2014 July DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Archive for July, 2014

Weekly News Roundup (27 July 2014)

Sunday, July 27th, 2014

I’ve been catching up on my list of “to watch” movies, both on Blu-ray, and on my Netflix “My List”. I really wish there was a separate genre for disturbing or depressing films, instead of lumping them all together in the drama genre. It doesn’t feel right that movies as different as ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ and ‘Enough Said’ both belong to the drama genre (at least according to the IMDb), or that a film as disturbing as ‘Blue Jasmine’ would also belong to the comedy genre. I watched ‘Blue Jasmine’ after back-to-back sessions of ‘City of God’ and ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’, and if I hadn’t watched ‘The Muppets’ in between, it would have seriously disturbed my mood (and even so …). Be very careful when choosing to watch a drama, that’s my tip for the week.

(‘Enough Said’ was pretty sweet though, so it was a real mood redeemer thanks to great performances by the late and great James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus)

And yes, I did have time to do (some) work in between epic movie sessions.

Quantity over quality, may be the strategy behind some rightsholders choosing to use Google’s DMCA process over more effective systems

This week TorrentFreak investigates why rightsholders are choosing to use ineffective Google DMCA take-downs as opposed to more efficient take-down tools, specifically the British based BPI. On one hand, rightsholders are submitting millions of take-down requests for URLs that are almost instantly recreated, but are refusing to work with tools that not only take down actual content/files, not links, but also keep them down.

One of the targeted file hosts, 4shared, is using a tool that is now owned by Spotify, that allows rightsholders to request any specific piece of content to be taken down – the tool will then automatically remove all related links to this piece of content, and even prevent future links from being created on 4shared. So it’s curious as to why the BPI and other rightsholders aren’t using this tool. 4shared thinks that the decision comes down to a public relations one. Millions of take-downs make better headlines than say working with a file host that you’ve been publicly admonishing, using a tool that makes piracy take-downs seem almost trivial. Piracy is supposed to be this billion dollar a year headache that cannot be solved without basically giving rightsholders total control over everything, so there is a need to be able to show how big the problem really is, and millions of taken down links will do that. The fact that these take downs are part of an endless game of copyright whack-a-mole, doesn’t really matter, neither is the fact that this does nothing to win the war on piracy.

It’s hard to win when you actually don’t want to win.

My recent Netflix binge has made me pine for a private viewing mode on Netflix, hoping that the eclectic collection of films I watch won’t end up confusing the Netflix recommendation system. My wish may come true soon, as it appears Netflix is testing a private watching mode. The current workaround is to have a dedicated profile that you create and delete all the time, which also helps to ensure all the softcore porn you’ve been watching on Netflix doesn’t end up on your My List.

PS4 and Xbox One both getting Blu-ray 3D playback in the next few weeks

Meanwhile, Netflix this week announced that they’ve broken through the 50 million users barrier, with nearly 14 million outside of the US. Revenue was up 25% as well, compared to last year, as the company focuses less on securing expensive licensing rights to films and TV shows, and more on original content.

Back to physical media, Microsoft this week announced that Blu-ray 3D support will finally be added to the Xbox One console, and a couple of days later, Sony followed with a similar announcement for the PS4. The PS4’s Blu-ray 3D support will arrive a little earlier than the Xbox One’s – next week versus some time in August. The one-upmanship continues for these two console heavyweights, which I guess is a good thing for the consumer.

Thus far, the lack of Blu-ray 3D support has been a bit more embarrassing for Sony than for Microsoft, considering Sony’s close links to the Blu-ray format (ie. it’s their format). So the update, coming via firmware version 1.75 next week, is most welcomed.

And if Sony can bring back DLNA support to the PS4, then I can finally start thinking about upgrading my PS3.

It’s that time of the month again, and the NPD report for June shows a marked improvement for the Xbox One, thanks to the Kinect-removing inspired price drop, while the PS4 was still the best selling console for the month (that’s 6 months in a row).

The PS4 is still beating the Xbox One, despite sales doubling in June for the latter

Xbox One sales doubled in June compared to May according to Microsoft, but they’ve not been as willing to release sales data ever since they stopped having the top selling console (funny that). And so without knowing the May results, it doesn’t really tell us much. The only thing we know is that it wasn’t enough to allow the Xbox One to beat the PS4, and Sony will be really pleased with that.

Nintendo are happy too because the Wii U sold 140,000 units, which is a 233% improvement compared to the same month last year. There seem to be a new air of optimism for the Wii U, following the release of the new Mario Kart game, but it will take some time to confirm whether the recent sales bump is a sustaining one.

So everyone with some good news to report in June!

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That’s all for this week. See you soon.

Posted in 3D, Copyright, Gaming, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Nintendo Wii, Wii U, Switch, NPD Analysis, PS3, PS4, Video Technology, Xbox 360, Xbox One | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (27 July 2014)

Weekly News Roundup (20 July 2014)

Sunday, July 20th, 2014

The World Cup has ended. For some reason, it seems like forever since the final was played out on an early and sleepy Monday morning (Australia time), and I had to actually double check to make sure it was actually the previous Monday, and not two weeks ago like it seems. I guess I just got used to being able to watch football almost every other day, and with a week without anything, it just felt like forever. Plus some really crappy news this week from all around the world, one of those weeks where you think back on the events and cannot do anything more than sigh and shake your head.

Well, there’s still the WNR, totally insignificant really compared to anything that has happened in the past week, but, as they say, the show must go on.

Perhaps the most comprehensive study yet on piracy’s effect on box office revenue has revealed that file-sharing has almost a negligible effect on revenue. In fact, pre-release piracy may actually boost box office receipts, due to the promotional effect of piracy.

The most extensive study yet shows piracy has little effect on box office revenue. Photo credit: EvelynGiggles, CC

The study, conducted by economist Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas School of Business, looked at the top 150 most popular movies, over a 7 years period – sometimes with thousands of daily observations – and only $200 million in reduced revenue could be attributed to the release of pirated torrents. That may sound a lot, but it’s actually only 0.3% of all revenue recorded during the same period. Revenue data comes via the Hollywood Stock Exchange, so there is some degree of estimation and error in the data, but it certainly isn’t the “billion dollar a year problem” that Hollywood likes to portray piracy as. In fact, in the same period, Hollywood spent more than $500 million on anti-piracy activities alone. Good money wasted, if you ask me.

More interesting were the “consistent” results the study found in relation to pre-release piracy (that is when the pirated version is released on BitTorrent networks before the movie even hits the cinemas). The study found that there was actually a “modest positive effect” on box office revenue whenever a pre-release torrent was released. Not what Hollywood wants to hear. Or want you to believe.

What they do want you to hear is that it’s everyone else’s fault that movie studios are “losing” billions of dollars every year. And ISPs and search engines, these days, are at the top of their “public enemies” list. News Corp boss and the inspiration behind at least on Bond villain Rupert Murdoch says that ISPs should be held responsible for piracy. In submissions made to an Australian senate inquiry into a proposed free trade agreement with South Korea, News Corp says that current laws “do not provide rights holders with means to protect rights online”, and want ISPs to be on the front-lines in the un-winnable war on piracy.

It seems now that rights holders are totally convinced this is the way to proceed, just like they were entirely convinced that suing downloaders was the best way to deter others from doing so. The same strategy that the American Bar Association this week says is totally ineffective and even counter-productive. Their white paper says suing individuals is too costly, don’t yield any financial returns and can cause “public relations problems”. And it only took them a decade to figure all of this out!

So maybe a decade from now, News Corp and others will realise that picking on ISPs and treating all Internet users like criminals may not have been the best course of action, and neither is blaming Google for all their piracy woes. We live in hope.

Speaking of Google, TorrentFreak has been testing Google’s anti-piracy demotions and found that while legal music listening alternatives are now easier to find than pirated MP3s, the differences aren’t that significant. It usually only takes a couple of extra clicks and keystrokes to access pirated stuff, compared to legal options like VEVO.

Google demotions have made legal music options easier to find, but there are so few legal options that most of the results are still piracy related

An interesting discovery made by TorrentFreak was that while the legal options are there, they are almost always YouTube or VEVO music videos. Other legal options, like iTunes, rarely rank (perhaps due to the way the iTunes website is set up), and TorrentFreak says that this is squarely the fault of the music industry. It’s no good for Google to keep on demoting piracy results when there are only a couple of actual legal results they can promote (and everything after these links become all pirated results again). The music industry will argue that removing the pirated results completely would solve this dilemma, rather than actually providing more legal options, or making legal sites more crawlable as Google suggests.

And it’s the lack of these legal options that seem to determine how many people pirate, and don’t pirate, from region to region. A new global survey has revealed that countries that have access to lots of legal alternatives have a much lower piracy rate than countries, like Australia, that have limited options. In the US, for example, 70% say they are unlikely to pirate, compared to just 40% in Australia. And even those that do pirate in the US, 90% say they only do it a couple of times a year.

The survey also shows pricing becomes an issue in countries with worse economic conditions than developed nations like the US and Australia. In Indonesia, for example, only 9% said they were unlikely to pirate, and out of those that do, 36% said that the high cost of buying content was the main reason they chose to pirate. In comparison, the main reason for Aussies was the lack of legal options.

Overall, the survey seems to show the many different reasons why people don’t want to go down the piracy route, including security issues and poor quality of downloads, and things like better availability, more options, fairer pricing all go towards helping people make the choice that they want to make in the first place.

But nah, just call all of them thieves and try to ban every one of them from the Internet.

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That’s it for the week, all copyright stuff I know. Hopefully next week will have a bit more variety. See you then.

Posted in Copyright, News Roundup | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (20 July 2014)

Weekly News Roundup (13 July 2014)

Sunday, July 13th, 2014

Another short one this week as the World Cup is finally taking a toll on me (and my sleep patterns). So it’s Germany vs Argentina in the final, and I’m backing Germany (but only because they have three players from the club I support, Arsenal – more than any other country). The Germans have a real team, while most of the other countries only have great individuals. Still, if there was one individual that could make a difference it would be Argentina’s Messi. My prediction? Germany wins 2-1 thanks to Müller and Özil – Higuaín to get the consolation for Argentina. Don’t put money on it, but if you do, send me 5% of all winnings.

Alright, let’s get started because I’m heading for an early sleep.

The MPAA is now going after Popcorn Time, or to be more precise, forks of the original project on GitHub

The MPAA is starting to turn its attention to a software tool that has been dubbed the “Netflix of piracy”, Popcorn Time. The MPAA has issued DMCA notices to GitHub for two forks of Popcorn Time, and GitHub has responded immediately by disabling the repositories of these projects. The DMCA notice also asks GitHub to take proactive action on any and all related forks of the project.

But it’s the open source nature of Popcorn Time will most likely save the software from the same fate enjoyed by other targeted tools in the past. After all, the original Popcorn Time has already survived being “removed” once. With the source code out in the open, it will almost be impossible to completely get rid Popcorn Time and its related developments, which is probably the main reason why the original creators chose to go down the open source route.

The MPAA may have won the first round, but it looks like this is going to be a long, and potentially un-winnable, war for them.

But fighting un-winnable wars is what anti-piracy is all about these days. And it’s a war being waged on from on-top, rather than by the people on the ground in Hollywood, who, according to director Lexi Alexander, don’t really care all that much about the piracy problem. Alexander, who directed the film ‘Green Street Hooligan’, also took to task Hollywood’s general attitude to a wide range of issues, from lack of diversity in hirings, to not giving people what they want.

Most interestingly, Alexander says that Hollywood’s woes, if they are in fact real, are mainly due to the lack of variety in the films they release and who they chooses to direct and star in them. Alexander points out several recent flops, including ‘Mars Needs Moms” and ‘Green Lantern’, and says that releasing crappy movies has cost Hollywood a lot more money than any perceived losses from piracy (both of these movies lost more than $100 million each).

But if you point out these and the dross that studios put on with such regularity, those “Fat Cats” (the only ones who regularly complain about piracy, according to Alexander) in Hollywood might lay the blame for these Box Office misses squarely at the feet of piracy.

With so many apps, games, and services competing for our time, and awesome platforms like Netflix to keep us occupied, crappy movies are flopping harder and harder at the box office – and it’s got nothing to do with piracy

What the Internet, and piracy, has managed to do is to provide ubiquitous availability of movies, even those that are still in cinemas. So once upon a time you might have had to pay some money to see if the criticism reserved for a flop that has been universally panned by critics is deserved or not, or you’re just curious (or a sadist), whether this means buying a cheap ticket at the cinema, or renting it on VHS – now, you can just download it. So perhaps piracy does have something to do with it.

But another factor to take into consideration is the sheer amount of choice we get these days in terms of content and activities, not just movies, but also video games, social media and other time wasters. There is no way you can do everything, watch everything, listen or play everything, and so we have to be choosy, not just with money, but with our time as well. There’s simply no room for watching a crappy movie on a Saturday night, which might have once upon a time been unavoidable due to the lack of entertainment choices. There’s also not enough money, so even if you have the time, why would you pay $20+ for ‘R.I.P.D’ when you can do so much more with that same $20?

But yeah, let’s just blame piracy.

One thing that I can blame piracy on, or rather the disproportionate response to the piracy problem, is this news where 30,000 people were sent notices of infringement. That in itself isn’t strange, except these notices were fake with a malicious payload attached to cause havoc. The trojan, sent to German Internet users, could steal credit card details and other sensitive information from the user’s computer.

In other short news, Aereo’s plan for survival has taken an interesting turn as the tiny-antenna company now wants a cable provider license. This would then allow Aereo to negotiate licensing deals with content providers and maybe, just maybe, re-launch their services.

The Emmy nominations are in and Netflix has doubled the number of nominations they garnered last year. Once again, Netflix originals ‘House of Cards’ and ‘Orange is the New Black’ led the way in terms of nominations. Good luck to them for hopefully putting another nail in the coffin of the cable network hegemony.

I wish for Netflix’s success not just because they provide a kick-ass product at a insanely good price, but also because if/when they come to Australia, I would love to work for them doing this recently posted job. I order waste so many hours on Netflix already, so if I can get paid for do it, it would be just bloody awesome.

And finally in gaming news, the PS4 isn’t doing so hot in Japan for some reason. This article tries to find the reasons for it, including the Japanese’s still strong love for last-gen consoles, including the PS3, and the fact that all the connected media services that the people are using the PS4 for in the west, like Netflix, isn’t really a thing in Japan. Worth a read if you need some arguments to fuel your PS4 fanboy fights with non-believers.

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That was the news that was, for the week just ended. See you next week!

Posted in Copyright, General, Movies, News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (13 July 2014)

Weekly News Roundup (6 July 2014)

Sunday, July 6th, 2014

Welcome to this week’s WNR. It’s another short one, and while the caliber of news stories is ultimately to blame, the lack of sleep I’m experiencing due to the World Cup cannot be discounted as a factor. It looks like my prediction last week has proved to be 100% correct, with the four teams I mentioned all making the semi-finals (even if it was by the skin of their collective teeth). In fact, I think I’ve managed to predict the result (but not the score) of all of the matches from the knock-out stage onwards (which is how I came up with the Brazil vs Germany, Netherlands vs Argentina semi-final line-up). I did not put money where my mouth is, unfortunately, because I don’t believe in betting and also because I’m an idiot.

Further proof that I’m an idiot comes from the fact that I nearly forgot to mention that this past Thursday was Digital Digest’s 15th anniversary, having been launched on the 4th of July in 1999. Having totally forgot about it until Wednesday night (I’m not in the US, so it’s not like I was bombarded with 4th of July stuff to remind me), I’ve only remembered it just now as I was about to hit the “Publish” button on this post. Anyway, here’s the obligatory Digital Digest in History photo album you can have a look at to see what Digital Digest looked like through the ages, including when it first launched in 1999 (check out the snazzy design!).

Alright, the news.

Following last week’s copyright smack-down by Australian ISP executive Steve Dalby, Dalby was again on the attack this week when he took part in a Reddit AMA. Speaking in reference to the Australian pay TV monopoly owned by Foxtel, and the company’s deal with HBO to lock-up Game of Thrones from all other outlets (including iTunes), Dalby says that Foxtel is “on borrowed time”.

Dalby says reports prepared by rights holders about Australia’s piracy habits are “BS”, and says that Foxtel’s pricing (which is “447% of the price previously charged by iTunes”) is more to blame for people choosing not to pay. “Making content available in a timely, affordable away will go a long way to tapping into the Australian willingness to pay for legitimate content,” Dalby says.

HBO much less worried about GoT piracy than almost everyone else

So what does HBO have to say about all of this? Surprisingly little. CNET spoke to HBO’s VP and GM Sofia Chang at the Game of Thrones exhibit in Sydney, and Chang’s comments were diplomatic, to say the least.

“Unfortunately, with this type of popularity comes this type of activity. However, I’ll say that in Australia you have one of the most liberal windows in terms of when it’s made available on the network and then when it’s made available on digital download,” Chang said.

“So, for example, with season four — the finale was on June 16, and on June 17 we made it available on Google Play and our other digital platforms.”

Make of that what you will. From what I read, it’s HBO’s way of saying that they’re happy with the current Foxtel-monopoly arrangement, and they don’t really care that it is causing record piracy for the show in Australia. Basically, HBO has a premium pricing model in which they rely on a small percentage of users to pay a high price for their content, knowing full well this leads to increased piracy. It works for them, and they know they can’t really complain too much about piracy given that this is the business model they’ve chosen. And HBO’s past comments have reflected their stand on the issue.

In other copyright news, hackers in Argentina have responded to the country’s banning of The Pirate Bay website by hacking and turning the website of a music industry group into a fully functioning Pirate Bay proxy site. The site operated for a full 10 hours before it was eventually taken down.

And over in Switzerland, draft legislation could see pirated downloads from cyberlockers made legal, but BitTorrent (which has an upload component) becoming illegal. Site blocking could also happen as part of sweeping changes in a bid to modernize the country’s copyright laws.

The digital transition gathers pace as Sweden, thanks to its super-awesome broadband, may be the first country in the world where digital video spending overtakes that of physical media.

According to the estimates of Futuresource Consulting, 2014 is when digital spending for video content in Sweden will top €153 million ($209 million). This compares to to the €146 million ($199 million) estimate for packaged media, which has fallen dramatically in recent years. With digital music already accounting for 75% of sales, when it was only 25% a couple of years ago, it seems digital video will be heading the same way, and not just in Sweden.

Release windows will help to artificially keep discs and subscription TV alive for the time being, and there will always be those (like myself) that still like to buy movies on discs, but it’s clear what direction consumers want distributors to head in. With Netflix maybe coming to Australian soon, it will be interesting to see what kind of effect it has on our one and only subscription TV provider.

Amazon, Netflix and Hulu Plus – which comes out on top for content?

While Australians are un-spoilt for lack of choice, it’s a different situation over in the US where Netflix, Amazon and Hulu Plus are all desperately trying to grab and hold onto market share. While Netflix has a huge lead in terms of the number of subscribers, the race to have the best content is a tighter affair. US based investment bank Piper Jaffray & Co has analysed the content being offered by these major streaming providers, and found that, at least for the top rated movies, Netflix was still on top.

For TV shows, Hulu Plus with its TV catch-up origins still has a clear lead (57% of the top 75 series from the last TV season, compared to Netflix’s 20% and Amazon’s 9%). But for movies, Netflix’s 12% of top 50 box office movies compares favorably to Amazon’s 6% (Hulu Plus is way back, with just 1%).

While Netflix has been concentrating on original content, Amazon has been desperately trying to sign up to deals with networks like Fox and CBS to get shows like ’24’ and ‘Under the Dome’. So expect the see the gap narrow over the next few years. Of course, here in Australia, we’d be happy just to have Netflix, but rumors suggest that Amazon and Hulu Plus may not be far behind either.

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Well, that actually went longer than I thought it would be. Hope you enjoyed reading, and see you next week.

Posted in Copyright, DVD, High Definition (Blu-ray/HD DVD/4K), News Roundup, Video Technology | Comments Off on Weekly News Roundup (6 July 2014)

DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

Archive for July, 2014

Weekly News Roundup (27 July 2014)

Weekly News Roundup (20 July 2014)

Weekly News Roundup (13 July 2014)

Weekly News Roundup (6 July 2014)

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