This reminds me of something Steve Kim said on podcast 121 about how Rhapsody's ever changing catalog left a bad taste in his mouth.
One thing no one ever really talks about in the whole downloads v. disc debate is the annoyingly short licensing arrangements studios make with download and streaming services. Movies will be there one day gone the next. The Apple TV Junkie site lists new movies that have been added each week right along side movies that have been removed. It seems to be even worse with streaming Netflix's deals with Starz where huge blocks of movies disappear at once. VOD is the same way.
Which means these services may be convenient but are ultimately unreliable... which makes many consumers (such as me) hesitant to put their trust in them as a primary source for content.
And in case anyone thinks I'm some sort of download hater I own both an Apple TV and an Xbox360. And I use them on occasion (once every month or two) to rent movies plus I use Netflix Streaming a good bit and Boxee on the Apple TV is good for the occasional show I missed.
But where's the majority of my entertainment budget still going? Blu-ray purchases and a 4 at a time plan from Netflix.
you are right.. but this is not fault of downloads as future now is it? it's purely fixable by studios and it won't really cost them anything. They are protecting packaged media still, but as demand goes up they will stop limiting downloads potential like this.
They've improved content delivery several times just in the last year. It's not hard to see that they'll continue offering more and more content as times go by.
You can believe that if you want but I am not gonna hold my breath.
My money is on a long painful fight between consumers and the content providers before we can ever get to the point where they will give is what we want, high quality, no DRM fiels for a reasonable discount over physical media.
It took the music industry 10 plus years to get to this point and I don't expect the video providers to get there any sooner.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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This reminds me of something Steve Kim said on podcast 121 about how
Rhapsody's ever changing catalog left a bad taste in his mouth.
One thing no one ever really talks about in the whole downloads v.
disc debate is the annoyingly short licensing arrangements studios
make with download and streaming services. Movies will be there
one day gone the next. The Apple TV Junkie site lists new movies
that have been added each week right along side movies that have been
removed. It seems to be even worse with streaming Netflix's deals
with Starz where huge blocks of movies disappear at once. VOD is the
same way.
Which means these services may be convenient but are ultimately
unreliable... which makes many consumers (such as me) hesitant to put
their trust in them as a primary source for content.
And in case anyone thinks I'm some sort of download hater I own both an Apple TV and an Xbox360. And I use them on occasion (once every month or two) to rent movies plus I use Netflix Streaming a good bit and Boxee on the Apple TV is good for the occasional show I missed.
But where's the majority of my entertainment budget still going? Blu-ray purchases and a 4 at a time plan from Netflix.
you are right.. but this is not fault of downloads as future now is it? it's purely fixable by studios and it won't really cost them anything. They are protecting packaged media still, but as demand goes up they will stop limiting downloads potential like this.
They've improved content delivery several times just in the last year. It's not hard to see that they'll continue offering more and more content as times go by.
You can believe that if you want but I am not gonna hold my breath.
My money is on a long painful fight between consumers and the content providers before we can ever get to the point where they will give is what we want, high quality, no DRM fiels for a reasonable discount over physical media.
It took the music industry 10 plus years to get to this point and I don't expect the video providers to get there any sooner.