphone-app-dvr-remote....

[michaelmrose]

Maybe the actual story is about the rising competition from cable co provided DVRs in an excellent position to roll their hardware into the customers existing bill for a perceptively smaller fee compared to outright purchase of superior tivo hardware combined with increasing competition from streaming services.

User has understandably negative feelings about piracy and retroactive explains his misfortune based on it.

[native_samples]

You're quite in denial here. User's story is true, and as he explained the effect was "overnight". You're trying to claim that an effect that happened instantly, the moment he removed the DRM, is to do with long term industry trends. But that wouldn't happen instantly.

It's pretty obvious that well implemented DRM works. If it didn't then it would have died out a long time ago. See how much effort the games console makers put in, despite it being a highly competitive market with extreme pricing pressure. Yet, they do compete on the quality of their DRM because game studies are responsive to it.

[michaelmrose]

I was being kind and not disparaging the commenter. User is misrepresenting the truth.

1 out of 250 iphones is jailbroken and can even install pirated apps directly. On balance which is more likely that piracy killed his app overnight or netflix, competitors, and cable co DVRs did?

The alternative is to have us believe that nearly all his prospective users were in the 0.4% and instantly heard it on the grape vine that his app was fair game "overnight" instead of buying a $3 remote app. Does that seem even slightly credible?

It makes a better narrative than I bet my livelihood on a excellent entrant to a market that became crowded then went away.

If you do a search restricted to the time frame his product died you will note there were multiple competitors including a mobile interface m.tivo.com launched.

[stutsmansoft]

I was able to dig up the sales report.

https://imgur.com/a/xE9UG1B

[stutsmansoft]

All those factors are plausible. If I can still get sales reports I will see if I can re-identify the dropoff and look for correlation.

I will say it certainly -felt- like removing the DRM was a mistake at the time, because the cliff was dramatic and immediate.

As others have pointed out this was a product in the 2009 era, and it did eventually get replaced by a first-party app from TiVo at which point I just shut it down.