Curious's Journal

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Unbox resells shows/movies in a digital DRM format that can only be viewed in Windows and in some cases Tivo… the lack of OSX as a supported platform means I still need to usenet/p2p for shows I miss… but I never knew that you could buy shows on demand from your tivo before. I’ve been aware of tivo coming out with new units and people complaining about prices, but I stopped following along when I joined the digital satalite world since the digital satellite DVRs are “good enough”… perhaps I need to see what Tivo has been up to lately…

Not too long ago, apple started selling TVShows on the internet through iTunes. They made deals to sell shows for all the major networks and ~50 cable channels. They made it so people could by shows they wanted to watch legaly, on ipods and a recently release appletv device. So people that only watch a few select shows can now subscribe only to those shows they want to watch – watch them on thier apple and not pay a cable/dish bill for crap they don’t watch.

At $1.99 per episode, you get about 10 weekly shows for ~80$/month commercial free (unfortunatly, not in HD). NBC (which owns Heros/30 Rock/Office/etc.) has decided it wants double what it is currently getting for each show purchased in iTunes. Apple says this would cause them to raise the price to $4.99 per episode, something they are not intrested in doing. NBC has announced that it would not renew the contract it has with Apple, that expires in December.

Lots of bloggers seem to be confused about this turn of events. Why would NBC give up such a large revenue stream for it’s shows on the internet? Don’t they know that people who are willing to pay for shows will need to pirate them inorder to get them over the internet now? Where did they think people would turn to get the shows they were paying for? The answer seems to reside in Hula.

Hulu ( www.hulu.com/more.html), a site started by NBC and some partners to offer shows though it’s own website and partners like Yahoo and AOL. Hula seems to be what NBC expects to use as it’s channel for making money off of tv on the internet. Hula goes beta in October, the contract ends in December, so that gives NBC 2-3months to go from Beta to production – right? Wrong, since December is midseason, Apple announced that it would not release any new episodes for NBC starting in September.  There is also some question about what “rights” users of Hulu will have with content they watch. Will they be able to download episodes? Downloading episodes is important to a lot of people since most people don’t have the bandwidth to stream shows at decent quality, also people want to play shows on their portable video devices and on their media centers, appletvs, and crap… Apple has come up with an end to end solution for people who want to get their shows easily off the internet and into their living rooms / computers/ portable devices for 2$/show. The shows often don’t come out till the next day, yet people are still willing to pay. NBC has apparently decided to abandon this  revenue stream. Without the itunes method of getting shows on demand  people will likely gravitate to alternatives that offer NBC little to no revenue like commercial skipping DVRs and freely downloading episodes hours after shows air using p2p, usenet, and friend’s shares.

I’m ranting because it bugs me that NBC would do something so stupid, I feel like I must be missing something… that maybe if I just started jotting it all down it would make sense to me… the best guess I have is that Hulu is going to be magical or something, but I’ve yet to see a major media company “get it right” and I seriously doubt that whatever solution Hulu cooks up, I probably won’t be able to use it with my Mac, and I proly won’t be able to watch it on my ipod.

Well, that is enough rant, I’m off to watch the leaked fall tv show pilots.

PS. if you’ve read this far you deserve a cookie!

Movies.com came out with a list of “25 best movies you’ve never seen”: movies.go.com/feature?featureid=881399 Well… here is my much shorter list (excluding any movie in the movies.com list).

-Series 7: The Contenders
Picked this up at a video rental place one day on a whim… people have to kill people to win a tv game show.

-Schizopolis
I went to the Video Vault years ago and asked for a film that was good, yet different… after they went though a list of films I had seen… all at once the tw guys at the counter suggested this Steven Soderbergh film. This film was worthy of being part of the The Criterion Collection

-Alice in Wonderland as directed by Bud Townsend.
After high school some friends of mine and I went on a quest to find porno movies with a plot… or more importantly someone who took the freedoms offered by the “X” rating and created a film that had some level of artistic merit… Caligula is probably the example most people think of when trying to come up with a film such as this… well, what about something that isn’t a drama… how about a musical, comedy, fantasy porno… yea… ummm yea

-Hedwig and the Angry Inch
IMDB states the tag line is “An anatomically incorrect rock odyssey”. That really describes this movie quite well.

-Short Bus
A movie that holds no bars when exploring human sexuality. John Cameron Mitchell the Director/Producer of this film also did Hedwig above. This would qualify as a “porno with a plot” except it really is more of a Woody Allan type flick that knows no limits.

-Waco Rules of Engagement
Documentary on what happened at Waco

-City of Lost Children
The setting is very Myst like, the characters are very unique and the story quite interesting…

Of the 25 movies from the movies.com list I’ve seen these movies:
Falling Down
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
Bubble Boy
Bully
Idiocracy
The Boondock Saints

I enoyed each of them as well…

BTW, if you liked Bully, check out Ken Park

Making a list like this is difficult, since I really have no idea what you have seen, nor what kind of movies you like… so, I’m going to just name some other films I liked that might be considered “not seen”

Requiem for a Dream
Memento
Trainspotting
Boys don’t cry
Brazil
Pleasantville
Cube (whole series)
Dark City

So, apple has a free song every week… before the release of “itunes plus” it was only available with DRM… well, the latest one is available without DRM, so if you want to try out an “itunes plus” song without the expense… here you go:

phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=255250200&s=143441&i=190123186

(you may already need to be configured to use the itunes plus version of songs for this to work)

song is not that great, but hey – it’s free

Sony has developed YET ANOTHER DRM for DVDs… and some of their OWN DVD players won’t play them.

www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=38938

Could you imagine spending a over 300$ on a really nice Sony DVD player… buying Sony’s ‘Stranger than Fiction’ or ‘The Holiday’ and discovering that they won’t play! Not only will they not play but there is no way to play them till Sony comes out with an update to their playe that YOU will need to figure out how to install…

while you wait, you may want to illegally download the movies you purchased online so that you can watch them

Seriously… if Sony is having issues with people ripping off their movies, making it harder for honest consumer to watch movies they pay for DOES NOT HELP!

Ohh yea.. that DRM really works:

www.mininova.org/search/?search=stranger+than+fiction

www.mininova.org/search/?search=the+holiday

Hell, even seems to be blueray version is available for download both.

Ok, now this is one of those “I’ll belive it when I see it”, along with a “Did Microsoft really say that?”

Background… Microsoft is a company that is heavily invested in DRM technology.. so much so, that when a vulnerability was exposed in their DRM, they released a patch for it faster then they had ever released a patch for anything before ( www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2006/09/71738 ). IN fact Microsoft’s flagship music player, the Zune, wraps non-DRM’d music with a DRM layer before it shares a song. So even if you record a song and share it with someone using the Zune share feature, the other person only has three days to listen to the song no more then three times ( www.medialoper.com/hot-topics/microsoft/microsoft-insider-clarifies-zunes-sharing-limitations/ ).

So, supposedly Microsoft has said it is willing to release EMI’s music DRM free. They add a caveat to that statement: “We plan on offering it to them as soon as our label partners are comfotable with it.” The label parters one assumes are EMI’s competitors. It’s not clear whether this means when the partners are comfortable with the fact that music is being sold by a major label without DRM or comfortable with the fact that EMI is selling music in a way that customers want – while they want customers to accept that music will only come to them DRM’d unless they buy the cd or get it from the radio. Regardless, I’ll believe it when I see it…

Anyways… now to what Microsoft apparently said that surprised me: “Consumers have made it clear that unprotected music is something they want” what happened to all the “Customers want DRM since it allows them better ways to gain access to music, like subscriptions”

ohh link to story here: www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=mobile_devices&articleId=9015898&taxonomyId=75

So, it’s official EMI will be selling their collection of music DRM free in may (starting with itunes). The tracks will sell for $.30 more… But wait! Steve said he wouln’t sell DRM songs for more then non-DRM songs, how did Steve save face on this? The DRM free tracks are recorded at 256k bit. So Steve’s story is that your paying for added quality not for the DRM freeness of the track. So, looks like major recording companies are starting to “get it”… what will this mean to companies companies that already sell DRM Free music like EMusic?

First review of this movie that I’ve come across: www.boingboing.net/2006/09/16/this_film_is_not_rat.html

Of the movies listed, the only ones I have not seen are Gunner Palace and A Dirty Shame. Speaking of Dirty Shame, I have not seen any John Waters films…. I really need to get around to changing this fact

Dirty Shame:

www.apple.com/trailers/fineline/a_dirty_shame/

Gunner Palace:

www.apple.com/trailers/independent/gunner_palace.html

www.break.com/movies/cool_optical_illusion.html