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February 01, 2006

Rigoddamndiculous.

You ever get the feeling that content providers don't really want you to see/hear/enjoy their content? Don't confuse that with buying their content, they definitely want you to do that, but once they have your money, they don't give a fuck what happens.

In a feeble attempt to hold onto their dying business models, the music, film and television industries are doing all sorts of stupid shit to try and protect their content and their stacks of cash.

(I feel like I'm muck-raking right now or something. Next I'll be referring to all the big media companies as "corporate fat-cats.")

Within the past month, I've personally run into road blocks on all three fronts: music, movies, and television. It's ridiculous. I had a little tet-a-tet with the Sony root-kit debacle, I danced with "M cubed" over a Garden State DVD, and I had a minor annoyance with Viacom and their so-called "Video Hits One." I'll actually start with VH1 since it's my weakest (or "weekest?") argument, but it at least includes a pretty picture to keep you guys interested.

So I'm watching Best Week Ever on VH1 a few weeks ago. Great show. That Paul F. Tompkins sure is funny. I was nary three minutes into the show when I saw this:

What the ƒuck is that? (Yeah, I said "ƒuck." It was an accident at the time, but I'm sticking with it.) I wish I knew what the ƒuck that was, but I can't tell because there is an enormous ad covering 50% of the screen. Not to mention the VH1 and Best Week Ever "bugs" in the lower corners... you know, just in case I forgot what channel I was on and what show I was watching. In any event, the in-show advertising has officially crossed the line.

I remember back in the day when channels didn't even have the company bug in the corner. Ah. Those were the days. Then CNN came along, then over the years everyone else said "yeah, that's a great idea." Which brings us to today where you miss half of the show you're trying to watch because it's obfuscated by advertising for other shows. It's as if television executives are saying "Well, we're losing advertising dollars to the Internet, let's make TV more like the internet... with pop-up advertising!"

My favorite thing though has to be the TBS tactic of starting a second episode of Family Guy while the credits for the previous episode are still running in the lower third of the screen. (Their reason no doubt being that by sandwiching those of credits in with the actual show they can squeeze one more commercial in during a half hour.)

I can't wait until 2008 when an hour long show is 32 minutes long without commercials and the show is running in a window in the upper right hand corner of the screen while ads run in the remaining space. And if you're watching on a widescreen TV that extra space is used for more advertising. That's gonna be totally sweet.

Anyway. Onto music.

Remember a few months ago when everyone was up in arms about the whole Sony XCP DRM debacle? At the time, I didn't give a damn about it. I figured I have a Mac, I rarely buy CDs, and when I do I make damn sure there's no DRM on them (even though more often than not the DRM is completely ignored by OSX). However, once a week whether I like it or not, I'm stuck in front of a Windows machine for two hours doing my radio show. Anyway, on my second-to-last show of the semester I noticed they had the new Trey Anastasio CD in the hotbox. Damn hippies. For some reason I remembered that Trey's album was one of the 52 CDs released with XCP on it. Probably because I smoked a big bag of pot the night before and spent about three hours at jambands.com.

Just for kicks, I figured, hey it wasn't my computer, why not. So I popped the CD in hoping to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out though, I couldn't even install the software to put the rootkit on for Sony to track my every move. Whether or not that's a bad thing is debatable, but the point is, even if I wanted to I couldn't listen to the CD. I couldn't play the CD. At a radio station.

This is a bad thing. Well, it's good that they're theoretically less hippie music on the airwaves, but if I were Trey Anastasio, I would be really fucking angry. Well, actually I'd probably just be kinda "bummed," really. It's kinda hard to be "really fucking angry" when your Blood Pot Level (BPL) is at a constant .8 percent.

Point is, Sony is hurting themselves in a virtually infinite number of ways with this rootkit debacle. Fortunately they seem to have learned from their mistakes (for the time being anyway), and live to die another day.

Now if only people got up in arms about DVD copy-protection.

The DVD front is probably the most infuriating of my trifecta of media annoyances. This is because: 1] it makes virtually no sense in context, 2] it wasted about an hour of my time, and 3] it's a multi-pronged attack of stupidity (from the MPAA, Microsoft, and Macrovision... the aforementioned "M Cubed").

So as is virtually always the case when I go home to Guilderland, I wind up sleeping on Kevin's couch. And hand in hand with that I'm always the last person awake in Kevin's apartment because everyone else are a bunch of pussies. So last time I was there it was like 3am, and I was finally gonna go to bed, but I figured why not pop in a DVD and fall asleep watching it on his lovely HDTV. I had already watched an episode of Lost on it and man was it was awesome. So I busted out Garden State since I figured it would be nice to dream of Natalie Portman that night. So I pop in the DVD and... wait for it... wait for it...

"Media Center cannot play this DVD. The DVD may be in use by another application or it is copy-protected."

Nice.

So I type that into Google. Dah. Macrovision. Apparently (and I still have no idea how this even works), if you're using component video cables to hook your computer up to your high definition television and are running at a resolution higher than 640x480 that's a not gonna fly in Macrovision land. Microsoft's "resolution" is to lower the resolution on your display to 640x480. So basically you want me to lower the resolution on my high-definition television to a resolution lower than DVD-quality (which is already lower than the resolution of the television) so I can watch the DVD that I rightfully own? Okay, awesome.

I understand why they're doing this, they want to prevent so-called "casual piracy" from cutting into their bottom line. ("They" being the MPAA via Macrovision, the copy-protection people.) They assume that you're gonna buy their DVD and make copies for all your friends via the old DVD-to-DVD burner/VCR tactic. They assume this because, you know, you went to the trouble of going out to the store and buying the DVD with your hard-earned cash. Of course you're a pirate. You're a filthy filthy pirate. And you're are going to hell.

Here's the thing, though. Here's the "rub" as it were. I was trying to watch Garden State on a Media Center PC with a dual layer DVD burner in it. If I'm going to copy the DVD, I'm just going to straight up copy the DVD, copy protection and everything. That capacity has been here all along predating even the days of DeCSS. I'm not going to use the "analog hole" to dub the thing. I'm not a redneck. And neither is anyone else with a $1600 Media Center.

(That reminds me of my favorite Jeff Foxworthy joke, stop me if you've heard it before: "You might be a redneck if you bootleg your DVDs by sending the signal from your Windows Media Center to your Apex DVD recorder using a composite video cable and stereo RCA wires to two 4.7GB single layer Imation DVD-Rs, circumventing the Macrovision copy protection via an RF modulator hooked up to your 19 inch television." See, it's funny because it's an Apex DVD recorder. Oh that Foxworthy.)

Now under normal circumstances I would just install VLC and be done with it, but in this situation I wanted to be able to use the pretty Windows Media Center remote to control the volume and turn everything off when I finally fell asleep. So, not wanting to go to bed (err... couch) defeated, I spent an hour figuring all this out and finally downloading some software to get around this copy protection (and as it turns out, the FBI warnings and all that other crap, too). And you know what? Now I'm better equipped to inform my friends and would-be Google searchers how to get around it in the future. Great job MPAA. Way to stick it to pirates and encourage people to go out and buy the genuine item.

(By the way, Kevin, if you're reading this, that software is going to expire in a few days. FYI.)

Bill Gates says that Blu-ray and HD DVD will be the last physical format. Meaning after the next format jump, everything from that point on is going to be distributed digitally. Mr. Gates is pwobably wight, but I'd argue there's absolutely no good reason why you shouldn't be able to buy a full length feature today. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to buy a copy of Aeon Flux digitally right now. The movie sucked, it bombed, it lost all sorts of money, it was out of theaters two weeks after its release, and I didn't get to see it. And while I'm certainly not going to wait until March 21st and drop $14.99 to buy it, I'd totally drop a couple bucks if I could have a nice H.264 file at DVD resolution with no DRM on it. It's two dollars more than you'd see out of me normally, and I anticipate a ton of other people like me.

The point of all this is to say that until content providers wise up, I'm going to continue stealing music, downloading movies and skipping ads (and probably stop watching shows entirely if they continue covering them up as I watch them). Whoever figures this out first (and selling us low bitrate music and low resolution video doesn't count as "figuring it out") is gonna make a pantload of money.

Or, as Lewis (or maybe it was Catone) said, "Whoever gets on base first wins."

Posted by pat at February 1, 2006 11:01 PM

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Posted by: deb at February 6, 2006 10:31 PM

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