Zediva<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s still a DVD rental place, but rather than go to them, you go online and pick out the movie you want.\u00a0 At Zediva’s datacenter, a physical DVD is put into a DVD player and its content is streamed to you.\u00a0 Everything in the original plan is still there except for your trip and your DVD player, assuming you have one.\u00a0 This isn’t a regular video streaming place, where the videos are all stored on hard drives somewhere.\u00a0 There’s an actual physical disk and player involved in playback, just as there would be if you rented one from Blockbuster or the like.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Naturally, the MPAA has taken exception to this.\u00a0 The problem, as they see it, is they aren’t making enough money.\u00a0 Specifically, the places that do streaming the old fashioned way–from a hard drive–pay licensing fees.\u00a0 DVD rental places don’t pay these fees, although (by my understanding) they do pay more for the disks they rent.\u00a0 What costs the consumer $10 to $20 to buy costs a rental store $100 – $200, as I understand it.\u00a0 However, that larger purchase price is a one-time cost per disk.\u00a0 The licensing fees happen over and over again based on how often a particular video is watched.\u00a0 Although the fees are small for each viewing, there’s typically a lot<\/em> of viewings, so the MPAA makes a lot of money from them.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The stated concern of the MPAA is ancient bullshit.\u00a0 According to them, an operation like Zediva is endangering the jobs of “writers, set builders, wardrobe designers, and countless others who contribute to a movie production.”\u00a0 Seriously?\u00a0 You guys are still<\/em> trying to sell that line to us?\u00a0 I want the name of one person, one lousy crewmember, who has lost their job or taken a cut in pay from this kind of thing.\u00a0 Or worse, from movie piracy.\u00a0 The MPAA used to run ads in front of movies about how the wardrobe designer was worried about his or her job going away because of movie pirates.\u00a0 I haven’t seen movie productions slowing down and the MPAA has yet to point to one example of a lost job and state its because of loss of profit from movie piracy.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The simple fact is that Hollywood is still making buttloads of money.\u00a0 The MPAA is making buttloads of money.\u00a0 The actors are making…well, you get the idea.\u00a0 Nobody has suffered a significant loss in their earnings from movie piracy.\u00a0 Now Zediva has come along with a different way of doing things, a way in which money is still channeled to Hollywood, if in a lesser quantity than what regular streamers pass along, and its somehow a problem for the wardrobe designers again.\u00a0 This is bullshit, pure and simple.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There is, I hope, a revolution coming on this.\u00a0 The recorded entertainment industries–both for movies and music–have been raping their consumers for decades.\u00a0 This wanton abuse becomes more apparent with each lawsuit they file and each reason they give for those lawsuits.\u00a0 They have yet to come up with a single justifiable figure for their crap.\u00a0 Independent studies have been done by groups who don’t profit either way and said studies have demonstrated a zero loss in profit due to piracy.\u00a0 Some studies have shown an increase<\/em> in profit.\u00a0 People download music or movies, like what they peruse, and then buy the CD or DVD or whatever.\u00a0 The content is something they would not have bought off the shelf if they had not pirated it as they would not have been able to sample it otherwise.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
So wake up, Hollywood.\u00a0 Take a closer look at what you’re doing.\u00a0 You’re pissing off people like me.\u00a0 I have a large DVD collection, and I will continue to increase it.\u00a0 At the same time, your asinine behavior makes me want to push for legislation which very clearly makes what you’re trying to do illegal.\u00a0 Maybe the people who feel as I do–and there’s a lot of us out there–might even demand to reduce copyright protections because we’re tired of the bullshit uses you put it to.\u00a0 End the bullshit, MPAA.\u00a0 Let the fictions of our lives be in the movies we watch, not in your ludicrous reasons for these lawsuits.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Rant off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rant on. Let’s imagine, for a moment, you want to rent a DVD.\u00a0 So you get in your car (or on your motorcycle, or whatever) and you go to the nearest DVD rental store or kiosk.\u00a0 You pick out a movie, pay the rental fee, and then you drive home.\u00a0 You watch the movie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=456"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":458,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/456\/revisions\/458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}