Louis CK self-produces, self-publishes content on his webpage
buy.louisck.net
buy.louisck.net
To those who might wish to "torrent" this video: look, I don't really get the whole "torrent" thing. I don't know enough about it to judge either way. But I'd just like you to consider this: I made this video extremely easy to use against well-informed advice. I was told that it would be easier to torrent the way I made it, but I chose to do it this way anyway, because I want it to be easy for people to watch and enjoy this video in any way they want without "corporate" restrictions.
Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I'm just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me. So, please help me keep this being a good idea. I can't stop you from torrenting; all I can do is politely ask you to pay your five little dollars, enjoy the video, and let other people find it in the same way.
Sincerely, Louis C.K.
- he doesn't understand torrenting and so is helpless against it
- he cares about his viewers more than taking advice about DRM
- the video is owned solely by him and not some soulless corporation, and you're directly hurting him by torrenting
- you'll destroy his faith in mankind if you torrent
- five dollars is nothing compared to all that!
All of which combines to make you feel like a huge asshole for even considering pirate bay - in the nicest possible way. This type of thing makes a lot more sense than DRM in his case, and I bet it's a lot more effective too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkptz2YfZik
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf340K_Ed0o&feature=relat...
I fullheartedly support comedy as a form of free speech that should not be influenced by sponsorship.
Remember: Nothing is free. If something is "free", that's because it's you that's being sold.
- Credit card number/expiration/code
- Billing address
- Name, e-mail and phone
That's all it asks. That's exactly what everyone else asks for. The merchant can even pre-fill all these fields but the card info before sending the buyer to PayPal if they filled them out on the merchant's website already.
It's especially weak to make such a complaint based on your "recollection" while you're two pages away from the actual payment form for Louis' show.
He didn't want to join paypal, fair enough.
He didn't know he could pay with paypal without joining it, now he knows it.
Other HN-ers might see this post, realize they don't need paypal, and go back to buy the video.
IMO this shouldn't be down-voted.
p.s. I know I could have just upvoted it instead of writing this useless post (Which I'd understand if you downvote me by the way), but I thought my point would be clearer with a message rather than a battle of upvote/downvote.
I'm not familiar with this artist, but I wanted to see it out of simple curiosity because he seems to be an artist who puts fans ahead of profits. People like that usually produce high-quality work.
"It's nothing, I just wanted to say hi! Hope everything is going well for you!"
https://buy.louisck.net/terms-and-conditions
"WE DO NO PROMISE THAT THE SITE OR ANY CONTENT, SERVICE OR FEATURE OF THE SITE WILL BE ERROR-FREE"
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/86011/comedian-louis-ck-asks-mi...
>>HI. I’m Louis CK. Can you please take this down? This show is a work in progress and was not intended to be passed around the internet. I have absolutely no problem, personally, with file sharing, and if you take everythign [sic] I have on the market on DVD, CD, and put it up for free downloading, I don’t care. But this is an artistic and personal request. Please take this torrent down. thanks. LCK
I'm going to be doing an IAMA on Reddit, Monday around 1230pmEST I don't know what IAMA or Reddit are, but I'll be doing that.
awesome bunch of geeky-openness from ck.
This is not a general solution.
The marginal cost of distributing an additional copy of his work is minimal, and his pricing reflects that, and makes people more likely to pay for it rather than steal it.
Can you elaborate on why you don't think this is a general solution?
This works for him because you, and i, know and (probably) appreciate his humor, and he's going to make some money from it.
It's not going to work for someone who's not quite as good, and rely more on having that product actively sold to you ...
For a lesser known artist or comedian, you lose the power of the distribution channel, but you gain in margins. The opportunity for cross-promotion in the form of an opening act is still alive and well, and I don't see why it can't continue in a digital form.
Someone (you or another user) is down-modding my comments, and i can't really understand why. I feel they contribute to the discussion (a feeling confirmed by the simple fact that you've engaged with and responded to them). Judging by your profile, it seems like you too are against the idea of down-modding simply because you disagree with an opinion. If you are the one down-modding me, I'd consider that both hypocritical and shameful, but I'm not one to jump to conclusions, and will happily give you the benefit of the doubt.
On the downmodding thing, the only thing to do is thicken your skin. The moderation system here is bloody stupid, inferior to moderation systems from 10 years ago. I'll not rehash my further arguments against it, you've already found them :)
Louie's just doing for comedy what have been doing for years, recording the concert and selling it at the end of the night or online for more than they'd have made otherwise through traditional distribution deals.
http://gizmodo.com/5658621/how-louis-ck-shoots-and-edits-his...
Now he seems closer than anyone working in this area to Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks territory (if anybody's closer, I'd love to hear about them) with at least a shot at equalling them, which would be amazing.
Much of his performances involve veering sharply from some relatively considered insight into the human condition to some completely unnecessarily graphic tirade against a trivial aspect of his everyday life, with absolutely no break between them. In many ways it's as much performance art as it is standup, he has a more fundamentalist attitude towards attacking sacred cows than any other comedian I can think of.
Also I'd add that his more recent work is considerably improved on a lot of his slightly more incoherent stuff from earlier in his career. His "No Refunds" DVD from 2007 is a lot more focused and better paced. Check it out.
His story is not only inspiring, it transcends comedy. The idea that a mixed but passionate reaction is better than a lukewarm one applies to startups as well as entertainment.
The same undercurrent of respect for comedy- as- craft runs through Patton Oswalt's stuff though, which even if that doesn't automatically make him Bill Hicks, I still very much enjoy hearing about.
Louis CK is also excellent live; if you're seeing him live in a given year, you're basically guaranteed to be getting an entirely new show.
No idea of the legality. Please remove if it's not.
Excellent way to discover a new comic I'd say.
Another example of the same dilemma would be Ricky Gervais - I really enjoy his comedy specials and stand-up work, but I couldn't watch the original Office or something like Extras. It's funny alright, but if I have to pause it for the cringe to go away every other minute, it just looses focus to me. Cringe->Funny is a proven vehicle these days, bit it's to a point where I find it a little too simple, really.
Anyhow - Louis CK (and, to a point, Gervais in his stand-up) glances at the cringe and then opens up a world of insight around it that is way funnier than just having the cringe meter top off every thirty seconds.
I actually used to get very uncomfortable while watching some Shakespearian comedy-of-errors plays. The type where the audience knows something that the actors don't. Makes me want to shout at them which is I guess the point however I feel like it is not an enjoyable type of anxiety.
Perhaps it is the engineer/nerdy part of us but I really don't enjoy watching people make mistakes.
Same goes for "x is a twat, situations involving x will make you cringe" shows - there are only a few like that which I can tolerate and they make a huge effort to assign enough other redeeming qualities to x to make up for it. For Curb, I do like Larrys character, but after a while, it seemed like he existed solely to feed the cringe.
And yes, I have it bad. The last episodes of Curb that I watched, I permanently had my finger on the space bar. Sometimes, I would have to pause it for periods of time that were longer than the show itself.
$5 feels like a good price point. I don't think I would have paid $20, especially if I knew that he would only be getting a small fraction of that. Bonus points for making it a 1.2 GB h264 encode. I hope this works out great for Louis and makes other people want to try it.
I'm curious to see what happens, hope he gives an update of some kind.
Surely there is a better way to distribute this stuff such that it doesn't take away the nice advantages and gives most/all the money to the artist too?
If the market ever allows for a consumer-level product to achieve this (my solution is very geeky) and it works well, it will be successful.
Probably something like that already exists, but the fact is that most of the content seems to be aggregated in different kinds of services that the artists don't really control themselves.
(I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback)
On the technical side, the scrolling text seems to overlap to the next line on some zoom-settings (I'm using Firefox 8 if it matters).
Another bit of feedback - imo remove the end bit of this sentence, in your FAQ re. pricing: "Simple. It's 5% + $0.30 for each transaction. We're working hard to get this lower.". You have just put the idea in my head that 5% + 0.3 is too much. now i have doubts. maybe now i should shop around? or roll my own? or wait for prices to go down? no need to sow this seed. 5% + 0.3, and you are covering transaction costs? total bargain
it sounds like these guys want control of the process and the users. you could ping them and provide something they don't have at the moment, like a better solution to the downloading streaming (Which some users a complaining about)
this could be a huge opportunity for you, i'd definitely ping him
Louis CK is a media maverick and I wish him good luck. His only condition for the network when he created his TV series was "you don't screw with my writing". And he chases opportunities like this because he just thinks in his gut that it might be the better way forward. Most personalities are too in thrall to meddling PR overlords to take principled stands like these.
"PLEASE NOTE that you can only stream the film twice AND you can download the film twice. Once you start a stream of the film, your stream will be active for 8 hours. Once you have exceeded your streaming and download limits, you will need to purchase the film again to stream or download it again. However once you have fully downloaded the film, you are of course free to watch it as many times as you like. "
The 2 download limit made me worry about disconnecting or restarting the download. I also can't make my download manager open more than one connection, in case that locks me out of the content I just bought. I think it should be higher, but I understand that he can't give away too much bandwidth without cutting into his profits.
I disconnected twice while downloading and emailed the customer support address and they just replenished my downloads.
It makes sense to me why he is only allowing a few downloads otherwise a few extreme users could take up all his money just by streaming.
I confirm that it is a ~1.2GB file (the file is precisely 1,199,666,893 bytes)
By fetching this video via torrent you (generally) must seed it, therefore making it available to others who may or may not have paid for it.
Two downloads and two streams seems reasonable to me.
BTW, to whoever downvoted enneff's reply: this seems senseless. I asked for a polite explanation, he gave one, and it's an interesting point of view (even though many of us may disagree with it).
<meta name="author" content="versionindustries.com" />
The writing is great and the design is clean. I want to believe he micromanaged everything. Or even that he made this site himself and that this line was a paste-o that he forgot to remove.
Edit: Nuts: "their company (that built the site) is called Version Industries". gotta tweet that shit."
It's very earnest and has a feel of "listen, I created this. You're likely to like it. If you give me a bit of money, I'll give you access to it. You can do whatever you want with it, but just keep in mind that I worked and paid for it being made."
a.k.a what Louis CK would probably sum up as "just don't be an asshole, ok?"
I feel like I'm getting a bargain at $5, knowing how much enjoyment I'll get from his material. That couldn't be said for the majority of studio-supported/produced mind-numbing crap out there. Sa-da-tay!
If the success of NiN's "Ghosts I-IV" was not sufficient, I doubt that one will be. It's a long walk, uphill, on a 10G planet, of a slope the size of Olympus Mons.
By size I meant length, not angle (and completely forgot to talk about angle on the way). Sorry 'bout that.
'though at 10G planet, 200 miles at 5˚ should be plenty fun to walk.
I bought a copy because of this. It's nice to support the artist directly especially when the video file finally is as good as the versions you usually find only on torrent sites (no "you criminal" warnings eg. like on store bought DVD:s. Nice way to thank those that have actually paid for the content...).
https://buy.louisck.net/account/download
http://download.aws.louisck.net/Louis_CK_Beacon_1280x720.mp4?Expires=<unix timestamp>&Signature=<long string>&Key-Pair-Id=<an id>
$ file Louis_CK_Beacon_1280x720.mp4
Louis_CK_Beacon_1280x720.mp4: ISO Media, MPEG v4 system, version 2I posted it because I was worried that I couldn't download it with wget before I bought it, I'm on a 3G connection through my phone and I wanted to download it to my server so I could download it later from a more capable connection.
I sent the below E-Mail to their support address (support@louisck.net) and I'd encourage others who bought this to send something similar do the same. I think it's important to tell artists that this sort of distribution is appreciated:
Thanks for making this show available in non-DRM format. I haven't
watched it yet, but I bought it and downloaded it already.
My friends and I have been following your work for a while, I've
watched both your HBO TV shows and downloaded a bunch of your
standups. But since I don't live in the US and don't want to buy DRM
content I haven't paid you for any of this.
However I'm happy to be able to when you offer something in this
format. I can pay for it even if I don't live in the US, and I don't
have to buy something like a DVD or subscribe to something like iTunes
where I'll effectively be getting a worse service by locking the media
I buy into some corporation's proprietary distribution platform.
But if you keep offering things in this way in the future I'll be sure
to pay for them.
It's not that I'm cheap. I make a very good living, and I'm happy to
pay for things. I just think it's unethical to pay for media when part
of the proceeds go to conglomerates like the MPAA which are actively
working towards reducing freedom on the Internet.Hi
Thanks for subscribing to the Louis C.K. email list. I swear to Christ* I will not bother you now that I have your email.
To complete your subscription, you need to confirm you got this email. To do so, please click the link below: ...
*(of course I mean Bill Christ, who owns a Fiat dealership in Ronkonkoma, NY and has diabetes)
Which makes me think - why does anyone write boring standard auto emails? But I guess no one is as funny as him and we don't need more Groupon copy in the world.
Can't say enough about this guy.
Anyway, my point is that starting a download and then only getting a couple of MBs shouldn't really count as using a download slot. On the other hand, I don't know if it's possible to check how much data has been transferred using existing technology. He seems to be using Amazon CloudFront.
I don't see this as being unreasonable, especially for $5 with no licensing or DRM or anything around it.
Not wishing for it to happen - but realize it's PayPal.
Now if we can just get him to be making jokes about PayPal, that I'd pay to see.
Which several hundred million people use without having their accounts locked.
Wait until paypal sees hundreds of thousands of $5 payments and a balance over $100k
- especially if his account is relatively new - unless his people were smart enough to pre-empt this with them.
I don't see anything to poke fun at.
A lot of the account freezings happen when the receiver of the payments isn't distributing an actual product (donations, fundraisers, etc). Louis could very easily provide the details of all the downloads, confirming delivery of the product.