Slashdot Mirror
DVDs, Blu-Rays To Show 20-Second Unskippable Govt. Warnings
bonch writes "DVDs and Blu-Rays will begin displaying two unskippable anti-piracy screens, each 10 seconds long, shown back-to-back. Six studios have agreed to begin using the new notices. Of course, pirated versions won't contain these 20-second notices; however, an ICE spokesman says the intent isn't to deter piracy but to educate the public."
This handy flow chart explains why. The **AA guys are desperately trying to put themselves out of business. See also The Oatmeal about why HBO is trying to do the same thing to people wanting to buy Game of Thrones .
Dog is my co-pilot.
Or use a DVD player that is not blessed by the DVD consortium.
Is it so hard to make a DVD player that plays the movie when you put it in?
A No it is not hard, just not allowed.
http://www.geexbox.org/ Play your movie. The menu and extras can be viewed if desired.
The truth shall set you free!
I finally got a Bluray player last November and although I have the money to easily afford any movie I want, and would prefer to have the highest bitrate, I gave up after several movies in a row took about 5-10 minutes to start up. I even had one rental that went on for over 20 minutes. Hell, the studio identifications alone take 5 minutes. I may be willing to give the studios my money, but I can't afford to give them my time. I will not pay $40 to be annoyed when I can have the annoyless versions for free.
This puts the final nail in the Bluray coffin for me. I was on the fence and now, I will simply never buy another. Congratulations movie studios! You really know how to sell a product there.
It'll probably get lost in the junk down here, but I was curious just how many human life equivellents was being sapped by these inane ads. If you look up the 2011 sales figures, the top 100 DVDs sold 147 million copies. Assuming each was watched only once, and by one person, the anti-piracy warnings waste a total of 93.27 years of human life per release-year (6.33775293*10^-7 Year Waste/DVD * ~147 million DVD/Release Year).
I'm comfortable with that dimensional analysis. Easy peezy. I'm less sure about the power consumption of warning: 20 seconds at 35 watts (A typical DVD player) would be 700 watt seconds. That times 147 million would come out to around 28.58 Megawatt Hours a year. That seems a bit much, though, so I may have made a mistake there. The average home supposedly uses around 11 megawatt hours a year. At 11 cents a kw/hr, that's 3,144.16666 dollars.
Now I'm not sure how to price leisure time, but I think the right economic thing to do would be to assume it's worth greater than or equal to the alternative activity (earning whatever per hour). I don't know what that number is, so I'm just going to assume it's a buck fifty arbitrarily. I don't think I could find many people to sit willing to sit being bored for 1.50 an hour, but I don't have time to dig through the lit to find a better one. At 1.50 an hour, the 20 seconds waste around 1.22 Million Dollars a year. which is a fair bit than the 3.1 Thousand dollars wasted electricity.
For those who must know, 93.27 years is 0.000213 Library of Congress equivalents, assuming you can read one book a week.