![Portrait with a Clumber horse [10/52]
I actually intended to try and do quite a straight portrait and include the horse at the side of me. I stood with my back to the horse with my camera at ...](http://publicenergy.co.uk/Projects/52-Weeks/20100306-1145-0017-Edit/803460292_nQg6M-Th.jpg "Portrait with a Clumber horse [10/52]
I actually intended to try and do quite a straight portrait and include the horse at the side of me. I stood with my back to the horse with my camera at ...")
No wonder people share files
I love watching films and I love listening to music. I work for a living and have no problem buying films and music.
It’s taken a very long time for the big companies to finally realise how to deal with music – make it good quality, usable anywhere, good value and easy to get at. I love MP3 shops like Bleep where you can get very high quality tracks at a price that seems reasonable given that there isn’t somebody producing discs, shipping them across the country or even around the world then having the overhead of a physical shop to sell them in.
These days there are streaming services like Napster and Spotify which are good enough so that you can listen to pretty much anything for less money per month than it used to cost to buy a CD in a shop. Because of the good value of these, I pay for one of them and enjoy using it (Napster, mostly via a Squeezebox in my case).
Movies on the other hand are a completely different kettle of fish – it seems like music was when the original Napster first arrived. The movie companies doing their best to sell you a crippled piece of crap with your film in it. Because films are sold in a variety of formats with various kinds of rights management attached to them, I’m wary about buying anything because I don’t know if I’ll be able to play it in the future. I already know I won’t be able to enjoy it out of the confines of whatever the seller thinks it should be used in.
iTunes movies are a complete no no. Tied to the computer or one of their own devices. Apple still get away with this kind of behaviour with music too, iTunes really being a shop that you have to install software to buy from and that software only really working well with devices sold by Apple. Until it’s all opened up for any device by any manufacturer I won’t use it.
It should be possible for me to buy a film and watch it on anything I want to watch it on and not have restrictions like this.
I would buy more films if they weren’t crippled.
TV again is behind the times and suffering as a result. If a TV show is made anywhere in the world, usually the rights to distribute it are carved up in to different territories and people in these territories can’t view content that originates from a different one. The end result of this is that a TV show is made, appears on some companies online TV service and everyone not in that country sees a message saying they can’t watch it. It’s not the 1970’s any more.
So how about a TV programme shop, selling TV programmes from across the world for reasonable amounts of money in an open format so that people can choose to watch what they want where ever it comes from.
The actions of these companies to try and protect their media is driving proper customers away – a lot of people don’t download music and movies because they don’t want to pay – they do it because it’s easier and you don’t feel like they’re being screwed by buying some strange format thing that only works on a device they tell you it should run on in an area of the planet that they have also dictated.
emdot 6:49 am on February 15, 2010 Permalink |
So great, Dave! I think Getty would also love your fish-eye animal portraits — i think they’d sell like hotcakes!! :)