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pulp novelties wrote:

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I agree, Divx was DOA.

Just beating the dead horse that streaming is a win of convenience for some consumers, but a win, win, win for studios who never liked permanent, theatrical-quality presentations in the hands of consumers to begin with, nor like the heavy lifting of manufacturing and distributing product. I can't blame them if people will pay for them to have their cake and eat it too.

In many ways the studios are kind of in trouble. Theater attendance is down and disk sales are down and catalog doesn't sell well anymore, they gotta scramble for something. Who knows, if they really get desperate enough, maybe they'll give making better movies a try.

Yes, this is quite a thing. Those who go for the streaming model often think they have control "hey, I can watch what I want, when I want, no waiting for discs to arrive in the mail or trips to the store!" - when in fact, streaming hands control right back into the studio hands. Like you say, they never really liked the idea that a consumer could get permanent ownership of a movie.

The studio's ideal model is that they control what you see, when you see it and where you see it and that you pay up every time you see it.

In many ways, streaming brings the theatre model of movie watching into your home. OK, you can pick from a large selection but in essence this is more like "what movie theatre do we go to tonight?" and then you pay for your view. It;s not really 'free' if there's a subscription and you can bet that pay-per-view will become more and more prevalent as well.

And of course, there's the deal breaker for me; the geolocking. The studios love this, in effect, it's region coding  but more restrictive - and it's very, very hard to defeat.

Streaming just taps into the must-have-it-now, must-watch-it-on-the-move generation who grew up with stuff like iTunes and accept it as not only normal, but the only way things are to be done.

Wich2 wrote:

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>in fact, streaming hands control right back into the studio hands<

Nebiroth, you never mention the elephant in the room: what about the cases where the stream can be the source of a file that is stored - and "collected"?

That's effectively downloading, which I find somewhat less objectionable although unfortunately it still has the dealbreaker drawback for me, that being, virtually all commercial streaming and downloading services are geolocked.

Downloading, for example, can remove certain limitations because it doesn't have to be viewed in real time. This frees it of the constraints faced by streaming, since you could (say) accept it would take longer to download a movie than it would to view it, in exchange for it being less compressed.

In response to ProfessorX's comment, I think one of the main motivators behind music becoming so cheap to download legally is because it needs to, in essence, compete again the illegal versions. The more expensive the legal versions are, the more tempted consumers will be to roll the dice and risk going down an illegal path.

Illegal music is a much bigger problem for two reasons: first, it is easily sourced from CD's which have no inbuilt copy protection or encryption (and indeed, even commercial software like Windows itself includes CD rippers these days, a tacit admission that the practise is so widespread and accepted now) and second because the file sizes are now trivially small.

There are certainly sources of pirated movies, but DVD and even more so BluRay, are much tougher to pirate than CD - they both have copy prtection and encryption (and BluRay's is reasonably robust and dynamic), there is not really a univerally accepted format  and the file sizes are very large even though pirated ones tend to be hideously overcompressed to mitigate that problem.