The Australian Home Entertainment Distributors Association (AHEDA) yesterday released “independent research” claiming that “Australia has the lowest average price in the world when looking at new release high definition digital video on demand films”.

The news arrived in a breathless press release in which AHEDA “announced that Australia is one of the cheapest markets in the world for digital films, contrary to recent findings from other bodies.”

The release said that after “Partnering with IHS Technology to conduct independent research, the findings show that in contrast to the analysis released by [consumer advocacy organisation] Choice last week, Australia has the lowest average price in the world when looking at new release high definition digital video on demand films, at $5.19, compared to the United States at $5.30 and the United Kingdom at $6.41.”

There was also a table listing average prices in Australia, New Zealand, USA, UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

The release also includes the following statement:

"Cherry picking a few film titles and comparing then [sic] against one market does not constitute proper research and mis-represents the facts."

But there's no explanation in the release of what AHEDA counted. It may well have cherry picked, but we don't know because it has not offered an explanation of the sample size it used or just what was compared to what, or when.

Your correspondent doesn't write stories based on research with so little detail, or when the source of the research has an obvious interest in self-serving rather than independent findings. So I asked AHEDA's outsourced PR operatives to provide any data that would explain the methodology and shed further light on the findings. I explained that without extra information the details above must be considered assertions, and paper thin ones at that, not facts to be relied upon.

I was eventually provided with a spreadsheet offering average prices over three years for “new release” and “catalogue” titles in standard and high definition formats, covering the nations mentioned above. But we've still no idea what AHEDA and the research firm it used actually counted.

A friend of The Reg let us know that AHEDA counted content offered by AOL, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony, Yahoo, Hulu, Netflix and pay TV broadcasters.

But there's no word on whether AHEDA is looking at a representative basket of movies, cherry-picking titles that help it to prove its point or just looking up the price of The Sound of Music every other Sunday.

The points AHEDA is trying to make is a fair: Australians should stop pirating content as there's lots of it about at reasonable prices.

But the means AHEDA is using to make that point assume readers are credulous. If Big Content has such a compelling case to make about piracy being unjustifiable because content is freely available at reasonable prices, surely it can offer more than bald and easily-contestable assertions?

Many Australians clearly hold Big Content in contempt. They're not right to respond with piracy, but their ire can be justified because it is blindingly obvious that promotion of films and television have global reach. The music industry has shown that simultaneous global response is possible. But local rights holders for film and television properties have delivered inexplicable delays to content release, peculiar pricing and slow innovation and then complained when consumers route around their obstructions by piracy or VPN use.

Against that background, “research” like that released by AHEDA makes the organisation looks like it has something to hide.

And the weird thing is, it has hidden something useful to its cause in the slim data it has released to The Reg: the spreadsheet I've seen shows the average prices for movies falling around the world, including in Australia.

If such a claim were supported by a proper explanation of its derivation, it might win hearts and minds. Without the explanation, it's hard to assume AHEDA's research was sincere, never mind rigorous. And as such it is a less-than-useful contributor to debate and a blow to the credibility of AHEDA and its industry colleagues.

Update This piece was written on Tuesday, September 16th and scheduled to appear the following day. Today, September 17th, AHEDA has provided the following update:

"IHS sample size is typically 30-50 titles per service, business model and release type (so if we consider there are two business models – retail and rental, two formats – SD and HD, and two categories – new release and library – this effectively amounts to between 240 and 400 instances per service, and between 1200 and 2000 instances per market. These are the top performing local titles (as consumption is weighted towards these titles, so these reflect actual spending) across the course of a month."

This additional information is welcome, but does not, I feel, compromise the argument I concocted when writing this piece yesterday. That argument asserts that failure to release information about the methodology behind big assertions is no way to enter a debate as it insults the public.

The update provided by AHEDA remains of limited use, not least because it appears to track only "top performing local titles" and because there's still no data on just what was tracked in Australia. That the research only considered "top performing" titles is also of concern, as this research appears not to take into account "long tail" content. ®