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'Roll Your Own News' DVDs Now Shipping
theodp writes "Amazon.com and CBS have partnered to offer a la carte news clips on custom-made DVDs. Pay $24.95 and you'll get 10 clips or 90 minutes, whichever comes first. Not too surprisingly, CBS News seems to have the best coverage on the new service."
I'm confused. Is this supposed to be "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters"? Doesn't really seem to fit into either.
when CNN attempted to make their content pay-to-view (made far worse by partnering it with RealPlayer). Even if it is an exclusive CBS story, there is no way that people are going to pay money to watch it when they can read about it from other sources or find out about it the next day.
Not only did they drop it, but CNN/FOX/MSNBC offer premium content on their webpage for free.
To everyone who seems to think this is useless, I think you've missed the point. The summary and headline are perhaps misleading. This seems to be more geared toward owning a copy of the clip or news segment, not a way to get the current news. THe usa today article says
.You either have no idea what this service is, or you're one of the few that does not care at all about the world around you.
/.ers are going to order DVDs of every computing/hi-tech story in the past 60 years?
The price for the DVDs is a bit high, but I fully expect man people will start ordering sets of DVDs with full coverage of every major historical event in recent memory.
How much money are they going to make just printing DVDs of the coverage of the 9/11 attacks? How about the fall of the Berlin wall, and end of the cold war? Perhaps even videos about the START of the cold war for that matter. How many
CBS should be commended for at least trying to adapt to the internet, and individual customization. Is it any coincidence they were also the first with free online news videos, and still have the best service? In fact I was just on cbsnews.com a few minutes ago, watching videos on the current Israel/Palestine/Lebanon conflict.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I would agree with you on your point except the price. It's too steep. I could see $9.99 downloaded or say $11.99 burned and shipped. But $24.99? That more than most movies.
Plus I find that clips are filled with more fluff than a nice written summary. My father recently got my uncle one of those year year DVDs (something like this) and when we watched it, we went almost went to sleep with the amount of moralizing/fluff that was in it (plus the super narrow focus on one story of that year and not a well-rounded montage). I don't know if CBS news is like that, but from the channels I do vaguely remember, I switched to online news precisely because of the constant moralizing/preaching/fluff/non-newsworthy crap they put out. The only thing good here is you can pick your clips, but if they drag on to get to their point, well, what is the point (of paying for that much for it)?
Wonder no more... It's The Public Library. And I'm glad they do.