| reply to SRFireside
Streaming video? First of all, streaming video is no threat to any industry. If the companies are smart they will get behind the idea and start doing what they did with movie rentals. Next, i don't know about you, but i have maybe downloaded 4 movies in total (Shrek, Vanilla Sky, Gladiator which I saw in theaters, and on DVD, and monsters inc). If you get movies, you know most of the time you get the first and second halves seperatly. And the quality is usually very bad compared to movies. First thing you have to do is get both parts which depending on the size of each file and the connection can take up to a total of 4 hours. And I have very little patience to wait that long for a bad quality movie. If you do get a high quality movie (i haven't been able to find one yet, but there may be places where there are) they are going to be huge. A normal length movie will probably be around 3 GB. I don't have that much room on my hard drive for one movie, and i don't have a connection (mine is cable with stable speeds of 100~200+ KB/s) fast enough that can download a 3GB movie. If anything, what's happening with file sharing is probably damaging the music industry more than anything, but hey, when a company tells a student to $15 for a cd that only has 2 or 3 good songs on it (and the fact that not even the whole CD is used and a CD costs less than $1 is besides the issue) and then is surprised by the fact that that student would rather go and get some mp3's quickly downloaded for free and then to put it onto his/her (got to be politically correct) mp3 player and carry around 100+ songs (if the mp3 player uses cds), then the music industry is really really slow. Maybe if the put more songs on a CD by making deals with mp3 player manufacturers so that a person could get more songs, or allowing a person to pick the songs they want, they wouldn't be losing so much money. File-trading is here to stay (as bad as it may be sometimes, it will still be used just to screw the record companies) so all this regulation won't even minimize it (since how are you supposed to control something as widespread and widely used as the Internet. I don't think that the government should or will spend taxpayers' money on tracking people that file-trade. And the fact that the large record companies don't care whether or not the start-up musicians find file trading beneficial to spread their reputation is a completely different issue. I know i went somewhat away from what this thread was discussing and i'm sorry but i just had to get this off my chest. |
