[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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