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Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

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Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#2
I hope Aereo continues to win. Another company doing the same thing is: http://www.skittertv.com/ - unfortunately neither of them support my local area. Due to my house's construction/location, I can't pick up DTV signals easily and would gladly pay $10-$15/mo to get those channels instead of the minimum $30/mo that my cable company charges for basic package.

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#3
So what if some company did something similar to Zediva, but with a model where customers "buy" the DVDs and then sell them back to the company when they are done streaming it? Basically use first sale to set up a streaming service where you don't need to deal with licensing issues.

I pay $20/month for access to the servers and infrastructure. I get $10 of that to use as purchasing credit. Movies cost anywhere from $1-$5 depending on popularity, and the company buys them back for some small amount.

The company would probably need to have some system in place for dealing with people that actually want the DVD that they 'bought'. Maybe something as simple as letting people know that they own the DVD, but the company is not responsible for shipping it to them. If the customer wants to come pick it up at the office, he can feel free to swing by and have someone pull it from the data center for him.

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#5
There's really the exact same copyright-induced inefficiency in traditional video rental places. It always struck me as bizarre that a video rental place could "run out" of copies of a particular film, when at trivial expense they could manufacture (on site) additional copies on demand.

Intuitively it seems like this would result in more money for the rightsholders as well, although maybe the need for video rental shops to vastly overprovision copies of some films made them more money than the alternative.

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#6
I wonder if any of the companies that require unique uploads to the cloud service play fast and loose with compression. There is a large spectrum between running a hash over a file to see if it already exists on the server, and doing the same thing over pieces of a file. Full file deduplication might be clearly against the rules, but what about running a totally generic upload cache that only looked at parts of a file to see if it already had been uploaded as a chunk of data and then copying from the server side cache instead of retransmitting from the user. Seems like there is a lot of grey area between deduplication and simple optimized compression.

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#7
Meanwhile millions just illegally download the movies and tv shows of various sites, completely ignoring copyright law.

And there isn't anything these people can do about it.

But hey, lets do a lot more suits against companies and at least force them to do crazy things.

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#8
post #2

I hope Aereo continues to win. Another company doing the same thing is: http://www.skittertv.com/ - unfortunately neither of them support my local area. Due to my house's construction/location, I can't pick up DTV signals easily and would gladly pay $10-$15/mo to get those channels instead of the minimum $30/mo that my cable company charges for basic package.

You should call the cable company back and ask for the "lifeline" package, by that specific name. It only includes the local channels, but it exists in basically every franchise area and is generally $10 or less.

Re: Why Johnny can't stream: How video copyright went insane

#9
Storing a permanent copy rather than a buffer just large enough for streaming is a pessimization, not an optimization.

And there's my word of the day. Can't wait to go pessimize me some software systems. Heh. Theses days, it's practically my job description.

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