Video Downloading And Streaming: An Assortment Of Combustible Thoughts

Last weekend, my wife was out of town, so I ‘played bachelor’ a bit. Translation: lots of pizza, lots of popcorn, a few Bass Ales, and a few movies. I rented 300….but that’s the subject of a near-future post. I also streamed to my Xbox 360 some content I’d previously downloaded to my laptop; Easy Rider (which I’m chagrined to admit I hadn’t seen before, at least in its entirety….what an amazing screenplay, what an amazing soundtrack, and what an amazing performance by Jack Nicholson!) and An Inconvenient Truth (a repeat viewing) from AOL Video, plus I finally finished watching Glastonbury from Movielink.

As I sat there enduring the occasional playback ’stutter’ (in spite of no substantial contending network or processing burden on the laptop), this even though the laptop was wirelessly connected to an 802.11g access point that was CAT5-tethered to the same switch to which my Xbox 360 was connected, I thought back to my recently-published hands-on cover story on wired and wireless LAN options and its series of online addendums. I was, as usual, multitasking, and I ironically came across an excellent article on the topic from ACM Queue that, I think, nicely validates my contention that a wireless-only LAN is applicable to only the smallest topologies with the most RF-friendly environments.

I also perused several other related collections of information that night, which I’ll share with you via the following bulleted list:

• Blockbuster’s just bought Movielink (more), presumably therefore enabling it to more effectively match up against Netflix’s ‘Instant Watching’ feature, along with more directly competing against Amazon Unbox and other online video rental-and-purchase services. Speaking of which, where this all leaves CinemaNow isn’t at all clear to me; can the company survive standalone or will it also need to seek a larger suitor?
• Google Video is shutting down, and in the process it’s leaving consumers that thought they ‘bought’ content in the lurch. Welcome to the dark underbelly of DRM, folks, the downside of downloadable content (which, to be fair, also applies to DRM-inclusive physical media). I’ve said it before and I’ll remind you again, folks….after you click on the ‘buy’ link, you don’t own the content itself. Instead, you’ve purchased a narrowly-defined licensed right to access the content in a certain way, a certain number of times, and for a certain length of time. Fun, huh?
• Speaking of which, in case it surprised any of you, the content owners are angling for an incremental revenue royalty stream any time you stream content from one device to another. The real reason for DRM is finally coming out into the open; it’s not fundamentally about piracy, it’s about control, and about control-cultivated profit.
• Does anyone really wonder why, after all this, consumers are dissatisfied with video downloading?
• Cory’s spot-on. The movie studios’ draconian attitudes and actions are taking them down the exact same road that the original Napster dragged the record labels, kicking and screaming the whole time. If the video content owners would just be reasonable with their DRM requirements, they wouldn’t create a situation where they’ll (like EMI and, more recently, Universal, with music) eventually need to completely discard DRM in order to (maybe) survive.

They’ll just never learn, I guess. Sigh.