I give up

I tried to use the Netflix live-movie streaming service to watch Ghost in the Shell:Stand Alone Complex and was rewarded for it with this:

netflix denied

that was after I was told that Firefox was incompatible, then asked by Internet Explorer to download three things and install two others, and after jumpin through all those hoops, got various “you do not have permissions to access this content” dialog boxes. The coup de grace was the message aboveApple is headed down the same bogus road:

Sources say Apple plans to charge $3.99 a pop for 24-hour rentals. Since Apple may agree to pay closer to the $17 wholesale price paid by other retailers, it’s unclear whether iTunes might boost the price or take a small loss to help drive sales of Apple TV boxes and video iPod players.

Apple’s movie download service is going to crash and burn, and leave a bigger smoking crater than Circuit City’s ill-fated DivX did a few years back. Four bucks for 24 hour rentals?

The first company to let you click one button and download a movie – no frills, no subtitles, no disc extras, just the movie – directly to your DVD burner and stick that in your home theater DVD player is going to mint money, for themselves and for the movie studios. And yeah I’d pay five bucks a pop for that, and I’d ditch Netflix too.

Unfortunately it only took the music companies 20 years or so to figure out that DRM was Dumb Retail Marketing. Maybe we have to wait another 20 years for the movie studios to figure that out. By which time the whole concept of physical media will be obsolete anyway.

2 thoughts on “I give up”

  1. (music) DRM is dead! Long live (movie) DRM!

    Seriously, movie DRM hasn’t shown any sort of dropoff in the way music DRM has.

    My buddy has XBox live, and is able to dowload movies so that he can watch them right on his shiny HDTV (and he can download HD versions of movies too, it just takes a lot longer).

    Incidentally, I’ve never had a problem with Netflix’s watch online service (aside from having to switch to IE to watch them). It’s technically a “free” service, so I don’t feel like I have much of a right to complain about it… but Linux and Mac users certain have a case. It doesn’t look like something that will be solved anytime soon either, as I believe Netflix is looking into Silverlight (MS’s proprietary flashlike presentation application) to enhance the functionality. But it’s still hard for me to blame Netflix for having to deal with studios’ stupid DRM requirements.

  2. Check your memory, seriously. Both my laptop and desktop play Netflix vids no problem; my friend can play vids on his disk but not on his desktop. All the system which can run Netflix have 2 GB memory. Of course, the ones which can play Netflix are also Duocore while the one which cannot is Monocore.

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