The entertainment industry has lost it's mind. They are still suing their customers in some kind of twisted business plan that involves attacking the very people they are trying to market to. It's actually scary if you think about it, buy this CD, or movie, and if you don't, we will take your house so just pay up. Mob style. It's insane.
And then to release competing HD formats, I remember all too well the VHS versus Beta battle in the 80's, don't they? Yes, I realize the HD format war wasn't a long battle, and Blu-Ray is king, but king of what? They completely missed the point in creating a new format, people don't want to buy shiny disks anymore. We are done with that. I'm done with trying to keep them in alphabetic order so I can find what I want to watch. I'm done trying to keep them in the right cases. I'm done with scratches and lost disks. I'm done. The sad part of this? When Blu-Ray as a format dies, the industry will not acknowledge that they missed the boat on what people really want in a format, they will just blame piracy.
So I was pleased to see a service like Xbox Live come along with the promise of the availability of HD media content for download. In particular, HD TV shows I could grab and watch at my leisure. I travel allot for work and just don't live the kind of life where I am going to dedicate every Thursday at 8pm to gather in front of a TV set and watch a show. Sorry, there is nothing quite that good out there for that to happen. But now when I am home, to actually get to watch a few episodes of something sounded great, right? Well it's been almost a year with Xbox Live, and no TV content for Canadian customers to download. Something about agreements with local content providers and the studios, preventing them from delivering content. That's fine, I can just download them through unofficial avenues, matter of fact I have a fantastic system using RSS feeds to auto-download shows for me watch when I want, and how I want. Now, if the entertainment industry every gets its act together and perhaps starts using their lawyers to draft new agreements as opposed to suing customers, they will be competing with the system I setup myself. It will have to be much better to get my attention, and my $$$ now. Considering how late in the game they already are, I don't see how this can be accomplished. You would think that they would see an urgency to try.
But instead, they see an urgency to attack us. In 2005, Sony BMG music released music CD's with a trojon designed to hijack your machine and prevent you from doing what you wanted with your own computer. This act horrifies me, almost as much as the lack of reaction from the public. How they got away with this without a massive backlash from the public is beyond me, but I for one, will never buy another Sony product because of this. The part that boggles my mind, and contributes to my point that the entertainment industry is absolutely batshit crazy, is the consideration of who Sony attacked with this rootkit hidden in their commercial CD's. Who was punished by Sony for music piracy? The few customers they had left, that were actually still buying CD's.
Insanity.
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