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Comment by flyhighplato | Hacker News Reader

Keeping actual files around, eh? What a quaint, old-timey idea.

Seriously. I don't have a single music or video on any media in my home. I stream music to my Sonos and listen to a more awesome range of incredible music than ever before (thanks Pandora and Rdio). This morning it was ethiopian jazz, romantic era piano, ska and early reggae.

True that streaming movies are a weak selection today. But dealing with media is such an annoyance, I'd rather just wait till the selection gets better than deal with all the file formats and wasted time copying files around. I have a more interesting life to lead than that.

Surely you're not implying people who copy files on occasion have uninteresting lives, worth more no more than a passing sneer? That would be a terribly absurd thing to imply.

Surely in this day and age, you can't actually have trouble with file types?

Surely you don't think everyone who copies files from one volume to another just sits around with baited breath waiting for the transfer to complete?

Of course not. Thanks for pointing it out! I'm just expressing my appreciation for great software and systems that make the process effortless. Like Pandora and Netflix.

And no I don't have trouble with file types. I just like to watch or listen immediately, without a lot of fussing around, and I'm happy to pay for it because good content is expensive to produce.

And of COURSE file sharers don't sit around idly, waiting for a copy to complete. They can read comic books while they wait. Or walk up to the kitchen from the basement bedroom in their parents' house for a FREE bite to eat.

Aesthete file sharers frequently have access to movies and music that simply can't be purchased. In the case of movies, subtitles are made every day in a myriad of languages for movies that have never been subtitled. Things that have been lost to the mainstream due to lack of general marketability thrive in the niches that have been created by the maintenance and curation of digital files on hard drives.

You make a great point. For example, I love Yasujiro Ozu movies, but very few of them are available on DVD. It would make so much more sense for those movies to be available to everyone through a streaming system, rather than have to sneak around exchanging files.

Streaming has always struck me as nothing more than a compromise with limited bandwidth and storage. If you can download a two-hour movie in two seconds, and it takes .001 percent of your storage device, why wouldn't you download?

Unless you're trying to appease the entertainment industry, of course.

Whether the data is displayed live off the wire, buffered in RAM, buffered on disk, cached on disk, or beamed into my skull by space aliens, it makes little difference to me.

I only care that the system is responsive with good quality.

But all this misses the whole point of the article: that easy local sharing and storage will make copyright completely unenforceable. If the files in question are pirated, they're not likely to be available for streaming.

I just signed up for the Netflix trial: looked for three movies, none of them available for streaming. Then I tried Hulu: they want $7/mo and still show commercials. Then there's Amazon, but their prices per movie are comparable to brick-and-mortar rental stores (aside from a few things in Prime), and that's for 3-day availability.

Compare to spending a couple seconds copying the file for free, with blu-ray quality and no commercials, and being able to watch as many times as you want with never a "buffering" message. If the industry doesn't step up their game, there will be a market for that.

Most consumers put a huge value on convenience, and don't feel inclined to sneak around copying files. The studios cause the file sharing by making it inconvenient to buy, as you yourself describe.

Look at mobile apps. Easier to pirate than a movie, but piracy is not a problem because it's so easy to buy the apps. Look at the growth rate of app revenue.

Look at Starbucks and how much people are willing to spend on a coffee.

We'll see how it shakes out, of course. But the problem now is that the studios fail to make their product available, not that people don't want to pay for it.

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