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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."

2 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 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.