Hollywood is about to repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the music industry
slate.com
slate.com
Give me a no-hassle-fair-price download service and I'll be fine paying for good movies. But right now I have not yet found a legal way of watching movies on my computer except waiting for the DVD's - and even those I don't really watch in a legal way as I'm using DeCSS to watch them on Linux.
And don't get me started on music streaming - when people talk about those lucky europeans with their Spotify accounts, we germans are still left out - thanks to the GEMA i guess.
I don't feel bad for using tvtorrents - as far as I am concerned, I am just watching a TV show that has already been paid for by its target audience and stations in the States anyway and I got a copy; what's the big deal?
And movies: why are there still significantly different "launch dates" for the same movie all over the world? This is 2011.
And while we are at it with movies, my favorite pet peeve are the frakking movie theaters here... you pay outrageous prices just to get a seat, then you pay extra for 3d goggles, then they sit you through 20 minutes of commercials, then they switch on all of the frakking lights AGAIN and ask "Does anyone want to buy some ice cream???"... and of course there are always some assholes who want to buy a $1 popsicle with a $100 bill but first they take their sweet time deciding on what to get... then finally the light goes out... and there are more commercials. The whole experience is just begging to install a nice home theater and since one cannot (legally) watch current movies while they are in theaters.. pirating surely becomes an option.
Movie theaters and current movie distribution are a concept from the stone age when people could not afford to view them at home; they are a fossil in terms of modern technology and possibilities. Most people who go to see a movie could just as easily watch it at home without much less enjoyment or sound or visual quality.
An actual human solicits ice cream orders between the previews and the start of the movie?
Then of course there are always a couple of inconsiderate a-holes who want some ice cream but did not manage to buy it before... in a big theater room they are spread out nicely so sales-humans walk around with their ice cream and sell their stuff; typically the people buying either have no idea what they want so they go through the whole "what do you have" talk and/or they don't have small bills and pay with 50 or 100 bills and go through the "oh sorry I don't have change for that" talk.
And we are talking around US $20 per person per viewing for "Pirates of the Caribbean 4" for example; just for seeing the movie in half-asses 3D.
I swear to FSM: Should you ever read about a bloody massacre in a movie theater in Germany it was probably me. :9
Whether most people could enjoy the home experience as much is an interesting point of debate, but there's no question that the sound and visual quality are lower in >>99% of homes. Very few people have good surround-sound systems. Even fewer have truly large screens for viewing. I have a 50-inch TV at home, and I love it, but it doesn't compare to a 20-foot screen.
I think theaters will remain relevant for some time to come. Until the "ten-foot-experience" at home means a ten-foot screen, people will probably remain interested in seeing movies at the theater.
At home, we're never interrupted by stupid people talking or being late, we don't have to wait 20 minutes with ads, the movie can start at the time most convenient to us. So the effective quality is higher.
I also didn't say that people could not afford surround-sound. I said that most people do not have high-quality surround systems installed. Relatively few people have surround-sound systems, and those who do have fairly low-end ones. As for the "huge TVs", huge to most people is 50-60 inches. Huge for theaters is 90-feet (that's actually just standard Imax size).
And no, 55-inch doesn't compare with the theater. 42-inch certainly doesn't, unless you're sitting two feet away from the screen. Modern theaters have very large screens, and even considering the seating distance they are still relatively much larger than a flat-screen TV a typical family might install. A decent theater will have screens large enough to completely or almost completely fill the field of vision someone sitting in the middle of the theater. You'd have to be about 3 or 4 feet away from a 55" TV for the same effect. (Or else the theater you're going to sucks.)
Pandora blocks your IP address you say? Go look for a proxy in the US.
Hulu recognizes proxies you say? Use a VPN instead. That opens the door to every free offer in the US.
iTunes won't let you download from the US store you say? Go to Ebay and grab an American iTunes gift card.
Spotify requires a bank account in UK/Scandinavia you say? There are always virtual credit cards like Entropay (I call them credit card proxies). Well, Spotify won't take those. But Paypal does, and Spotify accepts Paypal.
You see, this is the internet. There are no countries or borders on the internet. The tools are all there. You just gotta use them.
A much more difficult problem is undoing the years and years of distribution rights deals and complex availability windows that plague any improvement in the market. These deals lock up content, creating exclusive windows for entrenched players and hamper true innovation. Unfortunately, solving the rights windows issue, which includes not only time but also geographic limits, is a much more difficult problem to solve with fewer incentives on incumbents to change. If they don't, the whole industry will suffer, but I don't see this issue being solved any time soon.
I don't think it's breaking any NDA to discuss the overall aspects of the consortium's goals.
Basically what they are trying to do is produce a global network of secure digital content distribution servers. Under their model, all digital content retailers actually sell access to this single global commercial content delivery infrastructure.
However, it remains unclear to me under the proposed model: a) Who will pay for the servers b) Which devices will or will not be supported, and how media transcoding (to support differing device capabilities) will be handled c) Who the user complains to if they can't get access to the content they paid for d) What value retailers would add in such a scenario - indeed, how they would 'compete' with each other given very little control and thus capability for unique product offering
Like many dreamy consortia, I see this one as dead in the water. The technical problems are significant, and there is a general lack of impetus to actually get out there are solve the problems.
A DRM industry for plain media (consume only, non-interactive) that dreams of securing global distribution is, in my view, destined to self-flagellate until it is but a poor faded memory in the distant mists of time.
On the other hand, DRM can enable good consumer experience: I really like Steam, for example. I recently bought my first Mac and many of the games I'd purchased on PC instantly became available in my library. After just logging in, I could download them for the new platform and play away instantly... even though I'd changed countries and gaming platforms. This is what DRM should be doing: empowering people to mobility and choice through connected media. Steam just does so many things right: content discovery, supporting smaller and independent content developers, social elements.
I think the entire DRM industry should look up to Steam for a successful example of the future. Bottom line: THINK OF THE CUSTOMER.
...the music industry, when it began to feel the effects of the technological change coming, doubled down on stupid....
And the video industry is providing the sincerest form of flattery.
Après moi, le déluge.
tl;dr:
The easiest and most convenient way to see the movies or
TV shows you want is to get them illegally. Again, to belabor the obvious: The illegal version isn't just free. It's better.A movie on DVD without the menus and warnings is still a movie on DVD, but better.
But now I just don't buy DVDs anymore. I watch some stuff on Netflix, and am happy to pay $8/month for that service. I've mostly opted out though. I just don't see the stuff coming out of Hollywood and the TV networks as really being worth my time, regardless of cost or delivery mechanisms.
The problem is the "industry" is not monolithic, and if you think about Netflix cannibalizing $200/month cable subscriptions (for all premium channels) into $10/month streaming, you can see where some of the players are gonna drag their feet. It'd be great if big content could come together a create an amazing service for everyone, but they don't have the chops or the incentive.
I don't know how fast your internet is, but I can get an hour-long TV show in 720p in <10 minutes from torrents, and I'm paying $45/month for internet (in America).
> The disk space requirements are huge
Are they? 2 TB hard drives are now $70 a pop, and who says you have to save everything like a pack rat anyway?
> quality and availability issues are problematic
They've never been for me. There have always been plenty of seeds, and there has always been a high quality version that has been easy to find (usually because it has the most seeds & snatches). If anything, the quality is MUCH higher when torrenting than it is when streaming (legally or illegally).
This isn't the case for me. I watch mostly "foreign" films (i.e. films in a language I don't speak or understand). If the subtitles aren't included it can be a nightmare to find some (I won't watch dubbed movies). Sometimes you can't find any subtitles at all (I once had a movie sitting on my HD for over a year waiting for subtitles to show up for it), often when you do find them they're out of sync [1] or awful translations written by people who don't speak one (or both!) languages very well. Often whole chunks of the movie will be left out or have one word explanations.
So for me, the quality is not remotely better via torrents, that's just literally the only option for what I want to watch.
[1] Apparently different formats actually run at different speeds, causing the subtitles to drift if they were made for a different format. I didn't want to know about this and if the media industry had provided me some way of consuming this content I wouldn't have had to learn about it.
But in case you didn't already know, you can obtain subtitles separately, from sites like Open Subtitles and Subscene, then sync them to your video. I use Subtitle Editor[0]. Although it's Linux only, I'm sure there's similar software for other OS's as well.
As far as your other info, thanks for your help. I do, however, already know all this. Believe me.
Syncing to your video is a very hit and miss process. It's not a matter of just pointing the app at the two files and let it sort them out. What if the original version included more of the credits? It can be a huge pain. VLC makes it easier by letting me increase/decrease subtitle delay as it starts to drift out of sync.
For a 2 megabit encoding that would effective DL speeds of 12 megabit, which is impressive. I've never gotten that consistently in the US. I pay $70/month from Comcast and if I start torrenting it doesn't sustain that, I'm not sure if it's throttled or what, or maybe the connection is saturated because I'm in an apartment in mountain view no doubt full of geeks.
> Are they? 2 TB hard drives are now $70 a pop, and who says you have to save everything like a pack rat anyway?
Normals don't buy HDs. The point is this shit can still fill up your HD really quick, which is just a hassle for non-geeks. That is why streaming is such a win for most people.
> They've never been for me. There have always been plenty of seeds, and there has always been a high quality version that has been easy to find (usually because it has the most seeds & snatches).
If you're not searching for the most popular or recent stuff then the quality degrades though. You need to have a variety of torrent trackers in your pocket. You have to have an intuitive filter to avoid the bullshit, and still sometimes you will get shitty encodings or something that's fucked up some way.
Seriously this is a geek hobby. Not necessarily computer geek, it's accessible enough for anyone to geek out on, but it's not a superior user experience to Netflix. The fact that you like the end result better doesn't make this any less true.
Torrenting isn't a superior user experience, it's a giant pain in the ass. Sharing files with friends, however, is the piracy experience for most people. Pretending torrent users end the file sharing line, is ridiculous.
For old episodes you do hold a point, although waiting a few hours or even half a day is generally still more convenient than not getting the episodes at all or waiting through countless FBI warnings.
Now then again, there is Netflix. Its not too bad. Its only available in the US, too.
For example, if i want to follow game of thrones, i can wait a year or two until its available in my country. For some other shows, they'll just never be shown in my country. Or I can pirate it and reduce the wait from a year to 10 minutes.
I'd gladly pay up to $100 a month for quality, ads free streaming to anything recent and I think i would be over paying it. But the offer just isnt even there, free, $1, $100, $1000, $10000 it doesn't matter, there is no true offer available.
What we have here are some streaming content provided by the cable/dsl operators or tv channels which comprises tv shows that are ~5 to 10 years old and movies that are 30 to 5 years old, and a slim catalog of them too, generally the crappiest.
So I pirate the stuff. I feel a little bad about it, but it's that or nothing, and I won't be ok with nothing.
I shall also mention that I would want to be able to stream the stuff on any device/system or optionally save it for offline view, although id settle with streaming only as well.
You can't beat the streaming latency though. You click play and 5 seconds later you are watching. As long as you have the minimum internet connection quality then streaming wins on UX.
Also... disk space requirements? Really? Hard drive space costs nearly nothing these days, I can't imagine that's a big problem.
There are clients that allow instant streaming. It makes little difference to a busy swarm.
the quality and availability issues are problematic.
Problematic to Hollywood because they are superior to what they produce?
Since I signed up for Rhapsody about a year ago, my downloading of music illegally has plummeted. I trade the small amount of Downloader's Guilt for $10/mo and have access to (almost) everything I want to listen to. (And from wherever I want to listen to it: my computer, my phone, my home stereo.)
Before Rhapsody, I was downloading gigabytes of albums – I hadn't bought a CD in the new millenium (save those from smaller bands I wanted to personally supported). Now the music industry has me as a customer again, and monthly. Hollywood needs a Rhapsody to survive.
"Sorry, we are not able to offer Rhapsody Premier at this time. We are not able to offer Rhapsody Premier in Netherlands (substitute for just about any non-US country) at this time. For the latest music and entertainment offers in your country, click Current Offers. Click Cancel to end this session.
If you believe you've received this message in error, check to make sure your country and language settings are accurate. "
Don't look at torrents. Go look at many of the download services rapidshare.com, megaupload.com, etc. They all have one thing in common: they charge money.
This means that there is a segment of people out there who are willing to pay, but whoes needs are for one reason or another are not met under the current system.
If you want to grow the market try to capture them.
However, there should still be an explicit law that allows people to legally make free copies of content that isn't available for sale in any standard format. There's never enough supply as there's demand; there's always a niche that just isn't reasonably satisfied by commerce itself. A number of various collections or redistribution of minor series can thrive on the proverbial pirate bay because there are non-commercial incentives only to support them in the first place.
I can't take it. If, however, one of those persons you shared your video with decides to share it with me (or the rest of the world), you can't do shit, to put it bluntly.
To explain it differently, there are two states some piece of media (be it movie, music, books or software) can be in: Private, and public (and to those savvy C++ programmers amongst us, no, there is no "protected" :) ). As long as it is private, indeed no one has a right to gain access to it. In your example, the video would still be private as long as no one you showed / gave it to decides to share it with other people (ie, the rest of the world).
Once someone decides to share it, it is no longer private. It's public. And just as much as no one has a right to demand access to something private, no one (not even you, as the original creator) has a right to stop people from sharing something if they had access to it, thus no longer making it private.
To put this in perspective for the music and movie industry, as well as software authors and writers: there is but one (very simple) way of controlling your creation: don't share it with anyone else. Either that, or publish it, accepting the consequences that come with that decision, one being that you cannot stop people from sharing your creation.
tl;dr: I can't demand access from you, but neither can you demand me to stop sharing once I have.
Oh, and no, I'm not in the least tiny bit interested in developing proprietary software. :)
I think the author needs to stop watching so much TV.
Does anyone identify with this piece? It seems largely exaggerated to me. I watched the first 4 episodes of The Inbetweeners, season 3, on demand last night. I have FiOS, and even with its clunky menu navigation, it was easy to find and watch the shows. The alternate is. what, download a 1GB torrent? I don't see how that's easier.
If Hollywood wants to improve box office receipts, they could stop making so many sequels, movies from comic books, movies from TV shows, and 3D for the sake of 3D.
It was long winded and pedantic, but he's making a solid point metaphorically: this shit is painful, and no mortal can or would navigate the morass of technical, legal and financial woes without wondering the exact same things.
I feel sorry for people that don't know how to move comfortably around tech, because the one thing you and I share in common that they don't have is a choice in how this goes down on a personal level.
I have a Playstation 3 which I used for Netflix, and went through the same hassles during the PSN outage. Then it seemed like every time I went to watch a movie there was a new software update I had to have. On top of that, the repeated software updates seem to have introduced a bug where it has to resync the resolution with the TV every time I power it on or boot Netflix. I'm never buying a Sony product ever again.
Netflix streaming is a great product, but has limited selection. Again, it's not that I consume that much media, but that what I want to watch usually isn't available.
At the end of the day, I have a cable TV + internet subscription, as well as Netflix, and I just torrent everything. I have a server that runs deluge, and I just drop a torrent in a folder and a couple of hours later it's ready to watch.
I though the piece was spot on.
edit: Just thought I'd add that since the legal music stores have popped up (iTunes, Beatport, Amazon) I hardly pirate music anymore. I spend hundreds of dollars a year on music. This is why the premise of the article jives with my experience.
If they want to improve receipts, why should they stop making the movies that make the most money? You might not like sequels and comic books, but apparently most people do.
http://www.the-numbers.com/interactive/newsStory.php?newsID=...
I think as similar as these two industries are, the big deciding factor in this particular war is the size of files being downloaded. Video files are mammoth in comparison to music files and the Cable and Internet companies know this--there are obvious infrastructural problems in play, but the recent move by a number of ISP's to cap the data transfer capacity of its clients is a huge factor in this war on pirating--I mean where I live in Canada 1/2 of the major players have adopted this, with the 2nd committed to it but unsure of when it will be fully in place--so when that does happen I'll be forced into a cap of 100gb a month for the price I previously afforded with stiff penalties for going over--in this day and age 100gb, especially in terms of TV and movies is hardly anything. Couple that with my desire to play online games, surf the internet, stream on youtube etc and my fun time options are severely limited. If anything I think Hollywood lucked out on the fact that ISP's have hit a roadblock in terms of bandwidth and what they can afford to provide.
Storage prices will continue to drop. At some point in the near future it will be less expensive to have an entire collection of video stored locally, rather than try to create the infrastructure to stream across the country or globe.
I do not want to see it in a smelly, sticky, noisy public theatre.
Will this ever happen? Unlikely.