By: Comfortably Anonymous
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Topic: News: Technical
"It's useless to care about the pirates who would do it anyway, is a smaller group and usually dont have that much disposable income anyway. But it's the casual people and adults - your idea about piracy will change after you start getting more disposable income, like happened for me and lots of my friends and now happily buy what we enjoy (and another reason was the quality improvement and easiness of Steam and Spotify and other legit services)."
Um... no. "Lots" of my friends and I have a high disposable income. But we are simply not delivered what we want in a format that we are willing to use.
Frankly, the number 1 feature that "my group" looks for in a media player is a USB slot, and the ability to play xvid avi files. You know what? A lot of players now offer this. From the low-end on up. Can I go and buy a movie or tv programme in that format?
I don't really think that the (in the US) RIAA and MPAA are particularly on the ball -- they should have filed suit on Samsung, etc. for producing such devices. THERE IS NO "LEGITIMATE" CONTENT FOR THESE DEVICES. Would I purchase such content? Yes, I would. Ripping CDs and DVDs is a serious pain.
There may well be services like "Steam", but, honestly, I am a 50 year old, and I have never, and (most likely) will never use it. Just tell me where I can buy a copy of the new Batman movie on a USB stick. Meanwhile, if I buy a DVD copy (haven't yet), it may have yet another "anti-copy" measure de-jour implemented to make it inconvenient to rip. Frankly, it's easiest to simply torrent the damn thing (time is money, you know, and I have other things in my life to worry about).
Now, it is true that studios HAVE released movies in flash drive format:
but note that it has "DRM". It won't play on my Samsung player! And, its $53 for Ghostbusters (25 year old movie).
http://www.play.com/Gadgets/Gadgets/4-/11998344/Star-Trek-USB-Stick/Product.html
DivX, can "enable" up to 5 devices. Only $30 (much better than over $50). May work, but I am not sure enough to actually buy it.
And that's it. Meanwhile, what WE (my group) wants is the ability to purchase the programming, put it onto hard disks (good heavens, even my wife has a 1TB USB volume used for media and backing up her netbook, and we have 6TB in the home media server), be able to transfer to USB media for portability to be able to watch where we want. MY group sees nothing wrong with spending north of $1000 for a media pc. As long as it works. And the prices are dropping; we only paid $100 for a 1TB USB drive.
As it is, the content creators get very little from us. We have the money, but there is no product that we are willing to purchase. Which has driven us into torrents. Now, it would be hard to break the habit. Unless the content providers can somehow magically give us 500Kbps+ downloads of an incredibly large catalog. Which is the minimum bar that the "pirates" have set.
What has to happen
To get us back (and we ARE the ones with the money), the content has to be provided in SD or better quality, on-line, and via brick-and-mortar shopping, for the same price (or better for a download version), in DRM-free formats that are playable on the common home kit (aXXo's format would do nicely).
I would pay $5 for Ghostbusters (it's a 2 for $10 movie at WalMart). Billing must be as convenient as the Apple Store (and, yes, we buy from the Apple Store; but not music -- just iPhone games and applications. Why that is is another discussion, but remember, I *am* 50 years old).
And, having done that, it would still take time to convert us (our group). After all, we have been using torrents now for years.