

Hollywood is about to repeat the catastrophic mistakes of the music industry - blahedo
http://www.slate.com/id/2298871/pagenum/all/

======
coffeeaddicted
Situation is even worse in Europa. We have no Hulu or anything comparable. If
the movie industry doesn't learn that Europe is only ~10ms away from the
States when you're in the net it will have even more trouble in that market.
I'm chatting with friends in America, I'm occasionally working for companies
in the US (from my home in Germany) and I'm certainly visiting imdb.com and
similar websites to inform myself about movies. So why do I have to wait half
a year until a (often badly synchronized) version of a series arrives here on
legal channels? Most like even first on pay-TV (not that I even would have a
TV anymore these days...I want to watch movies when I have time and not when
some station thinks I should take the time). All while streaming-services are
found in less than 5 minutes (who is still using risky torrent services
anyway?)

Give me a no-hassle-fair-price download service and I'll be fine paying for
good movies. But right now I have not yet found a legal way of watching movies
on my computer except waiting for the DVD's - and even those I don't really
watch in a legal way as I'm using DeCSS to watch them on Linux.

~~~
Derbasti
Then again, this is the internet we are talking about. There is not much
stopping you from using technology to gain freedom.

Pandora blocks your IP address you say? Go look for a proxy in the US.

Hulu recognizes proxies you say? Use a VPN instead. That opens the door to
every free offer in the US.

iTunes won't let you download from the US store you say? Go to Ebay and grab
an American iTunes gift card.

Spotify requires a bank account in UK/Scandinavia you say? There are always
virtual credit cards like Entropay (I call them credit card proxies). Well,
Spotify won't take those. But Paypal does, and Spotify accepts Paypal.

You see, this is the internet. There are no countries or borders on the
internet. The tools are all there. You just gotta use them.

~~~
zeemonkee
Not the point. None of these solutions are easy or obvious to the casual
consumer. Companies (and governments) should make legal distribution easy for
consumers worldwide if they want to reduce illegal downloading.

------
jaaron
The article ends with the author suggesting the studios get together and
create a single source for digitial delivery to make it easy for the
consumers. Well, it turns out the studios are doing that, it's called DECE and
the first step is a suite of DRMs and a rights locker called Ultraviolet.
Unfortunately, it's a huge consortium that will have tremendous trouble
actually getting anything done. It's also primarily aimed at supporting
digital purchases to supplement the ailing DVD market instead of just biting
the bullet and recognizing that rental and subscription are what most
consumers want. Still, it's a serious effort despite it's flaws, so it's not
fair to say the industry isn't taking the changes of the market seriously.

A much more difficult problem is undoing the years and years of distribution
rights deals and complex availability windows that plague any improvement in
the market. These deals lock up content, creating exclusive windows for
entrenched players and hamper true innovation. Unfortunately, solving the
rights windows issue, which includes not only time but also geographic limits,
is a much more difficult problem to solve with fewer incentives on incumbents
to change. If they don't, the whole industry will suffer, but I don't see this
issue being solved any time soon.

~~~
archangel_one
I've not heard of it before, but this DECE thing is not going to create a
single source for digital delivery to make it easy for consumers if it also
involves a suite of DRMs and a rights locker (whatever that is). The two
concepts seem entirely antithetical given that DRM inevitably makes things
difficult for consumers.

~~~
avstraliitski
Don't worry about DECE. I had access to draft technical documentation on it
about .. oh .. early 2009.

I don't think it's breaking any NDA to discuss the overall aspects of the
consortium's goals.

Basically what they are trying to do is produce a global network of secure
digital content distribution servers. Under their model, all digital content
retailers actually sell access to this single global commercial content
delivery infrastructure.

However, it remains unclear to me under the proposed model: a) Who will pay
for the servers b) Which devices will or will not be supported, and how media
transcoding (to support differing device capabilities) will be handled c) Who
the user complains to if they can't get access to the content they paid for d)
What value retailers would add in such a scenario - indeed, how they would
'compete' with each other given very little control and thus capability for
unique product offering

Like many dreamy consortia, I see this one as dead in the water. The technical
problems are significant, and there is a general lack of impetus to actually
get out there are solve the problems.

A DRM industry for plain media (consume only, non-interactive) that dreams of
securing global distribution is, in my view, destined to self-flagellate until
it is but a poor faded memory in the distant mists of time.

On the other hand, DRM _can_ enable good consumer experience: I really like
Steam, for example. I recently bought my first Mac and many of the games I'd
purchased on PC instantly became available in my library. After just logging
in, I could download them for the new platform and play away instantly... even
though I'd changed countries and gaming platforms. This is what DRM _should_
be doing: empowering people to mobility and choice through connected media.
Steam just does so many things right: content discovery, supporting smaller
and independent content developers, social elements.

I think the entire DRM industry should look up to Steam for a successful
example of the future. Bottom line: THINK OF THE CUSTOMER.

~~~
danssig
Spot on post. I think the problem here is that big media sees its customers as
a bunch of criminals who will only pay when forced to.

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ojbyrne
This is why it's called "disruption." Basically there's a lot of mid-to-late
career people whose (comfortable-to-extremely wealthy) lifestyles depend on
ensuring that the status quo is maintained until after they retire.

Après moi, le déluge.

------
mixmastamyk
I sympathize but this long-winded piece didn't add much new to the discussion.

tl;dr:

    
    
      The easiest and most convenient way to see the movies or 
      TV shows you want is to get them illegally.

~~~
fourspace
I think this was the more important bit:

    
    
      Again, to belabor the obvious: The illegal version isn't just free. It's better.

~~~
mahrain
Exactly, as opposed to DRM'ed files, the open formats aren't "defective by
design".

~~~
rmc
Even without DRM, pirated content is usually available when you want it, as
soon as it's available, in more geographic areas (try buying digital content
outside USA), it's available in more formats, the file you get will work on
more devices, the file you get won't have ads, the file you get won't have
copyright warnings. Even if the content cartel sold unDRMed files, they still
wouldn't be as good.

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dasil003
I'm sorry, but acting like torrenting is a superior user experience to Netflix
is not credible. Sure pirating has its advantages, but it's no panacaea. For
one thing, who wants to wait hours to download something before they can watch
it? The disk space requirements are huge, and the quality and availability
issues are problematic. Netflix may not have everything streaming, but they
have a pretty good selection at your fingertips, and with DVD coverage you can
fill in the gaps of most stuff that you _really_ want to watch.

The problem is the "industry" is not monolithic, and if you think about
Netflix cannibalizing $200/month cable subscriptions (for all premium
channels) into $10/month streaming, you can see where some of the players are
gonna drag their feet. It'd be great if big content could come together a
create an amazing service for everyone, but they don't have the chops or the
incentive.

~~~
w1ntermute
> who wants to wait hours to download something before they can watch it

I don't know how fast your internet is, but I can get an hour-long TV show in
720p in <10 minutes from torrents, and I'm paying $45/month for internet (in
America).

> The disk space requirements are huge

Are they? 2 TB hard drives are now $70 a pop, and who says you have to save
everything like a pack rat anyway?

> quality and availability issues are problematic

They've never been for me. There have always been plenty of seeds, and there
has always been a high quality version that has been easy to find (usually
because it has the most seeds & snatches). If anything, the quality is MUCH
higher when torrenting than it is when streaming (legally or illegally).

~~~
danssig
>There have always been plenty of seeds, and there has always been a high
quality version that has been easy to find

This isn't the case for me. I watch mostly "foreign" films (i.e. films in a
language I don't speak or understand). If the subtitles aren't included it can
be a nightmare to find some (I won't watch dubbed movies). Sometimes you can't
find any subtitles at all (I once had a movie sitting on my HD for over a year
waiting for subtitles to show up for it), often when you do find them they're
out of sync [1] or awful translations written by people who don't speak one
(or both!) languages very well. Often whole chunks of the movie will be left
out or have one word explanations.

So for me, the quality is not remotely better via torrents, that's just
literally the only option for what I want to watch.

[1] Apparently different formats actually run at different speeds, causing the
subtitles to drift if they were made for a different format. I didn't want to
know about this and if the media industry had provided me some way of
consuming this content I wouldn't have had to learn about it.

~~~
w1ntermute
You're an edge case, so I don't think your situation is particularly
instructive when considering the industry as a whole.

But in case you didn't already know, you can obtain subtitles separately, from
sites like Open Subtitles and Subscene, then sync them to your video. I use
Subtitle Editor[0]. Although it's Linux only, I'm sure there's similar
software for other OS's as well.

0: <http://home.gna.org/subtitleeditor/>

~~~
danssig
I appreciate that I'm an edge case, but I'm not the only person who behaves
this way.

As far as your other info, thanks for your help. I do, however, already know
all this. Believe me.

Syncing to your video is a very hit and miss process. It's not a matter of
just pointing the app at the two files and let it sort them out. What if the
original version included more of the credits? It can be a huge pain. VLC
makes it easier by letting me increase/decrease subtitle delay as it starts to
drift out of sync.

------
orangechicken
I certainly identified with the spirit of the article and know that people
_are_ willing to pay money for legal access to digital content _when it's easy
and has the stuff people want_. I'm one of them.

Since I signed up for Rhapsody about a year ago, my downloading of music
illegally has plummeted. I trade the small amount of Downloader's Guilt for
$10/mo and have access to (almost) everything I want to listen to. (And from
wherever I want to listen to it: my computer, my phone, my home stereo.)

Before Rhapsody, I was downloading gigabytes of albums – I hadn't bought a CD
in the new millenium (save those from smaller bands I wanted to personally
supported). Now the music industry has me as a customer again, and monthly.
Hollywood needs a Rhapsody to survive.

~~~
tomjen3
Indeed.

Don't look at torrents. Go look at many of the download services
rapidshare.com, megaupload.com, etc. They all have one thing in common: they
charge money.

This means that there is a segment of people out there who are willing to pay,
but whoes needs are for one reason or another are not met under the current
system.

If you want to grow the market try to capture them.

~~~
w1ntermute
Of course, all these sites are charging for is taking away the inconvenience
of the free download option. If you use JDownloader[0] and don't want to see
something right away, you can use these sites just as well without paying them
a single cent. The most significant exception are the other sites, such as
HotFile, which use ReCAPTCHA, making JDownloader much less useful.

0: <http://jdownloader.org/>

------
yason
Yeah, so downloading torrents is still the easiest way to obtain selected
works despite its complexity. He's right in that we'll just probably have to
wait for a decade or so for things to get better, given the track record of
the MAFIAA.

However, there should still be an explicit law that allows people to legally
make free copies of content that isn't available for sale in any standard
format. There's _never_ enough supply as there's demand; there's always a
niche that just isn't reasonably satisfied by commerce itself. A number of
various collections or redistribution of minor series can thrive on the
proverbial pirate bay because there are non-commercial incentives only to
support them in the first place.

~~~
trotsky
Yeah, but no. If I want to make a home or specialty video and give it away to
a few folks but not sell it, that doesn't give you any kind of moral right to
take it and give it to the world. And it certainly shouldn't give you the
legal right. In your version of reality everything produced by anyone should
be available to all comers and if you don't charge for it then they'll give it
away for free? What about bloody confidential documents or video of my
groundbreaking experiments? I think you need to rethink that. If someone
genuinely doesn't want to sell you their film anymore well, then, bugger off.

~~~
slowpoke
_Yeah, but no. If I want to make a home or specialty video and give it away to
a few folks but not sell it, that doesn't give you any kind of moral right to
take it and give it to the world._

I can't take it. If, however, one of those persons you shared your video with
decides to share it with me (or the rest of the world), you can't do shit, to
put it bluntly.

To explain it differently, there are two states some piece of media (be it
movie, music, books or software) can be in: Private, and public (and to those
savvy C++ programmers amongst us, no, there is no "protected" :) ). As long as
it is private, indeed no one has a right to gain access to it. In your
example, the video would still be private as long as no one you showed / gave
it to decides to share it with other people (ie, the rest of the world).

Once someone decides to share it, it is no longer private. It's public. And
just as much as no one has a right to demand access to something private, no
one (not even you, as the original creator) has a right to stop people from
sharing something if they had access to it, thus no longer making it private.

To put this in perspective for the music and movie industry, as well as
software authors and writers: there is but one (very simple) way of
controlling your creation: don't share it with anyone else. Either that, or
publish it, accepting the consequences that come with that decision, one being
that you cannot stop people from sharing your creation.

 _tl;dr_ : I can't demand access from you, but neither can you demand me to
stop sharing once I have.

~~~
trotsky
I hope you're never interested in a job in commercial software - it's be very
hard for many of these firms to stay in business if every disgruntled
committer was legally clear to leak your whole source code base to the
competition or the world.

~~~
slowpoke
So, it amounts to firms relying on laws for their business model? Or, more
accurately, the artificial monopolies created by said laws? That's doing it
wrong. If you cannot stay in business without these laws, you shouldn't _be_
in business in the first place.

Oh, and no, I'm not in the least tiny bit interested in developing proprietary
software. :)

~~~
trotsky
best of luck on your crusade.

------
nhebb
_My new DVR holds so few shows [...] It holds now about 20 shows, and a few
movies, and is basically useless in that it fills up every few days ..._

I think the author needs to stop watching so much TV.

Does anyone identify with this piece? It seems largely exaggerated to me. I
watched the first 4 episodes of _The Inbetweeners_ , season 3, on demand last
night. I have FiOS, and even with its clunky menu navigation, it was easy to
find and watch the shows. The alternate is. what, download a 1GB torrent? I
don't see how that's easier.

If Hollywood wants to improve box office receipts, they could stop making so
many sequels, movies from comic books, movies from TV shows, and 3D for the
sake of 3D.

~~~
peteforde
You shouldn't confuse "should" and "could". I only watch a handful of shows
but I have no business judging the author for spending his time however the
hell he wants. I'll likely make millions of dollars before he will, and that's
entirely his prerogative.

It was long winded and pedantic, but he's making a solid point metaphorically:
this shit is painful, and no mortal can or would navigate the morass of
technical, legal and financial woes without wondering the exact same things.

I feel sorry for people that don't know how to move comfortably around tech,
because the one thing you and I share in common that they don't have is a
choice in how this goes down on a personal level.

------
joejohnson
Best line in the article: "If the studios were smart they'd go to the mat and
create a massive one-stop shop for TV and movies, find a price point they can
live with and then set programmers loose to make the thing as easy to use and
ubiquitous as possible."

------
int3rnaut
Size matters.

I think as similar as these two industries are, the big deciding factor in
this particular war is the size of files being downloaded. Video files are
mammoth in comparison to music files and the Cable and Internet companies know
this--there are obvious infrastructural problems in play, but the recent move
by a number of ISP's to cap the data transfer capacity of its clients is a
huge factor in this war on pirating--I mean where I live in Canada 1/2 of the
major players have adopted this, with the 2nd committed to it but unsure of
when it will be fully in place--so when that does happen I'll be forced into a
cap of 100gb a month for the price I previously afforded with stiff penalties
for going over--in this day and age 100gb, especially in terms of TV and
movies is hardly anything. Couple that with my desire to play online games,
surf the internet, stream on youtube etc and my fun time options are severely
limited. If anything I think Hollywood lucked out on the fact that ISP's have
hit a roadblock in terms of bandwidth and what they can afford to provide.

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chopsueyar
How many terabytes would it take to store all the television shows and movies
from the US in standard definition for the past 30 years? How about only the
shows you and your family/friends want?

Storage prices will continue to drop. At some point in the near future it will
be less expensive to have an entire collection of video stored locally, rather
than try to create the infrastructure to stream across the country or globe.

------
benaston
Oh yes. The whole movie industry needs to change. When a new movie comes out I
want to see it _that day_ , on my laptop/TV/home theatre in HD. If I am
constrained to a single viewing for a period, fine.

I do not want to see it in a smelly, sticky, noisy public theatre.

Will this ever happen? Unlikely.

------
bsiemon
In the golden days of media distribution (the 90s?) X amount if money was
made. They will do anything to make X again and then after that anything to
make more than X.

------
idonthack
"about to"?

