there's even more to it than lost sales of videotapes or dvds.
a few years ago, a guy i worked with asked me why ratings companies don't take it into account when viewers tape tv programs off the air for later viewing. well, when you watch a taped tv program, you usually skip past the commercials. since the whole point of broadcast tv is to sell commercials, it doesn't count toward a program's rating when viewers tape a program and skip the commercials.
suprisingly, a lot of people forget this little fact. when it comes to broadcast tv and basic cable, the programs are not the product and the viewers are not the customers. in reality, the viewers are the product and the advertisers are the customers. broadcasters don't like vcrs because they let their products, you, me, and the rest of the viewers get away.
so, if a broadcaster can somehow prevent you from taping a program and skipping the commercials, they can better insure that you will watch their programs live and with the commercials intact. this increases their ratings and the amount of money they can get from the advertisers.
incidentally, this attitude about viewers is one of the pissiest things about dvds and why i feel hollywood is on shaky moral ground with regards to their dvd protection. when i buy a dvd, i expect to get the movie and not to be turned into a tv viewer. if hollywood insists on putting commercials on dvds, then they ought to give the things away for free and make money off the advertising. but as long as they insist on their $20, $25, or more for a movie, they had better get rid of the commercials. otherwise, the consumers are completely justified in cracking the copy protection on dvds and make commercial free copies for private use.
fwiw, lara croft and the tomb raider franchise seem to be super popular in europe. many tomb raider site seem to be international and some of the really obssesive fan material comes from europe.
fan generated products have included music and music videos, artwork and 'zine style fiction. most of the fan stuff seems to be coming out of europe.
lara croft has also been used to pitch cars, soft drinks, etc. and she seems to have made many more appearances on european tv shows than us tv shows.
so while a lara croft movie may do merely ok in the us, it may do very well in europe (where they'll probably get the uncensored version of the movie).
CDs have 16-bit resolution yes. in theory that should give you 90 db dynamic range. but ADCs are hard to design. most lose the least significant bits. and since pulse code modulation is linear you loose 5.625 db dynamic range with each error bit. plus the distortion these errors cause sounds awful. then you have problems of click jitter (did you know that clock crystal rates change with temperature?) so digital recorders add dither. dither is pink noise added to the signal to make sure the least significant bits are always lit. the bits are then removed later through signal processing. so now cd doesn't have quite the sn ratio that's been advertised. now as for vinyl's ability to record ultra high frequency sounds. the pits pressed into the surface of a cd are small. but the high frequencies inscribed into the surface of a record are smaller still -- often smaller than a single wavelngth of light. back in the '80s a manufacturer designed and built a optical record playing system. it used a laser to read the grooves of a record. the system had to use interferometry because the information in the grooves was too small for the laser to read. the machine cost a fortune to build. diamond styli can read those grooves. contact line diamonds have a thin knife edge that is indeed smaller than the finest grooves in a record. an yes, those mechanical systems are capable of preserving and recording those high frequency sounds. and truntables that can achive good sound cost less than $1,000. your the roll-off argument has been used by digital recording apologists for years and it still doesn't hold water. if you want to make sure that your recording will have good frequency response at 18 khz, you have to make sure that it has the ability to extend far beyond that. by your argument, 3d games don't have to bother with more than 25 frames per second because that's all our eyes need to perceive continuous motion. gamers know better. finally, can dsl carry cd quality sound? well, to carry uncompressed cd audio you need a bit more than 1.4 kilobits per second (16-bits per sample * 2 channels * 44,100 samples per second). i suppose that could be carried by 1.5 kilobit dsl line or a t1 line. but there's not much room left for communications overhead or for replacing lost packets. and then you have dsl's 3 mile limit. my original argument still stands. digital is inefficient at delivering continuous analog material like audio or video. for example, fm radio delivers two 15 khz channels (limited to 15 khz for political, not technical reasons), and two 8 khz subcarrier channels, all within about 100 khz of bandwidth. to do the same in the digital domain you'd need between 1.5 and 2 megahertz of bandwidth. to reduce the bandwidth necessary for digital broadcasts, you need to use lossy compression, an unacceptable tradeoff for critical listening.
there is a super analog audio format. it's called vinyl.
a well made vinyl record can have an audio bandwidth as high as 50 kilohertz per channel. compare that to compact disc's paltry 22.05 kilohertz audio per channel. digital recordings lose even more resolution to quantization noise.
digital is amazingly inefficient in terms of bandwidth utilization. an ordinary telephone line carry 6-8 khz audio just fine in analog mode. convert the audio feed to digital and the same phone line chokes.
so even though a cd stores just two 22.05 khz audio channels, the digital signal is actually using 3 megahertz of bandwith - enough for a full ntsc video signal. in fact, early digital recorders used videocassettes as the recording medium.
where digital excels is in error correction - signal errors - also called noise and distortion - can be more easily controlled; digital information is easier to miniaturize - witness the size of a compact disc versus a vinyl record; and digital signals are easier to manipulate - such as the lossy compression seen on minidiscs and mp3s.
a side effect of the millenium copyright act was to enable creators to reassert their ownership of creations they were not able to hold onto originally. one example i can think of is that the family of jerry siegel has been able to reassert their rights over the superman character. http://anotheruniverse.com/comics/features/superma nrights.html while we complain about our rights to copy and distribute mp3s, its possible that many creators who were forced by corporations to sign away their rights in the past, can now reassert those rights. this, of course, is not limited to comics, but to movies, music, books, etc.
actually, as i recall, the postal service wanted to set up an electronic mail system back in the '80s, but the idea was nixed by congress. probably under pressure from phone and telex interests.
Slashdot Mirror
there's even more to it than lost sales of videotapes or dvds.
a few years ago, a guy i worked with asked me why ratings companies don't take it into account when viewers tape tv programs off the air for later viewing. well, when you watch a taped tv program, you usually skip past the commercials. since the whole point of broadcast tv is to sell commercials, it doesn't count toward a program's rating when viewers tape a program and skip the commercials.
suprisingly, a lot of people forget this little fact. when it comes to broadcast tv and basic cable, the programs are not the product and the viewers are not the customers. in reality, the viewers are the product and the advertisers are the customers. broadcasters don't like vcrs because they let their products, you, me, and the rest of the viewers get away.
so, if a broadcaster can somehow prevent you from taping a program and skipping the commercials, they can better insure that you will watch their programs live and with the commercials intact. this increases their ratings and the amount of money they can get from the advertisers.
incidentally, this attitude about viewers is one of the pissiest things about dvds and why i feel hollywood is on shaky moral ground with regards to their dvd protection. when i buy a dvd, i expect to get the movie and not to be turned into a tv viewer. if hollywood insists on putting commercials on dvds, then they ought to give the things away for free and make money off the advertising. but as long as they insist on their $20, $25, or more for a movie, they had better get rid of the commercials. otherwise, the consumers are completely justified in cracking the copy protection on dvds and make commercial free copies for private use.
no, not inspector gadget. this is for the secret super mario brothers in all of us...
fwiw, lara croft and the tomb raider franchise seem to be super popular in europe. many tomb raider site seem to be international and some of the really obssesive fan material comes from europe.
fan generated products have included music and music videos, artwork and 'zine style fiction. most of the fan stuff seems to be coming out of europe.
lara croft has also been used to pitch cars, soft drinks, etc. and she seems to have made many more appearances on european tv shows than us tv shows.
so while a lara croft movie may do merely ok in the us, it may do very well in europe (where they'll probably get the uncensored version of the movie).
CDs have 16-bit resolution yes. in theory that should give you 90 db dynamic range. but ADCs are hard to design. most lose the least significant bits. and since pulse code modulation is linear you loose 5.625 db dynamic range with each error bit. plus the distortion these errors cause sounds awful. then you have problems of click jitter (did you know that clock crystal rates change with temperature?) so digital recorders add dither. dither is pink noise added to the signal to make sure the least significant bits are always lit. the bits are then removed later through signal processing. so now cd doesn't have quite the sn ratio that's been advertised. now as for vinyl's ability to record ultra high frequency sounds. the pits pressed into the surface of a cd are small. but the high frequencies inscribed into the surface of a record are smaller still -- often smaller than a single wavelngth of light. back in the '80s a manufacturer designed and built a optical record playing system. it used a laser to read the grooves of a record. the system had to use interferometry because the information in the grooves was too small for the laser to read. the machine cost a fortune to build. diamond styli can read those grooves. contact line diamonds have a thin knife edge that is indeed smaller than the finest grooves in a record. an yes, those mechanical systems are capable of preserving and recording those high frequency sounds. and truntables that can achive good sound cost less than $1,000. your the roll-off argument has been used by digital recording apologists for years and it still doesn't hold water. if you want to make sure that your recording will have good frequency response at 18 khz, you have to make sure that it has the ability to extend far beyond that. by your argument, 3d games don't have to bother with more than 25 frames per second because that's all our eyes need to perceive continuous motion. gamers know better. finally, can dsl carry cd quality sound? well, to carry uncompressed cd audio you need a bit more than 1.4 kilobits per second (16-bits per sample * 2 channels * 44,100 samples per second). i suppose that could be carried by 1.5 kilobit dsl line or a t1 line. but there's not much room left for communications overhead or for replacing lost packets. and then you have dsl's 3 mile limit. my original argument still stands. digital is inefficient at delivering continuous analog material like audio or video. for example, fm radio delivers two 15 khz channels (limited to 15 khz for political, not technical reasons), and two 8 khz subcarrier channels, all within about 100 khz of bandwidth. to do the same in the digital domain you'd need between 1.5 and 2 megahertz of bandwidth. to reduce the bandwidth necessary for digital broadcasts, you need to use lossy compression, an unacceptable tradeoff for critical listening.
there is a super analog audio format. it's called vinyl.
a well made vinyl record can have an audio bandwidth as high as 50 kilohertz per channel. compare that to compact disc's paltry 22.05 kilohertz audio per channel. digital recordings lose even more resolution to quantization noise.
digital is amazingly inefficient in terms of bandwidth utilization. an ordinary telephone line carry 6-8 khz audio just fine in analog mode. convert the audio feed to digital and the same phone line chokes.
so even though a cd stores just two 22.05 khz audio channels, the digital signal is actually using 3 megahertz of bandwith - enough for a full ntsc video signal. in fact, early digital recorders used videocassettes as the recording medium.
where digital excels is in error correction - signal errors - also called noise and distortion - can be more easily controlled; digital information is easier to miniaturize - witness the size of a compact disc versus a vinyl record; and digital signals are easier to manipulate - such as the lossy compression seen on minidiscs and mp3s.
a side effect of the millenium copyright act was to enable creators to reassert their ownership of creations they were not able to hold onto originally. one example i can think of is that the family of jerry siegel has been able to reassert their rights over the superman character. http://anotheruniverse.com/comics/features/superma nrights.html while we complain about our rights to copy and distribute mp3s, its possible that many creators who were forced by corporations to sign away their rights in the past, can now reassert those rights. this, of course, is not limited to comics, but to movies, music, books, etc.
actually, as i recall, the postal service wanted to set up an electronic mail system back in the '80s, but the idea was nixed by congress. probably under pressure from phone and telex interests.