141–150 of 187 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if I want a DRM free copy so that I don’t have to ever keep track of this landscape of shifting alliances? This is way more mental overhead than I want to devote to movies.
You’ve never been able to buy commercial video without copy protection. Even in the VHS days you had Macrovision.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many hundreds of hours of entertainment for $167? Granted it has almost no marginal cost for the seller, but as you said, you can buy HBO for a fraction of $167 and still watch it. People just like to complain. It has never been cheaper or easier to instantly consume media, yet there is no satisfaction (because they’re comparing it to stealing the media, which is illogical of course). Of course, there are legitim…
> It has never been cheaper or easier That's exactly the thing though. It has been easier. We all remember it being easier, when we pirated something. The actual sentence should be "it has never been easier while also getting to pay for it". That's just not a very compelling case.
There is no purpose to comparing pirating with legal means.
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You’ve never been able to buy commercial video without copy protection. Even in the VHS days you had Macrovision.
Not true. Perhaps you meant to say that copy protection has existed for a long time. But plenty of commercial video has been available without copy protection.
What commercial video from the major studios have not had copy protection?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many hundreds of hours of entertainment for $167? Granted it has almost no marginal cost for the seller, but as you said, you can buy HBO for a fraction of $167 and still watch it. People just like to complain. It has never been cheaper or easier to instantly consume media, yet there is no satisfaction (because they’re comparing it to stealing the media, which is illogical of course). Of course, there are legitim…
> How many hundreds of hours of entertainment for $167? That's not relevant. The simple fact is that $167 for a season is well beyond the budget of the average person whose opinion you're considering. "Hours of entertainment" is (always) the wrong formula, by the way. Nobody needs to steal anything to enjoy hours of free entertainment doing a myriad of activities. Most TV shows simply make no effort at all to price e…
If the media owner determine there is insufficient revenue and more can be had by lowering price, they can do that.
What is relevant is that it used to cost much more to get the same product, and it’s up to the buyer to determine what they want to spend to entertain themselves. There’s so many options nowadays, if GoT $/hour is too much, then choose something else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not true. Perhaps you meant to say that copy protection has existed for a long time. But plenty of commercial video has been available without copy protection.
if you are referring to mainstream commercial movies by the major studios, Macrovision was introduced in 1984 for VHS tapes. DVDs from mainstream studios also had DRM. What commercial video from the major studios have not had copy protection?
Either there was no copy protection, or the copy protection was so trivial to circumvent that I never even knew it was there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
if you are referring to mainstream commercial movies by the major studios, Macrovision was introduced in 1984 for VHS tapes. DVDs from mainstream studios also had DRM. What commercial video from the major studios have not had copy protection?
I'd have to go to my fathers house to find the stack of VHS tapes that were duplicated from rentals. Meanwhile I have my own modest stack of DVDs that I copied in the 2000s using whatever generic DVD ripper was available for windows at the time. I recall once or twice being unable to rip a DVD for copy protection reasons but it was rare. Either there was no copy protection, or the copy protection was so trivial to ci…
I never said that the copy protection schemes weren’t easily circumvented. I said that commercial video has always had copy protection.
"For months now, journalists, industry insiders, and consumers have opined on who will “win” the streaming wars and why." The more streaming services there will be, the more likely it is that only thepiratebay and torrents will win.
It's amazing how we have gone full circle in the last 15 years or so. In the old days, people complained about their cable tv bill: why do I have to pay for 250 channels when I only watch 5 of them? Let me pay only for what I watch. Now that the future is here, people are complaining that they need to sign up for too many streaming services. Why can't I just pay once for a bundle and get everything I need? I'm just a…
Incidentally, after you paid for cable TV had better UX than streaming services today. You had one universal interface - your TV and its remote - and the UI was decoupled from channels and movie producers.
There is a sweet spot users want: one subscription and one UI, and for the two to be decoupled from each other.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How many hundreds of hours of entertainment for $167? That's not relevant. The simple fact is that $167 for a season is well beyond the budget of the average person whose opinion you're considering. "Hours of entertainment" is (always) the wrong formula, by the way. Nobody needs to steal anything to enjoy hours of free entertainment doing a myriad of activities. Most TV shows simply make no effort at all to price e…
In discretionary entertainment goods, there is no “should be” price, other than the price a seller is willing to sell at and a buyer is willing to buy at. If the media owner determine there is insufficient revenue and more can be had by lowering price, they can do that. What is relevant is that it used to cost much more to get the same product, and it’s up to the buyer to determine what they want to spend to entertai…
That's true in most markets, but also totally irrelevant to the point. If a seller has no idea what the market will pay for something, and so just slaps on an absurdly high price because they don't actually care about this secondary (a la carte) market at all, that's almost the same as not offering the service at all. If an a la carte service is prohibitively expensive, it might as well not exist for the purposes of this discussion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd have to go to my fathers house to find the stack of VHS tapes that were duplicated from rentals. Meanwhile I have my own modest stack of DVDs that I copied in the 2000s using whatever generic DVD ripper was available for windows at the time. I recall once or twice being unable to rip a DVD for copy protection reasons but it was rare. Either there was no copy protection, or the copy protection was so trivial to ci…
Generic DVD rippers used DeCSS to remove DRM. There were also plenty of devices that could remove MacroVision while you were copying. I never said that the copy protection schemes weren’t easily circumvented. I said that commercial video has always had copy protection.
The big players will likely all survive, yes, but some of the smaller ones are likely to end up also-rans. Thanks to IP exclusives, we'll end up with 3-4 players in the market, for sure. Better? Worse? I dunno. Different, for sure.