Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The End of Content Ownership

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the provisionally-renting-a-license-to-borrow-transient-ephemera dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "In recent weeks companies like Amazon, Sony, Google, Verizon, 24symbols and others have started to roll out 'cloud-based' content streaming and on-demand services (or plans) for movies, music and even books. Video on demand is nothing new, nor is streaming. The difference now, though, is that companies like Amazon want you to stream your own content. This article sheds some light on how the cloud, along with subscription and on-demand services, will transform our perception of content access and ownership."

4 of 247 comments (clear)

  1. Use more bandwidth to enjoy media? by theVP · · Score: 5, Insightful

    At a time when ISPs are moving to cap bandwidth usage, and these companies are moving to streaming-only ideas, am I the only one cringing?

    Don't get me wrong, I love my streaming media, but ISPs seem to really hate it.

    --
    "No one is more miserable than the person who wills everything and can do nothing." -Emperor Claudius 10 BC - AD 54
    1. Re:Use more bandwidth to enjoy media? by Wiarumas · · Score: 4, Insightful

      On the bright side, streaming media corporations can be a valuable ally against ISP bandwidth caps - which they should be if they want a viable business model.

      --
      I will bend like a reed in the wind.
    2. Re:Use more bandwidth to enjoy media? by nabsltd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      A 1TB drive will hold a whole 33 bluerays.

      If you are talking full Blu-Ray disks, then local storage is the only way to go, as you probably can't get an affordable network connection that allows you to stream at 30Mbps with no dropouts (and certainly couldn't for "on the go"). Even if you could, with even a relatively large 250GB cap per month, that lets you watch about 10 movies/month (as long as you don't do anything else).

      Now, in the real world, a terabyte drive will hold 250 movies at 720p resolution. I know, because I have exactly that with my Blu-Ray rips. Yes, I've sacrificed lossless audio (which I can't use anyway with my older receiver, so I "suffer" with DTS at 1536Kbps), and some video resolution, but the bitrate on the encode is more than enough to maintain quality at that resolution. On the other hand, I don't have to wait for menus to load, and I don't waste disk space on things I'll either never (no one in my house speaks Portuguese) or rarely (maybe I'll watch the trailer for the movie instead of the movie itself...nope, I guess not) use.

  2. TFA is all and good... but by mlts · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Having licensed content available in the cloud is nice, but there is one issue, a major one:

    Owning stuff in this manner is an investment can be easily turned off from a remote source, and there is absolutely zero one can do about it. With books, someone would have to enter my residence unauthorized with a fairly large truck and haul stuff out. Similar with DVDs. All a cloud provider can do is just click a button or enter a SQL statement, and the many thousands of dollars in a game/book/movie/music library are now rendered inaccessible. Lawsuit? Good luck. There have many people who threatened Valve with litigation because VAC banned them, but there has yet to be a single case that goes to court. EULAs are proven and are completely supported by precedents, so a cloud provider essentially states that "we are not responsible if you lose access to a product or your library", and someone with a large library does not have a leg to stand on.

    Even if a lawsuit was successful, a bankruptcy of the cloud provider can render all the licensed content gone.

    This is why people should have local, un-DRM-ed copies of their media they have purchased. It would take a lot more than just a delete to remove access from a library of physical media.