Speaker: How's that three strikes thing working out, anyway?
107 Responses
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Paul Brislen, in reply to
It is not as I'm required to buy dozens of other things I don't want in order to get it. Plus I can't get it at all online - and it's the online world I'm talking about.
What I can do is download it as and when I want (albeit illegally) then buy the DVDs when they come out. This is what I've done in the past - it's clumsy and stupid and I have plastic wrapped DVDs that I've purchased to assuage my guilt (nearly wrote Assange my guilt there. How very!) that I've never opened.
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3410,
Paying for SoHo isn't legitimate?
I suppose you'd argue that legal = legitimate, but if I wanted to watch legal and fresh episodes of Game of Thrones, as far as I know, the *only* way is to pay Sky about $1000 a year. Screw that.
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I suppose you'd argue that legal = legitimate, but if I wanted to watch legal and fresh episodes of Game of Thrones, as far as I know, the *only* way is to pay Sky about $1000 a year. Screw that.
That can't be the free market price can it ? That would only work if there was a monopoly or near monopoly...oh dear...
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On @mpaa now: US Ambassador Mike Moore co-hosting an MPAA screening of the restoration of Hitchcock feature The White Shadow with Chris Dodd.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
I suppose you’d argue that legal = legitimate, but if I wanted to watch legal and fresh episodes of Game of Thrones, as far as I know, the *only* way is to pay Sky about $1000 a year. Screw that.
This is actually the key problem with Sky's reseller agreements -- they explicitly prevent disaggregation of content. The ISPs who have signed such deals can only present exactly the service that Sky says they can. They're prohibited even from selling content not sourced from Sky.
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Peter Graham, in reply to
I suppose you'd argue that legal = legitimate, but if I wanted to watch legal and fresh episodes of Game of Thrones, as far as I know, the *only* way is to pay Sky about $1000 a year. Screw that.
So you could pay $250 to watch Game of Thrones now. Or you could wait a year and buy the dvds for $60.
The are plenty of production companies that screw over their New Zealand customers. HBO isn't one of them.
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Sacha, in reply to
I remember reading that ISPs don't make much from heavy users. They tend to discourage them.
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The Sky TV issue is an interesting one. I spoke to John Fellet about all of this - he swears Sky TV does not have any control over the rights needed for video on demand. S-VOD (Subscriber Video On Demand) are an entirely different set of rights (and come with a different price tag naturally) to the pay TV rights Sky TV has negotiated. None of Sky's rights restrict anyone else buying S-VOD rights, says Fellet, but it would appear some of Sky's contractual relationships with both ISPs and the likes of HBO do indeed prevent those players from going the S-VOD route, which is naughty.
Ultimately the problem is not just of Sky's making - far from it. It's a by-product of an old business model that requires layers of middle men passing on the product and clipping the ticket. A producer requires a global distributor who sells the product to a regional distributor who sells to a cinema chain, pay TV provider, a free-to-air TV provider, DVD producers, Airlines and assorted other resellers and eventually we get to see the product.
Ultimately all this will be swept away as we move to a world where HBO can sell TV shows directly to (gasp) customers.
The Economist has a great piece on the future of pay TV (http://www.economist.com/node/21526314) and makes it quite clear HBO would like to move in this direction. Sadly it would appear the cable TV companies and their production/distribution owners are not so keen.
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noizyboy, in reply to
For those lucky enough to have TelstraClear cable available in their area, Steam is unmetered.
If you can get Steam to use the TelstraClear CDN that is!
Before I installed the very useful SteamLimiter application, I was regularly stung by content NOT coming from TelstraClear, and thus counting against my cap. Very annoying when your boys are home on holiday and decide to download the entire Call of Duty MW series so they can play through it in sequence.
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Gareth Ward, in reply to
The Economist has a great piece on the future of pay TV (http://www.economist.com/node/21526314) and makes it quite clear HBO would like to move in this direction.
Oooh good read, cheers. If Apple hooks HBO as one of the "apps" for their TV play that would be intriguing - the CEOs take on the different channel sizes is interesting though...
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Paul Brislen, in reply to
it says to me at least some of the providers are indeed working towards the obvious goal. Sadly NZFact is funded by those same soggy middle management/"value add resellers" who don't actually add any value.
It reminds me intensely of the PC market in the late 1990s - channel versus direct sales. Dell wouldn't even make your PC up until you ordered it while HP, Compaq, Tosh, IBM et al would have warehouses of old stock but wouldn't sell to us users...
it all ended in tears of course.
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3410,
Ultimately the problem is not just of Sky's making - far from it.
True. That'd like blaming the fox for eating the chickens when the farmer left the door open.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
Ultimately the problem is not just of Sky’s making – far from it. It’s a by-product of an old business model that requires layers of middle men passing on the product and clipping the ticket. A producer requires a global distributor who sells the product to a regional distributor who sells to a cinema chain, pay TV provider, a free-to-air TV provider, DVD producers, Airlines and assorted other resellers and eventually we get to see the product.
And Kim Dotcom was working on a model to bypass the middlemen. Do I get the impression that he's the Preston Tucker of the Internet?
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Actually Paul what is your take on that HBO stat that there's 105m US TV subscribers but only 3m with broadband? I'd have thought broadband penetration much much higher than that?
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Sacha, in reply to
the *only* way is to pay Sky about $1000 a year.
and people used to complain about an annual state license fee about a sixth of that.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Actually Paul what is your take on that HBO stat that there’s 105m US TV subscribers but only 3m with broadband? I’d have thought broadband penetration much much higher than that?
The sentence ends " ... and reasonable amounts of money but no multichannel TV."
So most households with money and broadband also have multichannel TV, where they already get that content. It narrows the opportunity quite a bit.
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Paul Brislen, in reply to
what he said - why would you subscribe online if you're already forced to get it to the TV via a cable service?
If you've seen that Oatmeal cartoon of trying to buy G of T in the US online you'll see we're not the only ones who struggle with this model. You can buy the cable TV service online, but the content will be delivered by cable TV to your TV. Not quite what we're after.
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Stephen R, in reply to
But until they do, are there many other reasons to pay for a 20G data plan?
I don't download illegal content. Not songs, not movies. I used to have a 20G data plan, but have increased it to 40G since overshooting a few times.
I tried buying games on Steam. As an example, Dragon Age Origins was 24GB. 8GB for a game is pretty average. A linux distro is quite often 1GB for a starting point. One game I play releases patches fairly regularly which are more than a GB.
Because a lot of their market is US based (most customers there don't have data limits), more and more developers are happy to release huge patches via the web.
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Lucy Stewart, in reply to
So you could pay $250 to watch Game of Thrones now. Or you could wait a year and buy the dvds for $60.
The are plenty of production companies that screw over their New Zealand customers. HBO isn’t one of them.
Given that I can watch Game of Thrones in America for $25/month - so, say, $75 for the three months it airs - whether it's HBO's fault or not, people in NZ are getting screwed, yeah.
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This is pretty crucial to the whole debate. Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go - all these services are available based on location. The reason they're not available in New Zealand is not because of our infrastructure (sure, with fibre it will be better) but because of the old-school approach to rights management that dictates NZ is a separate geographical region therefore we must negotiate separate rights with a NZ distributor.
With the internet, you don't need regional distributors.
They'll figure it out I'm sure but the damage being done now is just stupid.
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With the internet, you don’t need regional distributors.
So true.
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So you could pay $250 to watch Game of Thrones now
Guys, just give up the telly, Go to rehab or something. I got rid of mine in 2007 and I so haven't missed all the time I wasted looking at little moving people..
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3410,
Guys, just give up the telly
I'm getting there.
Presumably, Peter's suggesting that I sign up for Sky, watch GoT until the series is finished, then quit Sky, for $250. It's a laughable proposition. We're talking about ten hours of TV, and you can buy an actual television for that much money.
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Related/unrelated:
We spoke about Louis C.K.'s DRM-free & cheap stand-up thing during the show last night, Dylan bought it and started downloading very slowly it from Louis C.K.'s server, so he swapped over to a torrent and it was down in just a few minutes. Louis got paid, but had reduced distribution costs, and the customer got it as fast as possible, win + win = win, but I bet it would make these industrial copyright arseholes completely lose their shit.Ironic, as it only came up because we were talking about a Paramount VP who used Louis C.K. as an example of artists who fail to monetize. These people are just completely baffling.
We don't need them anymore.
Incidentally, I pay Quickflix $10/month not because I watch what they've got on offer so far but because I badly want someone to succeed in this market so I treat this as seed funding of the smallest order.
I didn't think of it that way, being incredibly disappointed with their offering I discounted the idea, but it might have been an unduly hasty decision.
For those lucky enough to have TelstraClear cable available in their area, Steam is unmetered.
Same with Orcon, and I think at least a couple of the other players.
I bought a two-pack of Portal 2 to play with the girl, the client is so dumb it wanted to download it completely separately even though both machines are on the same LAN. Weak.
Speaking of games, I'm always relieved when a game is on Steam, 'cos every other way I buy games I get treated like a complete piece of shit. It's ludicrous that illicit game downloaders have a much better experience with installation and play than I do as a "legit" customer when I buy a DVD.
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Morgan Nichol, in reply to
The problem with your suggestion is that when you can pick and choose the very best TV in the whole world, and watch it when you want, how you want, and where you want, TV is really fucking great.
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