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San Francisco, 4:14 PM
Thu Nov 26
18 posts in the last 24 hours
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11/06/09
[www.nzherald.co.nz]
edit: 'growing' was not originally intended as a pun, but after I posted I saw the relation. I guess my sub-concious wanted to express itself. :D
11/05/09
11/06/09
Nope.
Annalee's just being fanciful / prophetic.
-Kle. #pharmaceuticals
11/06/09
oh yes.. i see now. duh. #pharmaceuticals
11/05/09
Don't necessarily want to inadvertently shut down our favorite producers. Support local growers! #pharmaceuticals
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11/05/09
So is easy to see a future where we buy food from the black market whille drugs are sold legally
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11/05/09
Is there any reason to believe that seed companies - who will produce a run of seeds from any varietal they have in stock for next season's planting - will somehow not exist? Is there any reason to believe that Monsanto will somehow crush Syngenta and Pioneer and Dow and all the rest, and somehow be the only place you can buy seeds at all?
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11/05/09
They're genuinely evil. #pharmaceuticals
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Do your Boritos have beans and cheese in them? #pharmaceuticals
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11/04/09
And so you guys know I do buy all scifi TV Shows we love brand new and support my shows.I own a ton of new legal TV scifis like all stargates,farscape,trek,etc.
I keep reading these studios trying hard to put big brother on us and quoting from their lying papers claiming losses,etc which is all a bunch of BS.
You guys need to research this subject good cause we can all be effected by these greedbags.
And how many of these studios have ripped us off by price fixing,DRM KRAP,stealing from their artists,etc.
I support indie fimmaking and have a big hate for Hollywood.
Do your research well. #startrek
11/04/09
[en.wikipedia.org] #startrek
11/05/09
11/04/09
11/04/09
However, since moving back to the States, thanks to the magic of (free!) Hulu, and (not free, but cheap, and very speedy!) Netflix, I legitimately have legal access to anything I could possibly ever want to watch, making torrents unnecessary except for particularly rare/lost things, that would probably be unfindable legally anyway. #startrek
11/04/09
A second thought I had regarding this piracy issue: how many people would have bought the Star Trek DVD/Blu-Ray if it was available right now? Why do movie studios insist on making their customers wait 6 months to buy a movie after seeing it in a theatre?
Sorry, I just don't have a lot of pity for companies that look for ways to arbitrarily control their customers. There are all sorts of movies I would have added to my collection months ago if they were already available. By the same token, how many people would have bought Star Trek, if there was no piracy? The numbers don't necessarily correlate, and some research says people who pirate buy more than the average consumer, IIRC. #startrek
11/04/09
1.) People who wait for download instead of paying to see it in the cinema, have straightaway taken a chunk out of the box office profits (the be-all and end-all of estimating a film's successes---home purchases are still second-tier in their eyes). This affects studio shares, future plans, company confidence and jobs.
2.) People who download and subsequently don't like the film, don't buy the film. So the few or many who would've bought it first and subsequently realised it wasn't for them, well, now they don't have to look at that wasted 20 euro* receipt anymore, they can just right-click-del. Meanwhile. DVD/Blu sales are less than they would have been.
3.)If people couldn't download films, studios like Paramount could charge much more for DVDs and especially Blu-Ray, and people would pay the premium price. But you've seen Blu/DVD prices topple, and it's not just the recession pushing prices down, or competition: downloads are way up, so people need further incentive to spend. Which means cheaper discs, and less profit for Paramount.
4.) Paying for downloads is the future. If Paramount successfully initiate a government-supported anti-piracy system, then they already have a stable legal framework in which to operate future SD/HD format downloads for consumers. Which means they can sue the asses off any chancers real-time streaming off their servers, or cloning their online files. They're paving the way for the future, all in their own interest, of course.
*Yes, euro. I'm Irish. So there. #startrek
11/04/09
I would like to see a study on the amount of money they spend fighting piracy verses what they would have to spend to make a high quality download service available for a fee the same day a movie hits theaters and what profits could be seen on said service. #startrek
11/04/09
If people truly enjoy a product and can afford it, they'll pay for it. You can't really fault them for trying it out before they buy, or for not being wealthy enough to pay inflated prices for things.
Seriously--Paramount is whining over Star Trek... which is a movie about a society where money doesn't matter anymore. Maybe they should work toward that, instead of clinging to outmoded and petty practices, like a bunch of whiny children.
If they keep it up, people will just ignore them. I mean, there are many other ways to create culture and pass the time besides movies made by big Hollywood studios. #startrek
11/04/09
Look at Hulu. Hulu pulls in what, six million a year to split between its partners? That's way less than they'd collectively earn from DVD sales, or even from airing their primetime lineups. Even the most successful attempt to monetize internet viewing is a huge step back in terms of profitability. Sure it's still in the black and that's great, but for business types, making less profit isn't really making profit at all.
Granted, this is an unhealthy attitude that lends itself to unsustainable growth, but it's part of why most attempts to monetize the web through channels like Hulu and the iTunes store are deemed failures.
On top of that, Pirates don't have to deal with barriers to entry. Hulu can't stream to Canada because of CRTC Regulations, but torrents give no fuck. It's no real surprise with that in mind that pirates are able to out-compete the industry. That's really the thing. The release groups and legit publishers are essentially competitive firms and they're behaving like competitive firms usually do.
Now, there are two ways this could go. It could go the way of VHS, but you're probably not going to see that without either a change in how we use the 'net or a change in how they monetize it. The main obstacle to this is that it's kind of the opposite scenario to VHS. It's the pirates who can best take advantage of distribution, not the publishers. That said, Australian-style throttling with "key partners" unthrottled is /probably/ the easiest way to shift power towards corporate content publishers, and ISPs have a lot of interest in it since it means they can make more money. In addition, as the 'net and RL get more enmeshed, spending money will probably be easier. Charlie Brooker has a great bit in one of his columns about how spending money online needs to get more intuitive and more 'fun' to raise sales, and he's right, and it's probably the way the industry is going. So between these two changes, it's possible the publishers will pull ahead. This would suck a LOT for consumers though, and would probably stymie digital distribution in general by promoting monopolies.
Alternatively, if the FCC, CRTC and other regulatory bodies find against tiered internet, it's possible that content publishers will just have to find some way to monkey wrench the pirates or otherwise outcompete them. The trend I mentioned earlier, wherein money is made easier and 'funner' to spend is a start, since people who can't afford online content aren't really lost sales, and publishing ahead of the scene is also probably going to become more prevalent.
Either way, the current system can't really last. The market just won't bear it since the market, you see, is basically a huge whiny baby. #startrek
11/04/09