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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."

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 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. Inevitable with zero-cost duplication by AcidPenguin9873 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Sometimes there isn't a cloud in the sky by Dcnjoe60 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).