Printable View
Here is a article about the current (and past) state of affairs when it comes to using 'media', and how Hollywood is screwing things up once again (as if the folks here already didn't know that).
Final result is that trying to 'toe the line' with their 'systems' results in a massive cluster-****, and that the true 'market' will win out once again.
http://www.slate.com/id/2298871/pagenum/all/#p2
Hollywood has shot itself in the foot many times before. Like when the VCR first came out, movies were exorbitantly priced. So naturally people made copies. Then the industry tried to put a stop to that with anti-copy schemes like Macrovision -- which ended up destroying the picture on certain models of VCR players that were incompatible with it. So customers were forced to install (possibly illegal) Macrovision filter boxes just to watch the movies they had legally paid for.
Now in the digital age ... History repeats itself.
I'd put money behind some DRM free media. In fact, once I figured it out, I actually put some money behind some videos I had to strip DRM from myself (non-Apple). I remember renting HD movies on my 360 (Zune market) and thinking it was great and cool. Since I originally did that, my internet speeds have increased, but my Zune MP experience has dropped drastically. It's a little easier to rent a movie on my 360, but I can grab and unpack an HD file in 1/10th the time using newsgroups.
So it's basically
-Ease
-Speed
-Quality
-Price point
They know how to fail on every point (DRM, slow servers, poor deinterlacing of their own original content, over charging, respectively, etc.)
What is kinda sad, is that I have subscriptions to BOTH DVD rental companies, yet find that in too many instances they either don't have what I'm searching for (okay, if Netflix doesn't 'generally' Blockbuster does, which is why I do both) but that in way to many (in increasingly so) NEITHER have it, or it's on 'super long delay' where they have one copy for the entire US.
But somebody out there in usenet-land got it one way or another, and it's there if I want to d/l it. Sans much of anything other than a good, fast, connection.
Now Netflix is set to announce another round of price hikes (so says some sites just today), so who knows what that's going to mean.
It's all a circle jerk; the rich are greedy, and they want to get richer. They go to Congress and get the laws changed to benefit them by bribing the politicians, which the courts say is 'okay'. Everybody else gets left out.
Well, the shoe dropped yesterday on the 60%+ Netflix subscription increases. So it's down to 1 at a time bluray for me, $10/month level.
Still thinking about what to do with Blockbuster, but I generally get '2 fer 1' from them as mailed DVD's can be traded in at any storefront for an additional rental.
Just checked today to find that "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" has no streaming on Netflix and very limited on Hulu Plus (5 or 6 recent episodes). Having seen the recent ones, I want to watch this series, looks like I'm going to have to pirate it. They left me no other feasible choice given the options I have.