Why Movies Are Not Exactly Like Music 378
Ars digs into the proposition that movies will go the way of the music business, and finds some reasons not to be totally gloomy about Hollywood's immediate future. For one thing, the movie biz managed to introduce a next-generation format to follow the DVD, a trick that eluded the music crowd (anyone remember DVD-Audio? SACD?). Blu-ray isn't making up the gap as DVD sales fall, but it is slowing the revenue decline. Perhaps the most important difference from the music business is that movies aren't amenable to "disaggregation" — unlike CDs, which people stopped buying once they could get the individual songs they really wanted. Ars concludes: "The movie business is facing many of the same challenges that are bedeviling music, but it's not about to go quietly into that good night — and it may not have to."
Re:The most important sentence in the article: (Score:2, Informative)
PSN's video store (Score:4, Informative)
I was horrified when I saw some of the prices on the PSN video store. £2.50 to rent Zoolander. In the UK, that film is on TV every other weekend and then DVD is probably onto £3.99. There's no way I'd rent that, much less fork out the £6.99 for the SD version.
That said, with proper 3D movies coming into play, I'm quite willing to still go to the cinema, sure I find the price quite high but if you haven't seen a 3D film yet I urge you to go and see one, it's very rare that I'm impressed with technology but this is something else.
Movies are definitely not like music, except it would be nice if you could download your favourite single episode of Family Guy, The Simpsons or The Big Bang Theory instead of having to fork for the box set (or can you already do this).
Re:PSN's video store (Score:0, Informative)
except it would be nice if you could download your favourite single episode of Family Guy, The Simpsons or The Big Bang Theory instead of having to fork for the box set (or can you already do this).
You can already do this. Most bittorrent programs like Transmission or uTorrent will let you select which files in the torrent you want to download.
Simply find the torrent of the entire season, and uncheck all of the episodes except for the one you want.
stale product (Score:3, Informative)
Another difference is that music is still produced as an 'album', with al the related expenses, but is now often sold as tracks. This means that some tracks probably are required to cover some of the expenses of other tracks. OTOH, movies as still sold as complete units, and are sometimes bundled with other units to generate additional profits, not cover basic expenses.
The other difference is that music has been sold directly to masses for a few generations, so the incumbents has gotten used to this as the normal situation. OTOH, movies has only been sold to the masses at the retail level for a generation or two. Prior to the 80's, movies were sold to first run theaters, then a series of lower priced venues, then to TV. Even in the 80's, with VCRs, there was still an debate whether a movie should be 'priced to sell' or 'priced to rent'. It was not uncommon for a movie to be priced $50-$100.
I do not see that bluray is going to be a big format. We have music players which changed the music industry, and we are not going to be told what we must have to watch a movie. I think the anti-piracy push of the industry shows they get this. They want to keep video cameras out of movie theaters, to protect the real profit centers. They want to stop free video streaming, so they can develop that profit center. An amazing number of movies and tv are available for streaming. This, of course is made possible by extremely tight DRM, another thing the music biz does not have, and something, I think, the video biz will have to give up in time.
Re:DVD Sales Gap (Score:3, Informative)
Pretty sure that as long as you’re downloading the head end of the file and not arbitrary bits from the middle, VLC would play the uncompleted file just fine and would continue to play until it either caught up with the download or until the movie ended.
Re:DVD Sales Gap (Score:4, Informative)
I believe that for some formats, the player needs to peek at the start and end of the file, before chewing through from the start.
Hence, many Bittorrent implementations prioritise the start and end of the file.
For as-good-as-streaming, of course you can fetch the beginning, fetch the end, then fetch the rest beginning at the front.
If everyone does that it kills torrent swarm performance as a whole, but hey, we're not advocating P2P here, right ;)
Re:Duh! (Score:1, Informative)
I've seen more than a few musicians (a couple, personal friends) who have built acoustically engineered sound rooms in their homes.
Boston's first album was recorded in Brad Delp's basement.
Re:DVD Sales Gap (Score:2, Informative)
The Loudness War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war [wikipedia.org] has done far more to erode appreciation of music than MP3 compression.
Re:DVD Sales Gap (Score:3, Informative)
You steal when you refuse to pay anything for something that a person worked years of their life to produce, and instead end run around them and download a copy of their hard work from an illegal source. It doesn't matter whether it was a sculpture, a painting, a movie or a song. The fact that we musicians are treated like our art is worthless simply because it's easy to rip us off is offensive beyond words. If it were as easy to copy a sculpture, sculptors would react exactly as we have. If you don't want to pay for the song, don't listen to it. If you download it for free from a source that wasn't authorized by the artist (IE: taking their hard work without payment and without permission) than you are a thief; it's that simple. If I did the same thing to General Motors they'd lock me up for grand theft auto.
So, peeking at somebody's newspaper over their shoulder is the same as grabbing their paper and running away? It's all "theft", right?
In fact, writing this post has taken me minutes of work to produce; if you read it and fail to send me money then you're just a common THIEF.
THEFT is permanently taking something that belongs to someone else. If the original owner still has it, it ain't theft, no matter what fuzzy platitudes about 'hard work' or 'art' you throw at it.
Re:Obvious difference (Score:1, Informative)
there IS no one-stop style that fits all.
Yes, but the first person was taking his own style and claiming that EVERYONE follows the same pattern. So no, both are not right.
Re:Duh! (Score:3, Informative)
That is, they sell albums based on people wanting just one or two songs.
The recording industry was singles-based for most of its history. A 78 held only one song per side. A 45 only held one song per side*. It was 1948 before the twelve inch album was premiered.
Most albums were "greatest hits" or other compilations; if you wanted a single you bought the 45 single.
During the 1960s and 1970s, many rock and roll bands made "concept albums" that were meant to be pleyed in their entirety; Sgt Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour, most Pink Floyd offerings, and many more.
When the CD came out is when the "album theivery" where you had to buy a whole CD full of second rate songs to get the one good one.
Why does a movie that cost $100 million to produce cost the same as a music CD that maybe cost $10 million (or $1 million, or less)?
Less; far less. You can get a record recorded in a professional studio and 1000 copies professionally duplicated with cover art and so on for the price of a good PA system and a few mikes (every band needs a good PA and mikes).
Good music can be produced for next to nothing, whereas it is much more difficult to do that with movies.
This movie [starwreck.com] scares the hell out of Hollywood. A parody of Star Trek and Babylon Five, it's very well done and hilarious. You can download it for free from the linked site (the producers of the movie). It only cost a few thousand dollars to make.
* The humorous song "They're Coming to Take Me Away" had a "B" side that was the song played backwards
Re:DVD Sales Gap (Score:3, Informative)
Do you know why that would kill swarm performance? And even if it does, how bad do you think it would be if say 30% of the people on did so?
I think it only matters at as the swarm is starting up. Think about it - the most efficient thing would be if every leecher is fetching a different part of the file. That expedites the situation where peers can start sharing with each other, reducing the load on the seeder.
If everyone starts at the beginning, then most leechers will be looking for parts that only the original seeder has.
Once there's a good population of seeds, it's OK -- it does rely on people continuing to seed after they've finished watching their streamed movie.
I like Wildclaw's observation, that a leecher might fetch the parts it needs from the front, in parallel with random parts from later in the file, in order to at least have something to trade.