From TFA:
"It has built a small Internet-ready movie box that connects to the television and allows couch potatoes to rent or buy any of the 5,000 films now in Vudu's growing collection. The box's biggest asset is raw speed: the company says the films will begin playing immediately after a customer makes a selection."
Two points. One, the article also makes note of the rise in HDTV sets - if that's indeed the case, wouldn't one selling point be the opportunity to offer movies in some fairly high-definition format (at LEAST DVD-quality)? Even for folks with broadband, most won't have the bandwith to pull down a DVD-or-better quality movie quickly enough to watch in real-time.
The other point is the "rent or buy" verbiage - what defines 'renting' or 'buying' (normally I'd only have to ask what defines renting, but considering how the major movie/music studios have handled DRM, one must include buying in that request)? When the article says renting, do they mean along similar lines to what you might receive from a movie store, 3 days and then it goes away? Or do they mean something like purchasing a single viewing, along the lines of what you'd get in a movie theater - if the latter's the case, why the heck would I want to "rent" a new movie for almost the same price as going to see it in theaters? Even the best home setups really just can't compare to watching a movie at the theater, especially with some films being available at IMAX theaters and the like. This brings to light the question of the pricing scheme - new movies more costly than old? More popular movies have floating costs that increment with every X number of downloads? These are things I wouldn't put it past the MPAA to try and implement, and they'd spell a DOA right out of the gate for a service that's trying to supplant internet piracy.
After all, you still just can't beat $Free.99 for price.
Ladies and gentlemen, somebody with no concept of the way the business world works! Fascinating.
"It allows your employees to bargain collectively for what is best for them. You would rather negotiate with each one separately for what is best for you."
If you can't see the error in your thinking within that statement, let me fill it in for you. Unions bargain collectively for what is best for the interests controlling the collective (which is quite often very different from the interests of the collective of a whole - just ask Michigan auto workers how they felt about their unions in the 70s and 80s). Negotiating on an individual level allows each employee to demand what s/he feels is the most advantageous work environment/compensation possible. Hard as it may be to believe for somebody as obviously bitter as you, we employees (and yes, I am an employee, not an employer - temp jobs and IT work, FUN!) actually do have bargaining power. Granted this varies by position, but generally, skilled labor is never in infinite supply, allowing the job seeker significant leverage. Aditionally, many employers have recognized this fact and have taken steps to create positive work environments. My current job is a great, community-style environment helping troubleshoot. Previously, I worked in somebody's basement doing paperwork and sneezing because she continuously allowed her cats (I'm allgeric) free reign down there.
"This allows you to pay the absolute minimum in wages in order to get your work done."
Only if the employee refuses to do nothing more than the minimum amount of work! The point of hiring an employee is to pay somebody value for his labor that is fair within the job market, but within a job market where the output received by that labor produces more profit than the accumulated costs of that employee charge the business. Paying minimum market wages ensures that the best employees (read: those whose labor is the most profitable) are impossible to hire because they'll simply pass your company over for one that offers better compensation. By offering higher salaries, you are able to recoup those costs through the higher value of the employee's overall work... But even if the employee's extra value added over market is exactly equal to the additional salary you offer over market, there are numerous other advantages to higher-value employees. Better services, better reputation, better investor confidence, etc. These don't immediately show up on a balance sheet, but they're the cornerstones of almost any successful business that grows from the ground up.
"Sure. But they are just as likely to get canned or laid off if you fuck up and lose a contract."
The only reason for employees to get fired is if the company is losing money on them. The alternative to being able to fire these employees? Having the company take a loss, which is the first step towards the company going belly-up - and with the higher costs to a business caused by unionization, the problem is usually only exacerbated. If a business goes under, EVERYBODY'S out of a job, not just the lowest-producing members of the workforce. How exactly is that better? You say yourself: "If you read my post I said you should fight tooth and nail for every dime due to you exactly because companies go out of business all the time." You think maybe the reason all those companies are going out of business is because their employees are too busy unionizing and not doing their work, then getting rewarded for it at everybody's expense later? Though I'd hasten to add that is additionally at the company's feet, ultimately, because it's the employer's job to create a work environment were employees feel no need for unionization or the like.
"I shed no tears for companies who can't survive without paying their workers slave wages."
*sings* 'If I only had a brain...' Oh, I'm sorry, you're not the scarecrow? It's just, that's such a straw-man, I just assumed... Let's take a look at the parent again: "At times like that, unions can serv
A problem with your logic - it assumes that the 'chance' of being caught can be one reasonably large so as to make confessing a worthwhile consideration while keeping the punishment from being exceedingly out of proportion to the crime. However, this likely doesn't apply to downloading a piece of software (huge numbers of crimes of this nature are committed every day, with an extremely small percentage actually caught as far as I know). If there is only a.001% chance of being caught, for example, we can calculate your "price point" for a punishment value imagining a piece of software worth $100 (by the way, your equation is wrong - it should be $100/X - if there's a 50% chance of being caught, punishment Y needs to be greater than 200 = 100/.5, not 100*.5 = 50). $100/.00001 = $10 million.
Let's set aside for the moment the fact that there is very little chance of a +$10 million punishment being levied against somebody stealing a piece of software worth $100. A significant portion of the possible "thieving population" will, even if the punishment were to be set successfully at +$10 million, be willing to attempt to break the law anyway because of the microscopic likelihood of being caught, simply because human beings are not completely "rational" creatures, despite what Econ 101 might try to argue.:)
Let's use a handy little tool, found at http://www.westegg.com/inflation/. It calculates the value of money corrected for inflation across the years. The Empire Strikes Back, according to the IMDB's list, made $290,158,751 in 1980. Let's just plug that into our little calculator, correcting to 2005...
$736,904,249... Oh, and 53 cents. Just *slightly* more than the $380,268,258.46 that the Passion of the Christ made, corrected for the extra year.
A much more helpful list can be found at http://home.earthlink.net/~mrob/pub/movies/topadj. html. It's the top movies, ranked not by box office statistics (which are both uncorrected for inflation, and are not managed for increasing ticket prices that may or may not outstrip natural Consumer Price Index changes). We can see that Gone With the Wind (#68 in pure box office) and Star Wars (#2 in pure box office), first and second respectively by attendence, blow away every other movie by a huge margin. Your examples? Empire Strikes back ranks 15th, with 101.7 million attendees. Passion? 81st, with 53.7 million, barely more than half.
People will go see Sci-Fi - it just has to be done right.
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA: "It has built a small Internet-ready movie box that connects to the television and allows couch potatoes to rent or buy any of the 5,000 films now in Vudu's growing collection. The box's biggest asset is raw speed: the company says the films will begin playing immediately after a customer makes a selection." Two points. One, the article also makes note of the rise in HDTV sets - if that's indeed the case, wouldn't one selling point be the opportunity to offer movies in some fairly high-definition format (at LEAST DVD-quality)? Even for folks with broadband, most won't have the bandwith to pull down a DVD-or-better quality movie quickly enough to watch in real-time. The other point is the "rent or buy" verbiage - what defines 'renting' or 'buying' (normally I'd only have to ask what defines renting, but considering how the major movie/music studios have handled DRM, one must include buying in that request)? When the article says renting, do they mean along similar lines to what you might receive from a movie store, 3 days and then it goes away? Or do they mean something like purchasing a single viewing, along the lines of what you'd get in a movie theater - if the latter's the case, why the heck would I want to "rent" a new movie for almost the same price as going to see it in theaters? Even the best home setups really just can't compare to watching a movie at the theater, especially with some films being available at IMAX theaters and the like. This brings to light the question of the pricing scheme - new movies more costly than old? More popular movies have floating costs that increment with every X number of downloads? These are things I wouldn't put it past the MPAA to try and implement, and they'd spell a DOA right out of the gate for a service that's trying to supplant internet piracy. After all, you still just can't beat $Free.99 for price.
Ladies and gentlemen, somebody with no concept of the way the business world works! Fascinating.
"It allows your employees to bargain collectively for what is best for them. You would rather negotiate with each one separately for what is best for you."
If you can't see the error in your thinking within that statement, let me fill it in for you. Unions bargain collectively for what is best for the interests controlling the collective (which is quite often very different from the interests of the collective of a whole - just ask Michigan auto workers how they felt about their unions in the 70s and 80s). Negotiating on an individual level allows each employee to demand what s/he feels is the most advantageous work environment/compensation possible. Hard as it may be to believe for somebody as obviously bitter as you, we employees (and yes, I am an employee, not an employer - temp jobs and IT work, FUN!) actually do have bargaining power. Granted this varies by position, but generally, skilled labor is never in infinite supply, allowing the job seeker significant leverage. Aditionally, many employers have recognized this fact and have taken steps to create positive work environments. My current job is a great, community-style environment helping troubleshoot. Previously, I worked in somebody's basement doing paperwork and sneezing because she continuously allowed her cats (I'm allgeric) free reign down there.
"This allows you to pay the absolute minimum in wages in order to get your work done."
Only if the employee refuses to do nothing more than the minimum amount of work! The point of hiring an employee is to pay somebody value for his labor that is fair within the job market, but within a job market where the output received by that labor produces more profit than the accumulated costs of that employee charge the business. Paying minimum market wages ensures that the best employees (read: those whose labor is the most profitable) are impossible to hire because they'll simply pass your company over for one that offers better compensation. By offering higher salaries, you are able to recoup those costs through the higher value of the employee's overall work... But even if the employee's extra value added over market is exactly equal to the additional salary you offer over market, there are numerous other advantages to higher-value employees. Better services, better reputation, better investor confidence, etc. These don't immediately show up on a balance sheet, but they're the cornerstones of almost any successful business that grows from the ground up.
"Sure. But they are just as likely to get canned or laid off if you fuck up and lose a contract."
The only reason for employees to get fired is if the company is losing money on them. The alternative to being able to fire these employees? Having the company take a loss, which is the first step towards the company going belly-up - and with the higher costs to a business caused by unionization, the problem is usually only exacerbated. If a business goes under, EVERYBODY'S out of a job, not just the lowest-producing members of the workforce. How exactly is that better? You say yourself: "If you read my post I said you should fight tooth and nail for every dime due to you exactly because companies go out of business all the time." You think maybe the reason all those companies are going out of business is because their employees are too busy unionizing and not doing their work, then getting rewarded for it at everybody's expense later? Though I'd hasten to add that is additionally at the company's feet, ultimately, because it's the employer's job to create a work environment were employees feel no need for unionization or the like.
"I shed no tears for companies who can't survive without paying their workers slave wages."
*sings* 'If I only had a brain...' Oh, I'm sorry, you're not the scarecrow? It's just, that's such a straw-man, I just assumed... Let's take a look at the parent again: "At times like that, unions can serv
A problem with your logic - it assumes that the 'chance' of being caught can be one reasonably large so as to make confessing a worthwhile consideration while keeping the punishment from being exceedingly out of proportion to the crime. However, this likely doesn't apply to downloading a piece of software (huge numbers of crimes of this nature are committed every day, with an extremely small percentage actually caught as far as I know). If there is only a .001% chance of being caught, for example, we can calculate your "price point" for a punishment value imagining a piece of software worth $100 (by the way, your equation is wrong - it should be $100/X - if there's a 50% chance of being caught, punishment Y needs to be greater than 200 = 100/.5, not 100*.5 = 50). $100/.00001 = $10 million.
:)
Let's set aside for the moment the fact that there is very little chance of a +$10 million punishment being levied against somebody stealing a piece of software worth $100. A significant portion of the possible "thieving population" will, even if the punishment were to be set successfully at +$10 million, be willing to attempt to break the law anyway because of the microscopic likelihood of being caught, simply because human beings are not completely "rational" creatures, despite what Econ 101 might try to argue.
Let's use a handy little tool, found at http://www.westegg.com/inflation/. It calculates the value of money corrected for inflation across the years. The Empire Strikes Back, according to the IMDB's list, made $290,158,751 in 1980. Let's just plug that into our little calculator, correcting to 2005...
$736,904,249... Oh, and 53 cents. Just *slightly* more than the $380,268,258.46 that the Passion of the Christ made, corrected for the extra year.
A much more helpful list can be found at http://home.earthlink.net/~mrob/pub/movies/topadj. html. It's the top movies, ranked not by box office statistics (which are both uncorrected for inflation, and are not managed for increasing ticket prices that may or may not outstrip natural Consumer Price Index changes). We can see that Gone With the Wind (#68 in pure box office) and Star Wars (#2 in pure box office), first and second respectively by attendence, blow away every other movie by a huge margin. Your examples? Empire Strikes back ranks 15th, with 101.7 million attendees. Passion? 81st, with 53.7 million, barely more than half.
People will go see Sci-Fi - it just has to be done right.