For a little while now, Blu-ray discs have occasionally come with what’s called a Digital Copy. This is basically a way for consumers to have a digital copy of the movie that they can use for watching on devices other than Blu-ray players (PCs with just a DVD drive, Macs, iPods, etc). The way the service works is that when you buy the Blu-ray you’ll either get a separate DVD-ROM along with it containing the video file itself, or a special authentication code that allows you to download the video file from the internet.
This sounds like a pretty good idea on paper, right? You can have another copy of the movie that makes it super-convenient to watch your movie on multiple devices. If only it were so simple… Once you get into the nitty gritty details of Digital Copy, it doesn’t seem that great:
The quality of the video is DVD (480i/p) at best.
The audio is only stereo (2.0).
Downloading an entire movie’s worth of video can be pricey for people with data caps (everyone in Australia, for instance).
No bonus features (directors’ commentaries, deleted scenes, documentaries, etc).
The video file will be DRM’d to hell (especially if you’re using a service like iTunes to download the video file).
Not so great any more, huh. In my opinion, the ideal situation is – well, the ideal situation is no DRM, no data caps, no physical discs, 100% uptime for downloads and rock-solid streaming of HD video over the internet to whatever device you want. In the meantime, Blu-ray is here to stay and by far the majority of consumers only have DVD players/drives in their computers. A good fix could be for studios to ship an actual DVD with the Blu-ray. By “actual DVD”, I mean exactly the same disc as you would get if you just bought the DVD release on its own. This way, the consumer can deal with ripping, encoding and converting the video themselves and tailor the digital copy that they make to their needs – users need to deal with streaming to different devices and creating different-sized files for different devices (a lower-resolution version of the video file for an iPhone, for example). This way, the consumer has control over things like that. If consumers aren’t hip to how to rip DVDs, then there can just be a free, simple application online that rips a DVD straight to a handy-dandy MP4 file that’s compatible with a lot of devices. Chances are if the consumer isn’t tech-savvy enough already to know how to rip DVDs, they won’t mind that much about what resolution/codec/audio format the movie is encoded in. The point is that we need a system that gives control of how the digital copy is made to the consumers.
This just in: pirating the movie is still the easiest way to get it. In some cases, it’s the only way to get it. If the film industry wants to kill piracy, they should make buying the movie the easiest way to get it – services like the iTunes Music Store and Amazon MP3 have shown us that people will pay for music if that’s the easiest way to obtain it. If Hollywood would just realise this, we wouldn’t have a need for crazy hacks to get around archaic Draconian DRM, or complex solutions to simple problems like watching a movie that we already own on an iPhone.
2 Comments
Your new blog layout sucks hairy monkey balls. Change it back.
That’s a rather odd comment “Hilda”, the Swedish woman who loves to read Scott’s blog.