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With Cinavia DRM, Is Blu-ray On a Path To Self-Destruction?
suraj.sun tips an article at AnandTech about a Blu-ray DRM scheme called Cinavia. The author makes the case that software like Cinavia is hastening the death of a Blu-ray industry already struggling to compete with online media streaming. Quoting:
"In our opinion, it is the studios and the Blu-ray system manufacturers who have had the say in deciding upon the suitability of a particular DRM scheme. Consumers have had to put up with whatever has been thrust upon them. The rise in popularity of streaming services (such as Netflix and Vudu) which provide instant gratification should make the Blu-ray industry realize its follies. The only reason that streaming services haven't completely phased out Blu-rays is the fact that a majority of the consumers don't have a fast and reliable Internet connection. Once such connections become ubiquitous, most of the titles owned by consumers would probably end up being stored in the cloud. ... The addition of new licensing requirements such as Cinavia are preventing the natural downward price progression of Blu-ray related technology. Instead of spending time, money and effort on new DRM measures that get circumvented within a few days of release, the industry would do well to lower the launch price of Blu-rays. There is really no justification for the current media pricing."
No, there is justification; it costs a lot of money to develop these new DRM schemes!
If blu-ray disks were $5 each I would have hundreds of them.
As it is, I have none.
The only reason that streaming services haven't completely phased out Blu-rays is the fact that a majority of the consumers don't have a fast and reliable Internet connection.
Also the fact that Netflix and Vudu is only available in the USA. The rest of the world still rely on physical media.
We are the people our parents warned us about.
You pick a movie on netflix, 5 seconds later your watching it. You download a pirated movie, open it and 2 seconds later your watching it. You put a blu ray in, you wait a minute for it to pass the security check, get notified you need to download a firmware update for your blu ray player, get that done, be forced to watch the fbi notice, non skippable studio notices, skip past the previews, get to the overly animated menu and have to wait 20 seconds before it get to the play / select chapters buttons.
I have always wondered how much money the studios have spent (wasted) on copy protection and huge legal teams over the years. Just lower the prices, when people walk by the 5$ dvd bin at walmart, they stop and grab a few. Bring down prices across the board and sales will go up. Also, start making better movies people want to watch more than 1 time.
Our house is rural, we can only get verizon 3G internet, with 5GB per month, we cant do any streaming. No cable, no dsl. We still need netflix (by mail) or download movies someplace else and being them home.
Redbox has shown people are more than willing to pay for physical movies,well, upto 1$ or a bit more for blu rays.
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons.
I have a rather vast collection of DVD's. Several hundred, in fact. I don't actually watch a lot of films, but I do enjoy owning the ones I like.
When Blu-ray first came along, or rather when I first got a Blu-ray player (A PS3 I managed to grab on the cheap, back when they were still £350+), I started the transition to Blu-ray. If I bought a new film, I'd buy the Blu-ray version instead of the DVD. If I wanted to watch an old film, I'd see if I could find it on blu-ray before raiding my collection.
Then the irregularities hit - obviously being a collector, I'd want to get the "best" version of the films in question. Yet for the longest time, you could get a "vanilla" DVD, a "Special" DVD (which often came with a second disk full of "Features" and maybe some art cards) or THE blu-ray. Which came with only some, or none, of the special features. And it was still £5 more than the special DVD.
I stopped buying either. I found that I could just as easily spend £10 a month on a newsgroup subscription and download whatever film I wanted in whatever quality I wanted, whenever I wanted. Why rebuy my whole collection when I can just watch what I want, when I want? If I wanted the extras, I could have them as well - at no extra cost. What's more, I could play them wherever I wanted, including streaming them to various other non-bluray capable devices. Much how people preferred MP3's simply because anything could play them, I now prefer downloaded copies for the same reason. I'm sorry that "crooks" are getting my money instead of the people who made the films, but it all just got too much. I will switch to a streaming service as soon as one offers a decent catalogue of films without charging stupid amounts. I refuse to "rent" films for anything more than £1 a pop - particularly as brand new DVDs can be had for less than £5 and most streams are NOT actually HD quality (they're often about as good as DVD quality, maybe a bit better - certainly no 1080p). The content is the killer though - why does Netflix US have 10x the content than Netflix UK does? Oh yeah, because the Movie companies are plainly greedy. They want licensing rights done on a per-country basis so they can squeeze as much out of everyone. Well fuck you, how about you let anyone access all your content for a set price and let competition do the work.
Some of us have no interest in streaming our media. And many of us have no interest in storing our stuff in the cloud.
I want my movies stored local, offline, and accessible when I want it and without asking permission. Streaming is just going to lead to 'monetizing' each view. Storing it in the cloud means I can't watch movies on the plane, in bed, or by the pool.
I'm probably old fashioned, but I still buy Blu Ray discs and CDs which I rip to MP3. With ISPs adding bandwidth caps and the like, I'm not going to pay to stream down a movie I've already bought, and then pay my ISP again for the bandwidth for re-watching the movie again. Everyone wants a piece of that action, and I'm not playing.
So, for many of us, the physical disk is going to remain as the way we play these movies for a long time yet.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
After updating my PS3's firmware, I could no longer play my blu-ray backups that I had ripped with AC3 audio.
I didn't hesitate. I sold my PS3 and bought parts to build an HTPC - and never looked back.
I don't regret the decision at all. Neither will you.
When will we be able to stream bluray quality to our homes over an affordable internet connection? Given that a bluray based 1080p movie is about 15GB in size, to stream that amount of data to your house in 2 hours would require an internet connection of about 17Mb/s.
I know, I know, most people can't tell when you're getting heavily compressed, downsampled whatever using H.264 ogg-something-or-other. But when someone invests a couple grand into their TV+stereo+speakers, we'd like to be able to get a high quality input into it and not a something that's sufficient for the 6 o'clock news.
I'm not a audiophile, but a believer in garbage-in = garbage-out. I hope the media companies or movie studios don't force us down the path of the lowest common denominator which would be low quality streams fit for an iphone. It's a shame that in order to get a high quality stream you need to pay a ton for the internet connection and then most likely pay a ton for a 1080p stream.
That's exactly the point. Yes, the vendor dictates the terms, but I decide whether I accept them. And I don't.
I don't quite get the idea why throwing more shit at my face is supposed to make me buy it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
THIS SO MUCH.
These idiots in charge really don't understand very simple concepts like this.
It has already been proved countless times in other industries throughout the decades.
The lower the price, the more people will buy, when you reach certain prices, impulse-buys considerably increase to the point that it offsets potential losses from a much larger price.
Not to mention that so many people buy 2nd-hand goods, which they get none of the profit from, simply because the price of the originals are so much higher.
If they were to lower the price to typical prices you see 2nd hand goods at, the sales increase from that alone would more than make up for that lower price.
People buy 2nd hand for a reason, it is more in their price range. Bring the initial releases down already!
Piracy isn't even on the scale of how much they lose to 2nd hand sales due to their own greed.
Whether it is films, games, music or whatever else, lower price points have already proven worthy causes in various different attempts throughout the media industry.
A very good example of this is Humble Indie Bundle. Those things are absolute goldmines for indie devs, sales that indie devs could only dream of most of the time unless they hit it lucky like Angry Birds or Minecraft.
I think from the last one alone, each group involved got around $90k+ from it. All from people donating on average around $6. That was barely 100k sales if I remember correct. Imagine if that was those millions from the rest of the games industry.
$20-40 seems like the absolute sweet spot where most people can afford it and the best amount of profit gained, varying depending on the type of game it is. (popularity, basically)
If you start to treat your customers as pirates, you make them pay a large price for said content when it is in fact your own mess you created by pissing off the stores and in turn forcing them to significantly increase the 2nd hand market size, of course you are going to lose sales.
Adapt or die. Locking people out isn't adapting, it is dying.
What I want to know is why Blurays take so long to load.
When I want to watch a movie, typically, I want to watch the movie, not wait sevefral minutes for the disk to load, then try to skip through 15 minutes of commercials (if it's possible to skip through them at all).
When I first got my Bluray play, I upgraded my Netflix membership to Bluray. 2 weeks later, I downgraded back to DVD because DVD's are more usable. I've bought a few movies on Bluray, but for the vast majority of what I watch, DVD quality is more than sufficient (even Netflix streaming quality is more than sufficient).
The operating system on my laptop boots up faster than the time it takes most Blurays to load on my bluray player.
And what's with the firmware updates that are needed for some disks to work!? My 8 year old DVD player has never needed a firmware update and it plays all of the DVDs I own but I've already run into a couple disks that refused to work without a bluray player firmware update.
I'm sure the Bluray gives content producers much more freedom to produce rich content, fancy menus and other features (which includes enhanced DRM), but all I want to do is watch my movie.
Which is why we have such great Internet connectivity in our cities with high population density, like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston or Philadelphia?
Face it, the "population density" argument just doesn't work. The real reason the USA is fucked in terms of infrastructure is because for some reason we prefer spending money blowing up other people's roads and bridges and networks over maintaining our own.
If blu-ray disks were $5 each I would have hundreds of them.
As it is, I have none.
I will add the supporting evidence Louis C. K.
Rather than take a flat rate of $50,000 - $100,000 for his special from the industry where they would price the disks at $10 - $20 he just produced it himself and put it up online with no DRM for $5. By circumventing the major industry players and just doing it himself he has made more than double. He has effectively done what the media industry says is impossible without them suing and forcing people to pay out the nose.
I have bought several copies for myself and gifts to support the idea of paying what the market really thinks the product is worth rather than forcing a higher market price.
"Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most." ~Ozzy Osborne
Having a small child myself, I freaking hate most of the DVDs targeted to them. Especially Disney DVDs, with their either 10 or 25 minutes (your choice, you have to hit the button shortly after inserting the disc) of unskippable ads before it starts the movie. Fastplay my ass. It's infuriating to me when he gets a Handy Manny DVD for Christmas and I have to go back and rip it and re-encode the disc so he doesn't have to sit through an outrageously long stretch of ads just to play the movie. Every time I go through the process I think to myself: I should have just pirated this, I'm being punished for trying to do the right thing.
I read the internet for the articles.
I'm not looking to replace my entire library of DVD with Blu Ray, since I have literally hundreds of DVDs. But some movies which I really like I've re-invested in them because seeing them in full HD is worth it if I can find the disk on sale.
Doesn't matter, lowering the price is a stop-gap to what's inevitable. The consumers will get what they want whether the movie industry likes it or not.
Music industry fought mp3, suing everyone, until Apple came in and cleaned their clock. Now instead of $15 CDs we buy songs for $1 and the music industry does whatever Apple says because Apple sells more music than Walmart. Had the music industry stopped suing their customers and start selling to their customers they would be the ones with $100 billion instead of Apple.
Fast forward, and the movie industry is on the exact same path of destruction as the music industry. Doesn't anyone learn? Look, you can try and sell blu-ray discs for $20+ a pop, but that's just going to drive more people to streaming. Give us $5 BD and start a universal streaming service and make money again or someone else will and they'll take your money. It's your choice, but in the end we will have a streaming movie service and we won't be paying $20+ for discs just like no one buys $15 CDs anymore.
Resistance is futile. We are your consumers.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
It is amazing how much you can make as an already established successful artist when you cut out the middleman.
If you are not already known with a good audience, you will never have the distribution, marketing, and advertising that the big boys bring to the table. But once you hit the level where everybody knows who you are, yeah you don't need the big marketing machine behind you anymore. But anyone thinking any unknown comedian/musician could just start putting out their own stuff and make a ton of money is pretty naive about the way the industry works. If it were really that easy, don't you think a lot more artists would be doing it like that already?
"But this one goes to 11!"