HomeWeekly News Roundup (23 August 2009)
There are so many sources of home entertainment these days, it’s hard to know what you spend your hard earned money on. I find that I’m now spending more and more on gaming, and less and less on movies (and a bit more on TV DVDs). Despite games costing a lot more than movies (for each game I buy, I can probably buy 4 to 6 cheapo DVD movies, or one and a half, two TV series on DVD), I still feel that games offer better value for money, just by the number of hours I spend on them (and to a lesser extent, TV series). So I wrote a blog that examines that various forms of home entertainment, the number of hours of entertainment each activity provides, and the cost of such – plot them in Excel and draw a graph, and you have the results. And I was right – gaming is the best value, followed by TV DVDs, although it only applies to good games that you want to put a lot of time into. What may be surprising (or not) is that digital music downloads turn out to be the least good value, costing nearly $20 for each hour of enjoyment (compared to just $2 for a good game, or just less than $3 for a whole season worth of TV on DVD). During the week, I plan to upgrade this blog entry to include cost per MB of data – this is a silly way to look at value, but it should put Blu-ray on top, followed closely by games and with digital music still the least value. The music industry needs to take a closer look and price music accordingly.
Otherwise, it was a pretty quiet week, and not just because I proved my own point by spending large chunks of this week playing GTA IV (so yes, I finished the story missions on the PC version, and I’m only 5% away from a 100% completion score – but I did not let it affect work, honest!). Enough chit chat, let’s get started with the WNR.
In Copyright news, Australian ISP iiNet is still frantically fighting the AFACT over allegations that it isn’t taking enough action to combat piracy. ‘Enough’ being the important term in the previous sentence, as iiNet sets out to prove that there is not much more they can do, not when faced with existing laws.
iiNet’s two new lines of defence sees them first claim that the existing Communications Act prohibits them to spy on their customers in order to monitor piracy. The second sees them arguing that since the AFACT has not demanded other ISPs to take similar action, that it is unreasonable to expect iiNet to be the only ISP that needs to take action. I’ve mentioned quite a few times what the copyright holders want ISPs to do is often in breach of privacy laws, although governments around the world are bending over backwards (and sometimes just bending over) to accommodate groups like the MPAA’s efforts to curtail piracy by removing your right to privacy. It all comes down to politicians (and some judges) not really understanding the Internet and what it all means, but the simple fact is that the Internet is now an utility like your telephone service, and is just another form of communication where privacy should be expected. I mention utility because homeowners should now be guaranteed the right to have the Internet, that there should not be any laws in which people are somehow denied essential utilities just because the utility companies don’t like what you’re doing with their services. It would be like your electricity provider shutting down your power just because you might be using electricity do to something illegal – it’s not up the provider to decide whether you should have power or not, it’s up to the judicial system to determine that and to hand out penalties. But governments and judges often see the Internet and the digital revolution as this thing that threatens the very foundations of civilization, and they overreact. In the short term future, when the current digital generation has grown up and are occupying the positions of power, I think they’ll look back at the court cases of today and see just how ridiculous and self damaging the whole thing was – just like how we view McCarthyism today (well, most of us anyway).
iTunes now account for 25% of all music sales in the US
Just to prove how the digital revolution has caught the old guard, well, off guard, news broke that 25% of all music in the US are now sold through iTunes. While the majority of music are still sold in CD form through retail stores, 25% means that iTunes is the single biggest source of music sales in the US already. Now, had the music industry being brave enough to embrace digital, they would be the ones operating the big digital music stores, as opposed to making Apple rich. And had it not been the whole DRM debacle, digital music would have gained market share even faster. While it is unfortunate that I cannot say the industry in general has learned the lessons from misuse of DRM, in that most of them still believe DRM has a place, at least some are trying to address the biggest problem that DRM provides consumers – the inability to do what they want, legally, with these files. Marlin is a new DRM scheme that actually promotes sharing amongst family (and some friends), but it does so in a controlled manner where you (and the copyright holders) know exactly who is sharing your file at all times. But Marlin is still a DRM, and while you are now “allowed” within the scope of the DRM to do all the things you could have done with DRM-free files, the framework is still there to restrict your freedoms if and when the powers that be deem time to do so. To paraphrase Wendy Seltzer of the Berkman Center, DRM is like a maze, and while the old DRM was a maze with a single path that you had to follow, Marlin presents many paths, possibly all the paths you might be able to take legally: but it’s still a maze, and one that you have to hand over your rights as a consumer to enter.
Removing copyrighted videos from YouTube could be a thing of the past
Then there are those situations where nobody gets hurt, yet everyone suffers. One of which is YouTube video uploads. How many times has an enthusiastic user uploaded a video he or she has spent hours editing, finding the right background music and clips to include in the video, upload to YouTube and then had the video removed because it violated someone somewhere’s copyright. Or in the pursuit of the next meme or viral video, someone uploads a clip of something they captured from TV or a DVD – the positive effects of a video going viral are so great that companies now spend millions to professionally produce viral videos – but the home user produced video, which costs companies nothing, gets taken down and all that positive energy is lost. Some companies are only starting to get the fact that people using their material isn’t necessarily a bad thing – it used to be the case where only copyright abuse that actually hurt the copyright holders would get prosecuted, but the fear about digital now means any potential, possibly not even real, copyright abuse gets maximum attention, forcing websites like YouTube to take drastic action to filter out all sorts of content, many of which are perfectly legal (like the time when a TV network used a clip of this guy’s home video, and then when the guy uploaded the same video to YouTube, the video got removed due to a complaint from the very same TV network). But there is money to be made in online advertising, and YouTube is now starting to share revenue with content owners, if they decide to allow the “unauthorised” videos to remain online. YouTube gets a bit of the money because they’re hosting the promoting the videos, the uploader doesn’t get his or her ass sued and gets to keep the video online, and the copyright holders make the money. Doesn’t sound like a bad compromise to me, and who knows, maybe someday the copyright holders will start to appreciate all the free promotion they get from uploaders, and give them a free hat or something for their troubles.
Onto HD news now. Nothing much happening, expect more analysis and analysis of analysis on the Toshiba move into Blu-ray. I’m going to link to one such analyst that came up with pretty much the same conclusion I did when I first heard the news, that Toshiba is doing this merely to promote their own anti-Blu-ray strategy.
64 GB SD cards already exceed Blu-ray's capacity, at a tiny fraction of the size
Well, not so much anti-Blu-ray, as anything-but-Blu-ray, because you can see from the statements Toshiba has made, they still believe that Blu-ray isn’t going to be the one format the rules over all in the early part of this century, and that downloads, streaming and flash memory storage are the future. SD flash cards and USB drives are getting to a point where they equal small hard-drives from just a few years ago, and certainly will beat Blu-ray rewritables in terms of capcity, cost and simplicity. Digital video and still cameras all use SD, most do not use Blu-ray recordables. HDTV PVRs do not use Blu-ray. And even the Blu-ray people don’t want people to use Blu-ray, because it might lead to people making copies of Blu-ray movies through hacking their HDMI cable or something equally absurd. Flash storage is simply more convenient, and there needs to be someway for it to be used for movie distribution before insanely fast Internet connections become the normal to allow us to download a 50GB HD movie in a few minutes. There are many situations where you will still need optical storage, but for everyday use, it is already a bit outdated. Can you imagine using CDs and DVDs in place of your USB drive? No, neither can I.
And going back to what I mentioned above about digital music downloads taking over from CDs, the movement towards pure digital distribution is gaining momentum all the time.
And finally in gaming, the big news of the week is of course the PS3 Slim and the PS3 price cut. It shall be known as the week when the collective gaming community yelled out all at the same time the words “finally”, as it heard about the PS3 price cut, and for once, the rumours turned out to be true about the PS3 Slim.
The PS3 Slim is finally here
My first impressions? That the PS3 Slim didn’t look as good as I thought it would be. I think I got ruined by those fake pics of the silver PS3 Slims that have been around forever – the actual PS3 Slim is a big flat piece of black matte plastic, that looks a bit cheap, to be honest. And while it is definitely slimmer, only about half the height of the PS3 Fat, it’s actually deeper (longer in length) than the old PS3. At the very least, they should have used a glossy finish, and perhaps offer it in some new colours, like white (Wii, Apple) or a sexy red like a sports car. Who knows, maybe they will.
As for the price cut, that’s very much welcomed relief for the ailing PS3 sales, although at this point, sales will need to increase by 100% on current numbers in order to make Microsoft of Nintendo really nervous, much more than the predicted 40 to 60% sales increase.
And what of the response from the other gaming companies? Nintendo remains silent, but Microsoft is rumoured to drop the Xbox 360 Pro package and to price the Xbox 360 Elite at the same price point of $299 ($100 off). Will that work to negate the expected surge in PS3 sales? Probably not, but as someone who is looking to upgrade his Xbox 360 to a new one, it can’t hurt. I would still love to have an Xbox 360 Slim, or at least an Xbox 360 Cool&Quiet – technology advances should allow Microsoft to do this without increasing costs (and possibly lower them as well), and if they are to stick true to their recently proclaimed 10 year strategy for the Xbox 360, then they need to this sooner rather than later to keep the nearly 4 year old platform alive and viable.
That’s all I have for you this week. More next week!