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Unregistered User
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banditws6 
damonlab
| It's like they want this to fail
Is anyone really surprised by this? The big media companies have botched the online market to the point of making it a great wasteland. We have burnable DVDs that won't burn, multiple DRM standards that are not only overly restrictive but that are also incompatible with each other's players, and we have companies pricing downloads almost on par with what the physical media would cost in a store, when their cost is only the bandwidth required to serve the download, and the quality is below that of a CD or DVD.
It makes one wonder whether these companies are trying to fail. Then, they could say, "See, we tried online delivery, but it doesn't work. No matter what we offer, people still keep downloading pirated copies. So, we desperately need laws to protect us from those evil terrorist-funding, drug-smuggling, child-exploiting, un-American, commie pirates." | |
pabster
join:2001-12-09
Waterloo, IA | Of course they do!
"Oh we tried legal DVD downloads and it didn't work!!!" | |
HMS1
join:2006-01-14
Austin, TX
| That may be the hidden agenda with the download service as a whole - "pay the same and get less". Same goes for the online DRM music shops: less quality, less packaging and more restrictions than CDs, but about the same price.
With the DVD burning in particular, tho, I wonder whether it's more incompetence than evil. I suspect that the movie people have no clue about technology and get suckered by snake-oil DRM vendors. "We can make it so they can burn only one DVD!" - "OK, here's a pile of money!"
Anyone who knows how the tech works could see this was going to be a travesty one way or another. If it will play reliably in a standard player, it's copyable; if uncopyable it won't work reliably in a standard player. So they introduce a lot of errors to make it barely play? It's amazing that something so dumb would even be sold. If the company cared about customers they'd sue the DRM hucksters for a refund.
Maybe after exhausting all other alternatives, they'll finally just lower prices and find that they make more money. | |
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