4 ms·

When you can get more movies and television than you could ever consume for only $8/mo and ten million songs for only $5/mo, it's hard to argue. I mean, would y

by pstack 15y ago

When you can get more movies and television than you could ever consume for only $8/mo and ten million songs for only $5/mo, it's hard to argue. I mean, would you rather pay $30 for a Bluray that you'll watch once (twice, to be generous) or spend that $30 on almost four months of on-demand content? Spend $15 for a CD or spend the same for three months access to an enormous catalog of music? In a world where you not only need serials and registration to play multi-player games, but many single player games, it's becoming difficult to even argue against digital download game services, like Steam (on which I currently have 400+ games). Hell, you don't even have to concern yourself with shelf space, theft, loss, or damage anymore. The problem is that you also have to accept several negatives. Like DRM or the inability to resell a purchased book, album, movie, or game. The problem is that you have to make several leaps of faith, too. Faith that the source of your content will still be around for the length of time that you'd own the physical version (several generations, in the case of books). Faith that their DRM won't bite you in the ass. Faith that something won't happen to your account which restricts your access to your content and that if it does, their customer services is accessible and responsive. Faith that they won't suddenly yank content you've already paid. Faith that they won't do any dirty aggregation or data mining as you use content that you own. I'm all for digital, but I think we need some serious commitment from publishers and distributors and content warehouses before we continue making huge investments into what is essentially a collection of content licenses. An industry-enforced sort of "bill of digital content consumer rights" wouldn't be unreasonable.

louismg 15y ago
All good points. The issue we're facing with DRM, upgradability etc is similar to that faced with moving from LPs to Cassettes to CDs to MP3s to... Books decay. Digital files get corrupted. Companies rise and fall. I know I'll end up buying things more than once, just like I did with my Depeche Mode collection - at least three times.
- pstack 15y ago
  That's one of the big points of contention, for me. If I am purchasing a digital copy of your content, then I am essentially purchasing nothing but a license to use that content and it should therefore be your job to ensure I can continue to access that content for the rest of my life (or longer, if we figure out the whole management of digital copies of things so I can give my library to my nephew when I die or something). When you are changing the physical media, it's a little more understandable (even though you're still really just giving me a license to the content on it and nothing else). When it's already in digital format, it's no longer acceptable to play that sucker's game, as far as I'm concerned.
- dools 15y ago
  My problem with "digital decay" is that it's much more "binary" - it's working or it's completely unusable. When the reception gets fuzzy on digital TV, you simply can't watch the station where as an analog signal has varying levels of decay. If you have a hard drive full of images and it fails, it's all gone (better have a backup!), but if you have a box full of photos and your house floods, some of them may still be around. Analog fades, digital dies, unless it's constantly resuscitated. When you think about it how many times have you found an old photo that you probably wouldn't have kept if you had the choice? Or some old photos or music at your grandparent's house. What are my grand kids going to find at my house?
  - erikpukinskis 15y ago
    If you put your photos on Facebook, they will probably be available forever. They will certainly be available for your grandkids' lifetimes.
    - streety 15y ago
      I'm not so sure. A few years ago a similar statement could have been made about Myspace or friendster a few years before that. Would you be willing to make such a statement about either company today? Would you have been willing to make such a statement about geocities 5 years ago?
      - erikpukinskis 15y ago
        No and no. Neither MySpace nor Friendster ever had anything near a half billion users. Facebook has gotten to the point where the government would step in if they wanted to destroy all of the photos. Mostly, I think Facebook has achieved the status of a utility. It is entrenched, with a solid business model. It's drastically different than Myspace and Friendster in that way. They were just fads. Also, GeoCities was at least partially saved. As we develop more computing infrastructure of all kinds, that kind of thing becomes more an more likely.
  - Raphael 15y ago
    Your grandkids are going to web search for your name and find digital scraps of your life.
patio11 15y ago
I'm all for digital, but I think we need some serious commitment from publishers and distributors and content warehouses before we continue making huge investments into what is essentially a collection of content licenses. This seems a lot of work in a world where most content, and most popular content, is disposable by design.
- mirkules 15y ago
  It certainly makes you wonder about how this civilization is going to be viewed in the future. How are we going to leave traces of our civilization for future civilizations to find and decode? I suspect that the riddles of Egyptian hieroglyphics are going to be pale in comparison to decoding DVD information, for example. Moreover, how pissed off are they going to be to go through all the work hacking our digital formats only to find "disposable content," as you so eloquently put?
  - erikpukinskis 15y ago
    how pissed off are they going to be to go through all the work hacking our digital formats only to find "disposable content," as you so eloquently put? I may be understanding your point, and if so I apologize, but I think the "format rot" argument is a red herring. Yes, formats come and go. But as long as there's a sizable catalog of content in a given format, it's going to be readable. We can still read WAV files, RTF files and AVI files from decades ago. In fact, most computers can read these formats without even downloading any special tools. It's true that reading your VisiCalc spreadsheets off of an old tape backup is going to be a pain in the ass. But that was the freaking dawn of digital storage. Imagining that there is going to be the same upheaval in storage in the next 100 years as there was in the last 200 years is absurd. Things are stabilizing. Media are being abstracted away. Powerful catalogs of codecs and transcoders are being packaged up into easy-to-integrate services. I think there's a reasonable chance that YouTube videos will be viewable on all computing devices for the rest of time without us having to do any transcoding. Maybe Google will migrate to new formats like they're doing with WebM. Maybe Google will eventually sell YouTube off as a historical relic. Maybe they'll even shut it down and someone will suck out all the public video and store it somewhere else like they did with GeoCities. But acting like YouTube is the same as some tape backup, or an LP... it's just not. The technology is at a very different stage in it's life cycle.
rflrob 15y ago
> Spend $15 for a CD or spend the same for three months access to an enormous catalog of music? I'm picky about my music, so I don't buy new CDs that often, but when I do, it's usually for an artist I really like. When I have the opportunity, it's at a show for that artist, which hopefully means that they're getting a larger chunk of that $15 than it would if I buy it elsewhere. Music and books are, of the media you listed, the ones where you could conceivably have a dinner party with all of the creative folks involved.

by pstack 15y ago

louismg 15y ago

All good points. The issue we're facing with DRM, upgradability etc is similar to that faced with moving from LPs to Cassettes to CDs to MP3s to... Books decay. Digital files get corrupted. Companies rise and fall. I know I'll end up buying things more than once, just like I did with my Depeche Mode collection - at least three times.

pstack 15y ago
That's one of the big points of contention, for me. If I am purchasing a digital copy of your content, then I am essentially purchasing nothing but a license to use that content and it should therefore be your job to ensure I can continue to access that content for the rest of my life (or longer, if we figure out the whole management of digital copies of things so I can give my library to my nephew when I die or something). When you are changing the physical media, it's a little more understandable (even though you're still really just giving me a license to the content on it and nothing else). When it's already in digital format, it's no longer acceptable to play that sucker's game, as far as I'm concerned.
dools 15y ago
My problem with "digital decay" is that it's much more "binary" - it's working or it's completely unusable. When the reception gets fuzzy on digital TV, you simply can't watch the station where as an analog signal has varying levels of decay. If you have a hard drive full of images and it fails, it's all gone (better have a backup!), but if you have a box full of photos and your house floods, some of them may still be around. Analog fades, digital dies, unless it's constantly resuscitated. When you think about it how many times have you found an old photo that you probably wouldn't have kept if you had the choice? Or some old photos or music at your grandparent's house. What are my grand kids going to find at my house?
- erikpukinskis 15y ago
  If you put your photos on Facebook, they will probably be available forever. They will certainly be available for your grandkids' lifetimes.
  - streety 15y ago
    I'm not so sure. A few years ago a similar statement could have been made about Myspace or friendster a few years before that. Would you be willing to make such a statement about either company today? Would you have been willing to make such a statement about geocities 5 years ago?
    - erikpukinskis 15y ago
      No and no. Neither MySpace nor Friendster ever had anything near a half billion users. Facebook has gotten to the point where the government would step in if they wanted to destroy all of the photos. Mostly, I think Facebook has achieved the status of a utility. It is entrenched, with a solid business model. It's drastically different than Myspace and Friendster in that way. They were just fads. Also, GeoCities was at least partially saved. As we develop more computing infrastructure of all kinds, that kind of thing becomes more an more likely.
- Raphael 15y ago
  Your grandkids are going to web search for your name and find digital scraps of your life.

patio11 15y ago

I'm all for digital, but I think we need some serious commitment from publishers and distributors and content warehouses before we continue making huge investments into what is essentially a collection of content licenses. This seems a lot of work in a world where most content, and most popular content, is disposable by design.

mirkules 15y ago
It certainly makes you wonder about how this civilization is going to be viewed in the future. How are we going to leave traces of our civilization for future civilizations to find and decode? I suspect that the riddles of Egyptian hieroglyphics are going to be pale in comparison to decoding DVD information, for example. Moreover, how pissed off are they going to be to go through all the work hacking our digital formats only to find "disposable content," as you so eloquently put?
- erikpukinskis 15y ago
  how pissed off are they going to be to go through all the work hacking our digital formats only to find "disposable content," as you so eloquently put? I may be understanding your point, and if so I apologize, but I think the "format rot" argument is a red herring. Yes, formats come and go. But as long as there's a sizable catalog of content in a given format, it's going to be readable. We can still read WAV files, RTF files and AVI files from decades ago. In fact, most computers can read these formats without even downloading any special tools. It's true that reading your VisiCalc spreadsheets off of an old tape backup is going to be a pain in the ass. But that was the freaking dawn of digital storage. Imagining that there is going to be the same upheaval in storage in the next 100 years as there was in the last 200 years is absurd. Things are stabilizing. Media are being abstracted away. Powerful catalogs of codecs and transcoders are being packaged up into easy-to-integrate services. I think there's a reasonable chance that YouTube videos will be viewable on all computing devices for the rest of time without us having to do any transcoding. Maybe Google will migrate to new formats like they're doing with WebM. Maybe Google will eventually sell YouTube off as a historical relic. Maybe they'll even shut it down and someone will suck out all the public video and store it somewhere else like they did with GeoCities. But acting like YouTube is the same as some tape backup, or an LP... it's just not. The technology is at a very different stage in it's life cycle.

rflrob 15y ago

> Spend $15 for a CD or spend the same for three months access to an enormous catalog of music? I'm picky about my music, so I don't buy new CDs that often, but when I do, it's usually for an artist I really like. When I have the opportunity, it's at a show for that artist, which hopefully means that they're getting a larger chunk of that $15 than it would if I buy it elsewhere. Music and books are, of the media you listed, the ones where you could conceivably have a dinner party with all of the creative folks involved.