- An Attribution Failure Theory – "Credit is easy. Well, mostly easy. It might have been hard to get the format of citations right at first in school when we were writing papers, but the act of citing is easy. You just do it. Yet, people all over the Internet don’t."
- You Are Not Ruthless Enough – "Here’s the thing: you are not ruthless enough. You are certainly not ruthless enough to your objects, and you probably need to be more ruthless to yourself." Programming Is Hard, Part 381.
- You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You – "The seven step, ten minute download process (which will be about ten seconds when US internet speeds catch up with the rest of the world) is the real enemy the studios should be trying to tackle."
Tag Archives: movies
Going Rental
Apparently the movie studios are placing further restrictions on rentals in order to promote the purchase of shiny disc. Marco Arment says this won’t work because:
If I’m adding a movie to my Netflix queue, I’ve already decided not to buy the DVD. I’m adding it because it looks mildly interesting and I’d like to watch it sometime.
I take the opposite approach. I am unlikely to buy a movie unless I have previously rented it. Why would I buy it if I don’t know whether or not I like it?
I don’t mention this to suggest that Marco is wrong. Quite the opposite. What I’m saying is that I can’t think of any use cases where this strategy would work. Whether you’re not buying it because you don’t want to buy it or not buying it because you don’t know whether you’ll like it, the common thread is that no purchase is involved. The studio would make more money in both these anecdotes if they allowed rentals.
But it’s not really about making money, as bizarre as that might seem. It’s about control.
Movie studios look to the music industry and are trying to learn from their mistakes. Unfortunately they’re taking completely the wrong lessons. Rather than seeing customers buying music instead of taking free copies from P2P networks, they see Apple being in control and able to dictate “unfavourable” terms to them.
To an outsider, “unfavourable” is an odd word as it mainly seems to involve more people paying for more content.
In this battle between the studios, the content providers (Amazon, Apple and NetFlix) and consumers there are no winners. Consumers either miss out on seeing films they want to see or end up making illegal downloads. Amazon, Apple and NetFlix all have to disappoint their customers with seemingly arbitrary additions and removals from their catalogue. And the studios continue to leave money on the table.
Personally I see that as the most “unfavourable” outcome, but what do I know?
My delicious.com bookmarks for September 29th through October 3rd
- Alma telescope opens its eyes – Awesome. In the original sense of the word.
- Mercury’s Explosive Volcanic History – Both beautiful and fascinating.
- Round Ireland with a Fridge – The Movie based on Tony Hawks bestseller – Full movie for a limited time only…
My delicious.com bookmarks for August 25th through September 1st
- Gallery: Iron Man, Other Pop Icons Become My Little Pony Sculptures – My Little Pony has a dark side too.
- What they’re "protecting" us from – "Every single person who'd attack Steve Jobs on any of these grounds is, demonstrably, worse at business than Jobs. They're unqualified to assert that liberal values are bad for business, when the demonstrable, factual, obvious evidence contradicts those assertions."
My delicious.com bookmarks for March 9th through March 30th
- March 30, 1848: Niagara Falls Runs Dry – Bizarre.
- Twitter fixes oAuth for desktop and mobile with xAuth – Just as I add Twitter support to Yummy, they change something. Typical.
- Famous Movie Quotes – Movie quotes visualised. (via @kottke)
Saw W
George W. Bush stars in the latest (and little publicised) in the gory Saw movie franchise. In it he discovers some interesting new “enhanced interrogation” techniques and finds that getting out, with no recourse to legal representation or trial, is, quite literally, torture.