Slashdot Mirror
Movie Industry: Loss of Control Worse Than Piracy
tlhIngan writes "Miramax CEO Mike Lang has admitted to what we all suspected. The biggest worry is a distribution monopoly, not piracy. They saw what happened to the music industry with iTunes, and vowed to not lose control and be at the mercy of Apple or whoever becomes the dominant distributor. From the article: 'Lang, whose company today debuts the Blu-Ray version of the cult classic Pulp Fiction, emphasized that people don’t necessarily want to pirate, as long as they get what they want. “Innovate or die,” should be the motive of entertainment industry companies, where it’s key to listen to customers.'"
To quote a certain friend...
... is driving dependable paying customers back to bittorrent!
Does anyone even care what the DRM loving Media moguls think anymore? Hardly. Son, that horse has done left the barn....you all blew it big time!
Hooray, there's a smart studio executive out there! Good luck with the innovation -- if it's any good, I'll probably buy it.
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
... is that the quantity of movies even worth watching is decreasing by the minute, let alone the quantity of movies that might be worth pirating.
Onda Technology Institute
You can't prevent me from giving away a copy of a movie i purchased without creating an inconvenience when i want to use it legally, so get rid of DRM.
Make it affordable, obviously.
Make it accessible, if it's harder than downloading a torrent then you'll fail, people will pay but you can't make it harder than getting it for free.
Make it global, nothing is more annoying (ok maybe not entirely true) than finding out you can't get particular content because your region isn't licensed for it.
I know an Canadian artist who is also signed to Warner/Sire in the US. Her latest album was a bit of a departure from her last one and Sire was too scared to support it in the US so she signed a distribution deal with a indie label for this album. Currently this album is #2 on the iTunes Pop chart and #18 overall.
tl;dr - Record labels are run by idiots who only want to release music for the lowest common denominator.
Why innovate when you can legislate?
That seems to be what is going on these days.
Pulp Fiction has been out on Blu-Ray since 2009.
i honestly tried to grasp the logic set forth in the article but all i can see is "wahhhh we don't like the itunes model". if you don't want to get swallowed by itunes like the music industry did, create your own digital storefront. you never will because this implies actually building something rather than sitting back and letting the royalty checks flow in, you lazy, litigious, delusional assholes
Had the music industry not insisted on DRM, iTunes would have never had anything like the power it ended up with..
I suppose running a production AND distribution cartel is far more profitable.
In the past people might throw a buck at a creator if they pirated something because they felt a little bad about it. Today, with piracy normalized (hey everyone does it), most people don't feel any nagging sense that they might have done something "not right" when they consume a creator's output without providing any form of compensation.
This is because deep down most people believe that entertainment is an optional extra. People make the rational decision when given the option of paying for it or not paying for it. They save their resources and pay for the necessities.
Perhaps in the long run, people will be less likely to invest in creating expensive entertainment ( lets face it, the SyFy Channel has pretty much bailed on it already because their existing "make money on the DVD sales" model collapsed). Whether the lack of expensively produced entertainment is actually a bad thing is another discussion entirely.
people don’t necessarily want to pirate, as long as they get what they want.
If you admit that, why do you refuse to give people what they want?
I want to convert my media into various formats for playback on various devices without DRM fouling the process.
I want to import your media into my video library and never have to physically sort through media to watch what I want (though I do like having shelved copies of media to see, I don't actually want to have to deal with them day to day).
I want to play your content locally, rather than streaming it over my internet connection and incur the wrath of lower bitrates, slow seeking, and service outages right when I want to watch something.
I want to manage all my content in a single place and not have to open a different application or website depending on which publisher/distributer just happened to kind of/sort of give it to me.
Currently, I can have *all* of this, but only if I either go through the tedium of keeping up with how to remove DRM which frequently requires peculiar setups I may or may not have, or download it from someone who has too much time on their hands and breaks your DRM anyway. For me the problem is not that I don't want to pay for the content, it's that the quality of the illegal content is higher than the legal. I do actually refrain entirely because I just don't feel like going through the trouble legally or illegally, it's just not worth my time and energy. That could easily change if movies were as manageable as mp3s purchased through itunes or amazon.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If there was a real free market with no such thing as Intellectual Property than movie studios could make money in the theater. There they control the product and real copying is much more difficult.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I suppose running a production AND distribution cartel is far more profitable.
"We are now in the unique position to form an international cartel to control not only production, but distribution!" ... "There is one obstacle - Silicon Valley"
-Christopher Walken's character in A View to a Kill
Prophetic?
I hire/buy a DVD and place it in the disc drive, press play and try to go to the movie.
But no, some prick has decided that I WILL watch the advert for organisations that I have come to hate (movie companies, distribution companies, etc). Every time I see tht adverts I am reminded that they have an excessive level of control and I seek a means to take some control back myself. As I am forced to watch the adverts I think about the region codes on the DVD. And so the brand value of the advertisers goes even further down
I don't pirate to save money, I pirate so that I can choose what to watch. And I choose to watch the movie not that self serving adverts that make my blood boil.
Pirates do not sell me pirated movies; movie distributors sell me on pirated movies.
Good luck with that.
Sincerely, the inevitable tide of change.
Innovate? Listen? Do either of those words go with the movie industry? As long as the movie industry and the Eff-You-A-A continue to think in terms of formulas, whether their "successful movie formula" or their "how to squeeze money from people without bothering with actual brain activity formula" they're going to continue to moulder away. When it comes to making a movie, how often is it other than some hackneyed (they'll insist it's "tried-and-true") plot that watches like it was put together by a committee? When it comes to figuring out what they're doing wrong, how often is it other than blaming something, usually piracy, _anything_ but their own lack of vision? Never happen. They're going to continue doing what they've always done and wonder why it's all going down the toilet.
Life, ultimately, boils down to the Four Fs: Fighting, Fleeing, Feeding, and Mating.
well duh, it never was about the MONEY; it was about the POWER that comes with having money. Shortly after the human has saturated its senses and desires with everything it laid its eyes on, one last cold thing remains that it can never get enough of: POWER.
This is news?
From a USA posting the salient words ring true: lawmakers have also suggested that the Solyndra deal went through — despite administration [a few staffs who will be killed] concern about the company's long-term viability [gasp, hack ... hack ... donkey laugh] — because one of the solar firm's top investors was a foundation controlled by a major Obama fundraiser [Cha Ching!].
Now we have a link in the trail to the Obama Money [Monkey] Man.
Granted that most if not all of that $535 billion was quickly converted to ca$h and deposited in Nigerian Banks. Ergo, no extradition to US!
Obama does indeed follow his most cherished mentor, Al Caphone.
Will Obama die in Gitmo? ... of Siphilus? She has a mighty grasp on his manhood!
Just not "enough" or enoughs ... to make one Mr. Obama into a Mr. Jobs.
>>
A distribution monopoly cartel is worrying about there being a distribution monopoly??
So many memes that need image-macroing ... ...
- Do no liek competition!
- Iz in ur monopoly, stealin' ur industriez!
- Sup dawg, I herd U liek monopolies
What a completely ignorant point of view... when you make something, you have absolute control over it until the moment that you show it to someone else. Then its pandoras box. The movie industry as it is shows a movie to a select small group first, eg a pre-screener, some of whom are probably there to nick it, then weeks later it goes to cinema, where its shown to dickheads who talk over it, some of whom probably have cameras and microphones and are there to nick it, then weeks later they finally offer it to the intended mainstream home viewer audience -- probably after it has been sneakily half-inched from the shiny master copy -- in a format which is incidentally quite patronising considering you have been a good boy and waited for it- it tells you in big scary red letters not to copy it, when in fact if you were going to do that, you would have done so several months ago at the pre-screening or the cinema or somewhere in the physical distribution chain, and in any case probably wouldnt be very much discouraged from doing so by a message from the future on a disc that you would never see anyway because you would have had the copied version...and in fact by paying for it in the first place, you have somewhat made it clear that you are not keenly intent on ripping it off...
*breathes in*
The point is, the industry is complaining that we wont buy on their terms, because they can't imagine a universe where a trade might in some way be flexible and open to reason. They should just take their head out of their arses and realise that no one is going to be encouraged to go to the cinema by being made to wait for the privelige of enjoying something in their own home. I wont go out, sit and watch a movie and eat shitty popcorn and listen to dickheads, when I have a nice chair and tv, I can cook well and pay attention to a story without feeling the need to shout over it. So when its finished, make the fucking movie website useful and offer a paid download link (without drm, because I won't be presumed to be a criminal when all I want to do is watch a movie) , at a price that actually reflects the savings of internet distribution, and I will buy it there. Last time I checked, there wasn't a monopoly on internet real estate.
head like a hole!
black as your soul!
I'd rather die
than give you control!
fuck the MPAA
If there was a real free market...
If Reaganomics has taught us anything, its that lower taxes do NOT create jobs and there is no such thing as a 'FREE' market! Something tells me you understand this. (Taxes use to be 90%, dropping to around 70% until the 1950s, between than and now they have dropped to less than 35% with wealthy (over $200K per year) able to pay 0% through their corporations....something a person can never do.) Where are the jobs?
Hey so called Faux News...that is what the 99% and wall street protesters are protesting...jobs! Get it right! Jobs and the lack there of, being fleeced while Corpers deleted jobs did not help either, of course you knew that. Notice how the protests are spreading to other communities outside of New York. No wonder Republican voting states want to move their primaries up to January 1st, they would vote now if it was legal. People know that Corpers have been paying 100% of conservatives, 40 - 60% of liberals to pass job killing legislation, bail out wall street, redistribute wealth to the banks and the uber wealthy 1% who pay 0% in taxes. This definitely cuts across all demographics as most of us regardless of what we call ourselves politically will never have a shot at joining that 1% and by now, even the densest and most dim-witted conservatives who have lost their homes to no fault of their own are waking up to reality that many of us already know.
Before you mod ers mod this down, think hard...can you honestly say that politics and legislation has not supported the Movie Industry, their lame DRM legislation and more? Follow the money... its not going into my pocket either.
...than movie studios could make money in the theater. There they control the product and real copying is much more difficult.
Sadly they have priced not only the tickets, but the popcorn, soda, candy, etc... beyond reason and have made trips to the theatre rare for many. And many of us went weekly and multiple times per week back in the day before ticket prices rose above $7. Now it costs that much for popcorn and soda...what a joke. A bag of popcorn, $1.29, lets me make 5 - 7 Tubs of popcorn and soda is between .77 - $1.00 on sale. I stop purchasing soda over $1.00...its not healthy for me to drink it anyway. So yea, those refreshment stand prices really make a difference.
I would love to see some of the statistics on movie attendance over time and see at what price point attendance really dropped off. But they will probably never release that. I bet the the theatres made more on their refreshment stands back in the day also
Suck shit. you missed the boat, mostly through your own greed. The opportunity has been there for the past decade or so for the movie industry to get on board with digital distribution and format shifting, but instead they persisted with hardware based copy-protection (blue-ray, dvd, etc) and attempting to get customers to pay for the same media multiple times on multiple different formats. They make out that they're not charging you for physical media, its a license to the content, yet if you want it in a different format, you need to pay full price for new media. Its bullshit.
Apple has taken over music distribution because by and large, they offer what customers want. They don't want to have to carry around a valuable single physical copy of their content (or break the law by ripping/copying it). They don't want to have to buy an entire album for one song. They don't want to trek around town to different stores looking for the particular song/artist they are interested in.
Yes, the iTunes program sucks. But as a marketplace, its awesome. I can hear about some new show/song/etc on the weekend or at night, go home, and purchase it then and there - and be listening/watching it minutes later.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Wil Wheaton nailed it when he said "make it simple, make it cheap, and folks WILL buy it. Make it expensive and a pain to use? people will just BT". he gave a perfect example, he bought the Doctor Who episodes on iTunes and then when he crossed the Canadian border his videos wouldn't play so his first thought was 'If I would have just pirated it i'd be watching my shows now".
I'm glad to see that he's coming around to seeing this from a more wisened user's perspective, but apparently he still has much to learn about doing business with Apple and becoming more articulate about defining his interests. In 2006 Wheaton lost all of his iTunes tracks while "upgrading" to some version of iTunes. Wheaton contacted Apple and then Apple restored the lost tracks to his account. Wheaton treated this as a reason to do business with Apple ("If you make a purchase from the iTunes Music Store, and something horrible happens and you lose all your music, Apple will give you a one-time only do-over to replace all of your purchased music, free of charge.") instead of looking at this as a problem to be solved. Removing all DRM and letting users make copies of the media puts users in a position where users can rescue themselves from unfortunate losses. Users ought to be able to re-download purchased media as many times as they wish, and share tracks as well. Magnatune.com, by contrast, does all of this: they never got into the DRM game so Magnatune has no (apparently halfway) Apple-style backtracking to go through on DRM. Magnatune contributes to FLOSS player programs; programs that give technically-minded users the opportunity to inspect programs before you run them so users don't walk into the trap Wheaton experienced in 2006 with iTunes. Magnatune lets users re-download purchased tracks as much as the customer wishes upon supplying an email address at purchase time (for logging in). Magnatune also lets you share membership downloads with some friends. Purchasing media from Magnatune means you can play the media as much as you want without anyone tracking what you play, where you play it, or restricting what you use to play the media they sell.
Digital Citizen
That could easily change if movies were as manageable as mp3s purchased through itunes or amazon.
Easy like Amazon? Not if you live in Canada... I tried to buy MP3s, it said I couldn't... what option does that leave me? Dumbasses!
I'd agree that Wil Wheaton has a good general point. .m4v that will play in VLC
However, when I've gotten video from iTunes (music videos not TV shows though), I get an
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Hollywood is obsolete, now that the shadow government can beam movies into your brain wirelessly while you sleep. Who needs the box office when you've got Induced Dreams?
Do you have a more precise quote from Tocqueville? That comment sounds like a predecessor to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law ("90% of everything is crap")
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
I thought Apple dropped the DRM from their music a few years back?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
would you mind giving further details?
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
George Lucas shows one form of control, refusing to release his movies until he was good and ready for it. There was a reason the original Star Wars movies didn't make it to TV for a long time (at least in Holland, don't know about the rest of the world). And when he does release the movies, he controls what is released, not the customer. Why restore Jabba the Hut but not Biggs? There is a scene earlier in the movie that is mentioned in books even picture books where Luke talks to Biggs who is about to leave to join the rebellion. For a movie that isn't exactly deep to begin with it would add something. But instead Lucas makes Greedo shoot first.
Loosing control of distribution is deadly, just ask any Walmart supplier. Walmart sets the terms. Alone. You comply or die. I can well imagine that the movie industry would not want to be told to supply what Walmart wants. Solo shooting first? Walmart could sell it, it could dictate it.
Same with staggered releases, it makes sense for the industry. They can avoid having to spend all the money at once and adjust a movies release strategy depending on American results. There are reasons some movies do well after having bombed in the states and for that matter vice versa. Look at movie posters, every country gets its own. Releasing a movie at once, globally requires a high upfront cost and no tweaking to recover from an error.
So it, is understandable to don't want to loose control because they want total control... whoever wins, we loose. Because we, you and me the consumer, are just cash dispensers to either. Both iTunes AND the movie industry want to squeeze us for every penny we can get. The only difference is where the penny ends up. Steve "Disney" Jobs, remember that (although he is now dead so it matters less). Control means a lot when you are dealing with a product with no real value because it has no scarcity. Disney knows this and releases its classic movies for limited times only because... if they didn't, they wouldn't be special anymore. How can a VHS tape be a limited item when they are created in the millions? Yet Snow White IS a limited release. And it is advertised as such. The power of advertising is truly awesome to behold. Remember, these are NOT tapes specially signed or with toys that are produced in limited numbers. Unsold tapes and DVD's are simply recalled until the next, limited release.
It is as if someone sold factory chicken as a once per year item, buy it now for that special occasion! What a con.
Control is what the movie industry desires, it is understandable but does that mean I as an individual have to allow them to have it? Just because they want it doesn't mean it is something that is desirable for society as a whole.
It is not like control has benefited the industry. Control makes one lazy, the industry hasn't innovated in years. Decades ago I used to visit a movie theather in a student town in Wageningen, it was between an art house and a commercial setup. They ran English animation for instance in English by default, Dutch dubbing is the worst since funny voices are a must especially the unfunny ones. Dutch bugs bunny voice does not suit watership down.
Anyway, in that theather, they ran without a break if there were few people and people didn't want one. Even skipping ads. Late arrival? Get stuffed, the movie started the doors closed. End of story. This was before mobile phones.
Recently pathe, a large chain, announced the same policy. After years of loosing customers in the upper markets they realized that going for the bottom is not a long term plan. They had the large theathers, they had the must see movies, so they thought they could pull anything they wanted. They were wrong. Now they face the struggle of clearing out those customers that are costing them and regain the customers they lost...
And that is the ultimate loss of control of the movie industry. Once I stopped going to theathers, I no longer needed to watch a movie when the industry wanted me to watch it (when it is runni
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In the past, when printed books were invented, it was deemed fair to give the original artist some money for each copy sold. That is, the original artist, not his agent, the publishing company or someone he sold his "rights" to. I don't object to that. I do object to the movie and music companies getting 90% of the money made from the work of art. Evidently, artists should be happy to get about 10% of the price consumers pay for something. The other 90% is purely for distribution, and as we all know, since we have broadband Internet and writable optical media, there should be an insignificant charge for that, not nine times the money the artists get. If this invalidates the business case for the majority of publishing companies, tough luck.
The industry was thriving on a single market anomaly. The anomaly is being corrected and the industry will cease to have a right to exist. You can't keep coaches the only form of transport and keep automobiles, subways, taxis, trains and all that out, just because the coach drivers have friends they bought a seat in congress for.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
I don't care if a few of you are now 'getting it'. It's now too little too late.
I want you to go bankrupt completely. And i'll help that along anyway i can now.
I have listened to your bullshit lying and bitching while ripping everyone off for too long now. Dry up and blow away.
-Me
p.s. fuck you
“Innovate or die,” should be the motive of entertainment industry companies, where it’s key to listen to customers
Really, they've only just worked that out???
And now we finally have it straight from the horses mouth.
Fights against BitTorrent, YouTube etc etc are about controlling content and making sure content they have decided not to make available (movies you cant buy on DVD, all those old TV series you never see anymore, whatever) remains unavailable.
Take for example classic cartoon series. You can find episodes or partial seasons of many of these series on video sites like YouTube or on file-hosting sites like Rapidshare but its often impossible to get the whole series.
The studios need to stop trying to fight the internet and realize that if they made the content people want available for a reasonable price through online streaming and download services (and through DVD and other distribution channels) people would have a LOT less reason to pirate their content.
For example if I could have bought a DVD box set of the History Channel documentary "Tales Of The Gun" I would have done so instead of watching the episodes on YouTube. (because I prefer to watch things on my TV and not my PC and the quality on YouTube isn't as good as a DVD plus its something I would want to be able to watch multiple times)
Or if Warner Bros would release Young Einstein on DVD in Australia (its available in the US) I would have bought it locally instead of importing it from the states (this was before fast ADSL and YouTube).
If I turn a friend on to content, let me sell them a digital copy. Then the distribution doesn't become monopolized by one company and I get a cut (which I will most likely give 1/2 of to the person I'm selling to, so we both get a discount on it).
Innovate on new ways of getting revenue from something that were created in 1994, like new marketing campaigns that make people that have payed at least four times for your film guilty if they try to download it(on theater, then on VHS, then on DVDs and then on TV), threatening them with prison and so on.
If only we could make the copyright last 200 years more so we and our descendants don't have to create new films to be ubber rich...
Another word about the movie industry and control:
Unlike DVDs, blu-rays must integrate (code) controls for whatever customer action is allowed or no.
Some examples:
- Power on and play from last known position (the last time the player was switched off)
- Top/popup menus - Remote buttons special actions...
Players provide default actions for DVDs, but the movie industry/blu-ray makers have to write and include Blu-rays actions.
With blu-rays, the Industry gets to a higher level of control. The down side is that a number of important features are simply missing (like play from last position) or buggy. Annoying.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
How exactly does your model deal with piracy? those .avi files will hit the torrent servers as soon as they are released.
The problem with comparing the two industries is that they really only "meet" on the privacy issue, but nowhere else.
To produce music you CAN do it in a garage and tidy it up in a studio later, and artist revenue also comes from touring. To produce a film you need a lot of extra facilities that quite simply cost money, and your actors may promote, they will not go on tour and sell acting tickets.
The RIAA is about to get a massive kick up its rear end when the plans I have seen a few days ago are anything to go by, and, frankly, I think they deserve it because of the way they treat their customers. However, I don't see such clear things work for the MPAA members because the whole business model is different - there is a LOT of money required upfront, and the performing actors are not always part of the creative process.
I see more differences than parallels. I cannot see the movie industry change on the production end as has happened in the music industry apart from going digital and in some cases 3D.
The distribution end, OTOH, is changing dramatically. The revolution most missed was that Avatar also finally forced cinemas to go digital - no more films, just electronics. When you watch especially 3D you are in principle watching a seriously large LightPro with a fat hard disk and some hardcore DRM. As the process is thus digital from the start, quality goes up and distribution costs go down as long as the Internet stays the free zone it is. If those dropping costs are passed on to the consumer (not from where I'm sitting, but bear with me), "professional" piracy will disappear as it no longer creates a profit. Although, you'd have to resort to a pirated DVD if you want to buy DVDs when you travel because of region codes - not the brightest idea they ever had..
Yes, the control issue is relevant, but to me, the only real lever is price. The rest creates barriers that actually harm sales rather than stimulate them. I can see the need for staggered releases, but is piracy harming that? I don't think so, at least not from my perspective.
Insert
Not entirely, and now that their catalog includes more than music the same old issues have continued. In early 2009 Apple said that they had removed DRM from 80% of their music catalog. Today, as I understand it, audio books still have DRM, earlier-purchased audio tracks still have DRM, and of course (as should be apparent given Wheaton's story you quoted) videos have DRM.
Digital Citizen
"“Innovate or die,” should be the motive of entertainment industry companies..."
Really? Rather ironic that "innovate or die" was basically the same motive of Apple circa 15 years ago, and with that motive they ultimately became their biggest competitor...clearly it's a successful business model, but it also puts the exclamation point on the "out with the old, in with the new"...and yeah, of course it sucks when you're riding the "old" wave.
In soviet Russia we watch streaming movies for free. There is a number of web sites with embedded Youtube size movies, many of them are really good quality and translated into Russian. Some sites have just huge amount of movies, - almost everything I can find on IMDB is already there; and it's all for free! They just have several banners, that can be easily adblocked.
a few points:
first, they say this now after spending tens of billions on lobbying for and creating ACTA.
second, this is what we've been screaming for 10 years.
third, they have the monopoly.
They're using their grammar skills there.
They are just middle men who take their money for "protection".
Well they lost me 12 years ago do to the lawsuits. When they started on that wagon I stop buying music and movies. I used to purchase from time life, sony, colombia house, virgin, so on & on. This was my biggest thing I had collected since I was 11 years old. Till that time it was one of my greatest hobbies the collection of music and movies. They made it into the most deplorable thing. Till this day my kids do not under stand why I stopped buying them there movies & music. They buy it behind my back but not with me. My collection 2998 LP'S, 492 real to real, 178 8-tracks, 574 cassettes and 3942 Cd's all music. 236 VHS ,422 DVD'S and 14 laser-disc.
My average for a years time in music & videos was $2,700 us
Now days I just listen to my old music, I do not listen to radio well just a podcast The Howard Stern Show.
It is at list for a good laugh, as soon as the show is finish the Ipod goes on.
For movies no theaters just Netflix till I moved to Colombia, had to proxy the connection.
Now Netflix is being sold here it sucks big time it's old movies, well I not talking oldies no nothing newer than 5 years if that.
It's not worth it, not that there's been anything worth watching in the past 8 years.
All the remakes of bad dialogues, piss poor effects, and plot-less movies in other words C rated movies.
If not for pixar movies there would not be any thing to watch, so no big deal.
Indeed, for all his speechification, his actions show that he's happy eating the lotus inside the prettiest of the walled gardens. I like the chap, he's decent enough and seems erudite, but talk is cheap.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I know that there are other options out there, but most of the people that I know (including myself) uses iTunes. It is an effective monopoly, and that's bad.
Then again, it was pretty close to a monopoly before. It was slightly better in that there were multiple labels and multiple retailers, but if you were interested in a particular artist you were still stuck with a particular label. Which is pretty much how it is today. Granted, you still have many retailers to choose from.
You might think so, but I can barely wait for Battleship: The Movie!
People for whom time is worth nothing find piracy valuable.
I would gladly pay for content. Problem is, I can't. I've tried Roku, WMC, and AppleTV, Netflix, and HuluPlus and guess what - they don't fucking work. In fact, they're so limited that I finally gave up and went to Usenet. Problem is - it takes time to maintain and manage it. I've got about 350 DVDs and BR discs in my closet. And yet it's a pain in the ass to watch them. I can stream my music all over the house, but to rip the video I had to buy a program from overseas. And I still can't watch it all easily on all my TVs.
Right now I've got a usenet account, sickbeard, couchpotato, sabnzbd, and Plex. Finally, I get all my shows, easily, and accessible on every TV that has an AppleTV puck (no thanks to Steve for having to jailbreak the ATV) and on my iPad. And sometimes things still don't come through correctly. I'd pay to NOT have to manage all of that and get what I want. But I can't.
The studios are so afraid of letting their content go that they make it impractical to get legally. Yes, there will be piracy - it takes nothing to reproduce (a key economic item which is not lost on the public). But for some of us, we just want to watch what we want. If I were king, part of the copyright law I would re-write would be statutory pricing for practically everything that gets copyright protection, similar to mechanical licensing, and allow on-demand collection so that there could be lots of competing players in the market. Sadly, I'm not king.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Please. They are no more interested in giving consumers what they want than Mexican drug cartels are interested in the US legalizing marijuana.
http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/tech-fun/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/pirateddvd1.png
If that's not incentive to pirate, I don't know what is.
Aside from format shifting, it's the main reason I never watch a DVD I buy. Instead I rip it and watch the rip.
I mean, was the Pulp Fiction thing the whole point of this article?
In music the issue is the artist vs. the entire mechanism that feeds off of the artist and the public as well. It is becoming possible for the artist to cut the distribution chain and produce and market their music in person or directly.
Now we have the actors,musicians and others who actually create the films. They don't want to be bled by any marketing and distribution monkeys and they can earn a good living while delivering content at far lower prices if they don't have to feed the monkey. The catch is that it is much harder to produce a good film without a huge investment machine behind you and that opens the doors for the monkeys to feed off of you.
This problem continues to invade every form of the arts. Now if you write a book the practice is to have lawyers carefully inspect the content to try to assure that some law suit isn't likely. Imagine the expense in publishing simply getting lawyers to spend that kind of time studying a book. You write about Superman jumping off of buildings and some young kid jumps off the roof of his home and the next thing you know you are sued out of house and home by the kid's parents. Monkeys keep getting in the middle and it is these stinking monkeys that drop that monkey wrench in the gears every time.
I'm smiling because after decades of screwing artist and ruthlessly maintaining their stranglehold on the Music industry their shit has come home to roost, not only are you dinosaurs that don't even know you've been replaced, but there is no room for you in the future, you're done, we (the artist) don't need you any more.
Good riddance.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Yeah. How about innovating where it counts the most, in front of the lens. Quit re-making worn out themes. Quit putting out junk that nobody wants to see. Bring out new stories and new ideas. Not all of those blockbusters won because of spiffy CGI, they won because of great stories.
And no, I'm not talking about Oscar winners, I'm talking about Box Office winners.
Run your own torrent trackers. Require strong authentication. Charge a reasonable fee per month to keep the private key valid.
I don't know what is so difficult about this. It's a win for everybody:
- Downloaders get a guaranteed good copy
- Content creators don't need to invest in a crapton of bandwidth
- Content creators maintain a reasonable amount of control
- Customers likely to remain loyal, because there are no real hoops to jump through.
But, by all means, continue wasting your time and money and pissing your potential customers off with your current model.
Look, those were some of the first players in the digital music realm. I remember posting on Slashdot back in 2001 or so (sorry, not going to go find it) about how the music industry was stupid for not embracing the digital music revolution instead of fighting it. I know I wasn't the only one.
My idea was that instead of suing Napster et al to kill digital music they should have started selling digital content. They should have started building their digital library, offer a CD buring service in stores where customers could burn whatever songs/albums they wanted with a reasonable pricing system. (.50 per song for anything 1 year old, .25 up to 5 years old, .10 older than 5 years). Build a menu of pre-made playlists for purchase (like staff picks in bookstores). People wouldn't mind buying songs even multiple times if the price was right. Offer them the SERVICE of music.
I thought that this could be done in the dying record stores. Burn them audio CDs, or MP3s to CDs (DVDs were a ways off, as were mainstream MP3 players). SELL MP3 players / USB drives and let people load them up with the purchase. But do it in a way where you lay down the infrastructure to keep the business. That could easily be built into an online service too. Harness the excitement that people have around music instead of trying to so strictly control it.
They chose the dinosaur way, then Apple comes along and changed the game with the iPod and iTunes (neither of which I've ever used). The 'music industry' could have really done so much with digital music to actually advance things, but they let other people do that.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
They make me watch the FBI warnings even in other countries where the FBI has no jurisdiction...
I bought a box set of Dexter seasons 1 through 5.
Seasons 1 to 4 were great.
When you put the disk in, a short (4-5 seconds) un-skippable logo at the start, but then choose a language and see a piracy warning, and then straight to the menu to select an episode to watch. The usual "Subtitles" control works fine (I play DVDs on my Xbox 360). Also, they put a chapter boundary right after the title sequence for the show (i.e. right at the start of Act 1 of the episode). This is how TV DVDs should be made.
Season 5 was a fucking mess.
When you put the disk in, you get a short un-skippable logo, and then a LONG, UN-SKIPPABLE COMMERCIAL for the channel that produces the show. What the fuck. Finally after like 1 minute, you get to choose a language and see the menu. But the "Subtitles" control no longer works, you have to have a TV / player that supports closed captioning or something. And there's no chapter boundary right after the title sequence, so I end up fast-fowarding through it instead of being able to just skip. Really fucking annoying.
“Innovate or die,” What does it refer to - the music industry as a whole or just to some companies unable to change? It has never happen in the history that the whole product or a market died without had been replaced by a superior one... So why do we bother with this? Movies are either here to stay or to be replaced with a holograph-vies or a with something that could actually stream "real feelings" straight into the brain.
Movie Mogals don't read slashdot, and therefore don't know what irks their potential clients. I read books, and have no patience for the new released movies.
My idea of new release is synchronized to three years old stuff, which for me is new. And I make my own popcorn at home.
We almost no longer have any remaining video stores in the 10 mile radius from my home.
Leslie
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Piracy is ship to ship armed robbery, murder and kidnapping.
Don't help their cause, you morons!
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!