The End of Content Ownership

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."

Comments

Use more bandwidth to enjoy media?

[theVP]

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.

Re:Use more bandwidth to enjoy media?

[Tackhead]

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

Don't worry, your ISP will start loving it once again when it's "forced" to pay the rightsholder $0.25/GB - while charging you $1/GB - for overages. Don't want MTV^WThe Music Streaming Service or ESPN^WThe Sports Streaming Service with your cable TV^WInternet? Fine, you can have throttled-to-dialup-speeds^WBasic Cable!

From TFA: "The parent whose child wants to watch "Dora the Explorer: Big Sister Dora" over and over and over again doesn't have to own the DVD or even the digital file. Cloud-based ownership and access means that their child can see Dora play big sister at home, on the iPad, in the car, and on mommy's smartphone. They own the movie or, more likely, have an all-you-can eat subscription service, so each viewing costs nothing except the price of Internet access."

Indeed, your ISP is counting on it. Cloud-based ownership and access means that their child can be charged for each viewing, tracked for each viewing, and have customized banner ads sent to each device.

From TFA: "For the majority of consumers, however, they will come to fully trust the cloud and believe in subscription pricing for everything. Ownership will become an anathema as consumers realize they don't want to risk losing content as they switch services, and they tire of finding requisite space on their own local storage for all those digital files. "

The Right To Read is also relevant here. Unless the bits are stored on a device that you control, the content provider can flush them down the memory hole and there isn't going to be a damn thing you can do about it.

(Seriously? "Tire of finding requisite space on their own local storage for all those digital files?" A 1TB drive costs less than $100 today, never mind in 10-15 years. Or is the business model going to be that since everything is "streamed" to dickless workstations, that 640GB oughta be enough for everybody?)

Re:Use more bandwidth to enjoy media?

[Wiarumas]

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.

Re:Use more bandwidth to enjoy media?

[nabsltd]

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.

TFA is all and good... but

[mlts]

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.

Inevitable with zero-cost duplication

[AcidPenguin9873]

When IP can be reproduced and distributed at zero cost, ownership and property rights have little to no meaning. People who use the term "imaginary property" have been saying this for at least 10 years, especially on Slashdot.

Well, this is now content creators agreeing with them. "Imaginary property" advocates have been saying for years that IP rights holders are free to exercise their exclusive rights to that IP by not selling it to anyone, thus maintaining their exclusive copy of the IP. (Implied there is that no one will get to actually experience the IP, making it useless as a source of income). Well, this is them doing half of that. Because copyright (i.e. exclusive distribution rights) is impossible to enforce, they are simply going to stop distributing the IP in "here's a copy of it, please don't copy it again and give it away" form, which basically stopped working over 10 years ago. They are instead providing access to their IP behind these cloud-based services which, in addition to providing the content itself, provide added value in ways such as organizing the content and allowing access from many devices/places/times. For most people, the content plus the additional value offered by these services is enough to get them to subscribe (i.e. pay). This allows the IP creators to continue making money from their IP. By the way, this goes for software too: think Steam.

This is in opposition to the "imaginary property" advocates that maintain that all content should be free-as-in-beer because it doesn't cost any money to duplicate, damned be the (sometimes significant) creation costs. Most of them use free-as-in-freedom arguments like "I own this, I should be able to do what I want with it", or arguments such as "I hate the RIAA/MPAA so I'm screwing them." Personally, I hate the RIAA/MPAA as much as the next guy, but what I hate even more is justifying pirated content by saying "well I'm just screwing the RIAA/MPAA". Guess what? You're also screwing the content creator, whose work you apparently want enough to pirate.

Sometimes there isn't a cloud in the sky

[Dcnjoe60]

The problem with everything being in the cloud is that the government can make the cloud go away. Didn't slashdot just have a discussion on how the internet helped with the changes in Egypt? Once everything is in the cloud, what is to stop some government from cutting off its people from the cloud?

This proposal is a lot more than being able to stream Avatar to any device you want. It is really about who controls your access to information (your own or licensed).