[mythtv-users] Their Baaaacccckkk!

Raphael Pooser rpooser at gmail.com
Wed Feb 15 00:11:02 UTC 2006


Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 02:24:38PM -0700, Greg Woods wrote:
>  I
> would never buy a song from the Apple music store, for instance, because
> they give it to me in a way that I can't use it in my home music system.
> It's worthless to me, so they have lost a lot of sales.
>   
>
> The Ars piece I linked last night about (which I stole from Mr Newbury;
> thanks :-) makes that point pretty clearly, as well:
>
> 	You get the picture. Copy protection is not about stamping out
> 	piracy. Sure, it will cut down on piracy-at least the casual
> 	file-trading that goes on. But at its heart, its about finding
> 	new ways to monetize the content. And by "monetize the
> 	content," I mean "charge you multiple times for the same
> 	thing."
>
> Nice piece.
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra
>   
Yes, that Ars article hits the nail on the head or whatever the 
expression is (it got linqed off the inq is how I read it). You can 
watch your show once, if you paid for it, but you have to make sure to 
be up in time to watch it.  If you want on demand, to watch it when you 
want, we have that for you, but it'll cost you extra in addition to the 
price of being able to watch it at all.  Then if you really want true on 
demand, which is to be able to watch it whenever you want for an 
unlimited time, a la myth, this is sacrilege, and of course is wanted to 
be the most costly solution such that it becomes prohibitive, lest DVD 
sales suffer.  A show like the Sopranos: once you've paid your monthly 
HBO fee and watched Sopranos this week, I don't see how HBO can make an 
attempt to get more money off you to watch that same episode again -- 
not for a long while at least.  I'm not gonna go rush out and buy the 
DVD immediately once the episode is over.  One day they may get a DVD 
sale off you when you go to buy season 2 or whatever at walmart 2 years 
later.  In the short term at least things like Tivo and myth won't cause 
them to lose money on any kind of television content that you are 
already paying to see.  Most myth users probably auto expire their stuff 
without ever archiving it anyway, so a potential DVD sale is a potential 
DVD sale same as a non on demand user.  I know there are a lot who do 
burn it to DVD and archive it and I certainly _don't_ think that's 
wrong.  But I think it's kind of dumb for those TV companies to waste 
time pursuing broadcast flags this and that and attempting to limit our 
ability to record stuff, when there is actually no potential revenue 
being lost there, as the number of users who actually do archive it is 
probably comparatively small relative to the whole userbase.
About DRM in general, with itunes in the forefront, Brad said:

Lost some sales, yes.. but made nearly a billion. I agree that  
consumers shouldn't be assumed criminals, but the masses have spoken.  
They are willing to make concessions in return for quick/easy purchases.

but that doesn't actually present a counterpoint to Greg, because as Tim 
said, they're pretty much still using itunes because their DRM is pretty 
easy to crack.  I think Greg's orginal point was that people have not 
been shown to buy into DRM that has not already been cracked or has a 
workaround.  To my knowledge I think this is pretty much true.  For 
instance in the games industry, DRM has been around for a long time, but 
disc copy protection on computer CDs didn't historically hinder gamers 
playing their games.  And when it did start to become a problem, things 
like Daemon tools or others were produced, which allowed gamers to go on 
playing games and not worry about how the invasive DRM on their gaming 
discs would otherwise in some cases prevent them from even being able to 
play the game without such ISO loaders (copy protection rendering 
incompatible with some drives).  Hell, some industries should consider 
themselves lucky to still be around as the only reason they're still 
selling is because some good people have developed workarounds to their 
unfortunate DRM.
Also, to illustrate the truth of the Ars article in aother industry 
besides TV, in gaming we used to be able to use two discs in one box to 
play a game multiple times on a network.  Pay once for the game and ten 
people could play.  Is this true anymore?  No, if you want to play the 
game on a network anymore, first you don't have extra disks in the box 
anymore, and the CD key issue attempts to prevent you moving the CD from 
one computer to the next.  Further, the EULAS now expect you to have 
paid for ten games if you plan on having ten people play over network.  
Kind of nuts.
Raphael


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