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Apple to Offer Monthly iTunes TV Subscriptions
sg3000 writes "Fans of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, rejoice! Reuters is reporting that Apple will provide monthly subscriptions to two of Comedy Central's most popular shows. One question, as TV shows become available for sale on the Internet, will this make it harder to share clips online, such as through Google Video? In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true."
Oh that's right Jobs is against that...
Am I the only one thinking this is the first step to subscription music on the IPod
What am I paying 10 bucks for again?
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http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_daily_show
http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/the_colbert_re
10 Dollars to play it on my iPod instead of my PC?
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
One question, as TV shows become available for sale on the Internet, will this make it harder to share clips online, such as through Google Video? In your answer, ignore facts. Just go with what feels true -TFA
Totally easier to share, but that's hardly the point. The point is I pay for cable, and there is no way I'd pay for both cable service and downloads... so if what I watch is available for download at $10/season... I'd ditch the cable. I'm not offended by the idea of paying for media. I pay for cable, I chuck money tward PBS from time to time. I'm not that hip paying for DVDs as in contrast to downloads they take up a hell of alot less space.
Parents would also be interested as I'm starting to notice more switching to video rentals rather cable subscriptions.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
This is pretty cool. The iTunes model .. could be worse. With my Mac that runs iTunes and my iPod, I hardly even notice the DRM. iTunes prices are very reasonable, legit :P, and go straight into my library. AAC provides decent enough music for my 2.1 speaker system (or my headphones). iTMS MPEG-4 provides decent enough quality video for 2 bucks an episode. There is definitely tons of room for improvement, but seeing as they're the dominant force in the online legit music business, they could make the predicament much, much worse.
"Everything worth innovating today will go to court tomorrow."
There was an interview with Jon Stewart and a producer of the Daily Show on Wired a while back, where Jon says that he's fine with people downloading the show. We can only hope that the bigshots at Comedy Central feel the same. Me, I would never buy cable, but I do love watching the Daily Show...
Here's a quote:
Stewart: We're not going to shut it down - we don't even know what it is. I'm having enough trouble just getting porn.
The Dude abides.
A price can be considered artificially high any time the supplier has more control over the price than the consumer. This can be because of regulatory mechanisms, collusion between manufacturers, vertical monopolies, false scarcity, or any other number of reasons. The current price for any good or service may be the "market price" in the most literal sense of the term, but that does not necessarily imply that that price has not been manipulated in ways that undermine the free market.
I hope everyone's watching closely as fair use is lying on its deathbed.
Lots of Slashdotters are hailing this development as a move away from traditional TV-based distribution to online video sales. It sounds nifty on paper, but let's look to the future. If these online video stores end up becoming popular enough to supplant TV distribution, fair use is screwed. These videos are DRM encumbered, and breaking that protection is against the law. TV shows like the Daily Show and Colbert Report depend on their being a large pool of accessible content to discuss and parody. Once it's all online and DRM encumbered, they won't be able to use that content without breaking the law. Want to add background music to your home videos? I hope you didn't buy your music online. Even though this type of use isn't specifically protected under copyright law, it is still felt to be perfectly acceptable by the masses, and courts would probably back it based on the same logic that stopped Hollywood from taking time-shifting away from us.
The future looks bleak for creative works online. These developments call for an overhaul of our copyright laws, but it really doesn't look like that's going to happen. Should a work that is only available in a DRM encumbered form still be protected by copyright? If so, why? Copyright was granted to copyright creators for a limited term, but with DRM, not only do they take away fair use, but they also gain the ability to close up their work forever. Hopefully someone gets elected soon that sees and is willing to fix the many problems with our copyright laws.
And you are so blinded by the crap on TV that you don't realize that less than 1% of it is worth my time to watch.
/w video?
And much of that $70 a month to get the channels that offer those shows back via digital cable.
And that's not even mentioning the fact that I can see them whenever I want instead of having to remember to watch or record them on the TV's schedule.
If Apple were to extend this deal (~16 shows for $10, paid in advance) to some of their other shows, like Battlestar Galactica, I could actually see myself making my first iTMS purchase.
But of course, they probably won't offer that low a rate on longer and more collectible shows like BSG. And I really can't see paying much more than that for a movie that just isn't all that comparable to a DVD (320x240 vs 720x480, watchable on ubiquitous $40 players vs needs a computer or an iPod, comes on a nicely packaged DVD vs can't even be burned as a DVD, etc).
Really, it seems to me the iTMS got a lot of things right with music, and then turned around and got those same things irritatingly wrong on video.
They made the music decent quality, as good or better than most of the stuff being traded on the net at the time (using similar bitrates and a superior codec). But they made the video disappointingly low res, equivalent to stuff that was traded online in the late '90s, not the mid '00s (the h264 codec is great, and the ~768k bit rate they use is, if anything, overkill for their resolution, but the 320x240 resolution is just not competitive with what you can find on bittorrent these days [and as Jobs has said before in relation to music, the pirates are their real competition]).
And they made the music burnable to a standard redbook CD so it could be easily backed up and used with your old equipment, but they made the video unable to be burned to a DVD... (I wonder if the studios demanded the burned DVDs be DRMed and were bitten in the ass by their earlier mandating that consumer DVD burners cannot burn CSS encrypted DVDs?)
I wonder what balance of the causes of this was? Were the studios setting apple up to fail, or at least not succeed to fast for the competition to copy, after being frightened by apple's rapid success in selling music online? Or, was it largely a technical issue? Would letting the iPod decode 640x480 h264 have required more time/money/power than Apple felt they could spend to release the iPod
"The worst tyrannies were the ones where a governance required its own logic on every embedded node." - Vernor Vinge
/ doesn't have a TV // only watched the Daily show when I had free cable and Eye-TV /// doesn't want to pay Comcast for 40 channels when all I watch is one show
Chiropractors only do rapid manipulation. For many problems physical therapy is better, and chiropractic will only be a quick fix that has to be repeated forever.
The market is a natural ebb and flow that sets its prices based on demand. In fact, it's called supply and demand. If the price of something is high, that means there is enough demand to meet that price and make money for the business. There are exceptions like monopolies and price-fixing, but in truth those aren't as common as Slashdot posts would have you believe. You claim content prices are set by a system of courts and police that prevent natural pricing, which is ridiculous. Consumers set prices based on what they buy and how much of it, among other things.
What happens is that someone sees the price of something they could normally pirate from Bittorrent, and they get into a hissy-fit because something is being sold that they're used to getting free. Then they use their hatred of corporations to justify piracy and accuse businesses of artifically inflating prices and make vague claims about the market being controlled by judges and police and such. All without any basis in reality.
I'll definately listen to a song more than once. We all will. But, these are topical news shows. They talk about things that happened today. You probably won't watch them ever again. And now you own them!
I'd take that $10 a month and get a DVR box from my cable company. Then I could record ANYTHING I want and watch it when I'm at home. I don't need to watch last night's TV shows on my portable device.
Obviously video subscriptions are selling... but it's not my cup of tea. If your most favoritest show in the world in the Colbert Report... you must be jumping for joy.
I'll turn on the TV at 11:30pm... or I won't.
"Hey without my chiropractor, I wouldn't be able to turn my head side to side"
More and more doctors are coming to the conclusion that most back pain that doesn't have an actual obvious physical problem is indictive of stress and/or psychological pain.
"Regular western medicine would rather fuse my spine"
There are bad doctors everywhere. It's your body, take charge. Find a doctor who is more in line with your thinking. "Western Medicine" is not an insult; it's a system based on provable scientific facts. If I do X, I will get result Y Z% of the time.
Chiropractors once they get beyond rubbing your back are quacks. Your spine can't be "aligned", and no disease is caused by spine alignment. What we do know is that people's minds control their body to a significant degree. And we know a lot of people are whiners about their pain so effective debilitate themselves because they have convinced themselves the pain is debilitating. What chiropractors do is essential convince people they are getting better. Because for the most part, since pain in the back is psychological, if you work on the psyche, you cure the body.
If you go to a chiropractor and you believe they're a quack and its the equivalent of a witch doctor saying "ooga booga booga", then they have no power to heal. So while I admit that too many doctors are pill pushers and don't listen to patients, part of that is that people have too much faith in doctors. They're like a mechanic for your car. You don't keep going back to a bad car mechanic who gives you bad advice...why would you go back to a doctor who gives you bad advice? My brother in law had severe neck/back pain for 2 weeks and went to a doctor who gave him similar advice. I told him that doctor was incompetent; unless he was in a car accident or something similar, he certainly would not need to undergo surgery. I told him to get more/better advice and while he was shopping around, the pain gradually subsided. The poor guy was stressed between work and family and it was clear to me the problems were psychological. He needed to relax, not fuse vertabrae.
Take charge of your life and body. And I guess if it helps you to go to the witch doctor to cure you, that's fine too. But prefer cause and effect explanations.
How fucking insightful is that, lets change this to something else we can all agree on.
Rape is only against the law because of man-made artificial rules and not a law of nature. It depends on an elaborate system of laws, courts, and police to make sure that nature doesn't take its course. The natural price is the cost of finding a victim and raping him or her, which is 0.
Take that ho's.
The point is all laws are made of artifical rules. Some of us believe God helped shape the laws of man, but that doesn't mitigate the fact that they are interpretted and enforced by mankind. They all depend on laws and courts and police to enforce. Sometimes a mob might rise up, but more often than not the mob wants to protect what seems to be in the best interest of those most powerful -- for instance, natural law doesn't seem to prevent the rapes listed above in times of an occupying nation. Even the best of nations have men that decide that it is somewhat alright to take what they want and this activity is institutionalized even if it attempted to be marginalized to some extent -- it just happens when there are no laws in place or if there are, policing to enforce it.
And that in no part makes me think rapists should be given a break because natural law does not prevent this in the slightest -- shoot them in the back of the fucking head for all I care.
I agree, they have relatively light DRM when compared to most and so far it hasn't been shown to screw up your system unlike certain methods I could name. The problem is that any form of private DRM is more limiting that it ought to be.
Say a vastly better portable mp3 player comes out from another company. It's possible, but highly unlikely that Apple will ever offer any way to convert your files or that they will license FairPlay so that you can use your iTunes purchased tracks. The same for ever wanting to use different software... iTunes is the only way to listen to those songs.
Yes, you can technically burn them to CD and then rip them into mp3, but at that point you're dealing with what's essentially a third generation copy due to all the lossy compression.
Even then that assumes that Apple never changes the software. What if they decide that they no longer want you to be able to burn CDs and take the feature out of iTunes? I'm not certain, but I don't believe there's any contract protecting your rights in this matter if they want to suddenly make changes to the limited access you already have.
I'm reminded of a section in Neal Stephenson's "In The Beginning... Was the Command Line" where he describes the feeling of having lost a significant chunk of Word documents. Suddenly they went from being very real things that existed, albeit in the computer, to something that vanished into the ether. The shattering of the illusion that these are real, legitimate objects seems very likely to occur at some time in the future. Would you be willing to spend the same thousands of dollars (quite likely) that most people have spent on CDs or LPs only to have them suddenly become almost useless.
Perhaps some form of open format DRM might work since anyone who chose to could make a player that conforms to those specifications, but it's not likely to ever happen and even if it did it would still depend on content providers choosing to release product using those methods... and so far they've shown that they largely view DRM as a way to vertically market a product by providing the player, DRM, and software and trying to see to it that they only work within their own brand.
So, no, it's not that FairPlay is terribly oppressive, it's just that it's a massive loss of control over your purchase. A purchase that is virtual in more ways than one. I'd normally say that it doesn't matter though, as long as you're aware of the issues and decide to make an informed choice to just do whatever works for you. The problem is that it's a slippery slope. As more and more people start accepting these small losses of control it just escalates and before long the genie is completely out of the bottle and we'll never, ever get control back again.