bruceames

It's not the video quality but rather the time it takes to download it. If they want to watch a certain movie then they'll probably just end up watching something else from Netflix or cable, rather than going through the hassle of downloading a pirated movie. The selection these days is just too enormous to not find another movie you want to watch just as much but is available to view immediately and without leaving your couch. In fact Netflix is making piracy almost obsolete except for the newest releases.

With music it only takes a few seconds and they can take it on the go and listen to it over and over so it's way more worth the hassle. Rather than a two hour HD video that they'll only watch once.

That's why piracy doesn't affected the movie industry nearly to the extent as the music industry, and never will.

orangerunner

The other thing about digital technology is that it is not a copy but a perfect clone of the original.

Sure, at this point in time music and movies are compressed over the internet giving the end user a compromised version of the original but as technology advances there will be perfect copies made in a short period of time.

bruceames

That's one reason the studios are eager to go digital, so they can get more control. Also why (like Bill Hunt) I'm skeptical about 4K coming to physical media, especially in a "stand alone" form (meaning you don't need the player to be connected to the internet to play a disc). 4K copies floating around on disc are essentially master level copies which I don't think they feel comfortable having out in the wild that easily.

BuckNaked2k

We are on the verge of this now with 3D printers. I'm just waiting for the 5th Element model to come out so I can replicate my own Leeloo. Mutipass, baby!

morriscroy

How many telecoms own movie studios? (Besides Comcast owning NBC/Universal).

For that matter, what is the likelihood of the telecoms being broken up again, like what happened to the old AT&T in 1984 ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

bruceames

It's not going to go all digital, but whatever the studios do I'm sure you'll think they're headed down the wrong path.

morriscroy

If it comes to the point where physical media is not being made anymore for new titles, most likely I'll already be dead by then. (Too many health problems).

Though it will suck for anybody who is still living that is around my age or older, who is accustomed to physical media. (ie. Gen-X, boomers, etc ...).

orangerunner

It's all relative.

Throughout the 1990s, we paid $15 for CDs and we bought a lot of them. Did anyone feel they were getting screwed? I guess not, because we bought a lot of them. Same thing with DVDs.

The internet, CD/DVD drives in every computer, MP3 players and $.20 blank discs came along and suddenly we decided we were being "screwed" by the music and movie industries because these technologies have allowed us to grow accustomed to getting music and movies for free or close to free.

I like paying as little as possible as much as the next guy but it comes with its trade-offs.

hanshotfirst1138

Denying that streaming and downloading are the future would outright foolish, especially since they aren't the future, they're the present. The convenience is hard to deny too; even if you only watch something once, it doesn't physically take up space, you can store stuff in the cloud, pop open a laptop or juice up a Smart TV, and watch your movies or listen to your music wherever and whenever you want. But my main concern lies with them becoming the only choice. Oh, it's cheap now. They're offering tons of deals to get people to switch over. But if it's the only method of distribution, then they can regulate the prices a little too strictly for my comfort. A disc goes down in price when a store tries to put it on clearance to get rid of it. But a download can be the same price in perpetuity, and they can exercise much tighter control over distribution. My region-free player cost a lot. But if they lock out a download, it's locked out. Oh, I know that won't stop bootleggers, there'll always be ways around it, but again, it allows them control distribution much more tightly, and frankly, I'm not comfortable with that. And that's not even counting issues about rights could cause something to get taken down. The latter IS somewhat paranoid, I admit, but it's no impossible. Well, that and the fact that the only streaming purchase service currently with a damn is owned by Walmart, and I don't want to out anything in their damn pocket, no matter how good the D2D deals are.

Alan Smithee

I was usually OK with $15, though when I started buying CDs in 1985, The Wherehouse had ALL their CDs priced at $11.99, which to me was the standard "sale" price. I started feeling screwed when record companies started RAISING those prices, going up to $16.99 regular price (and $12-13.99 sale price) in most stores and $18.99 by the time Tower went out of business. I used to buy a ton of CDs every pay day, but when prices started going up I started buying a LOT less, and this was well before music was easy to get on-line. DVDs on the other hand got ridiculously CHEAP pretty early on, which made CDs look like an even worse value in comparison. You could buy a special-edition DVD of a movie for under $15, but that same movie's soundtrack album would sell for MORE than that!

morriscroy

A decade ago or so, I was still buying a lot of music cds.

At the time I too was wondering why cd prices were still sky high, while movie dvds were tumbling in price and looked like a better "value" proposition. Only problem at the time was that I had no interest in movies and tv shows, other than maybe Star Trek and Star Wars. So I found nothing to buy at the time on dvd. (ie. Back to the drawing board).

bruceames

I've always felt that this perceived value discrepancy between CD and DVD was a major factor in the decline of CD. Also, as people starting to gobble up DVDs, it took away money that otherwise could have been spent on CDs. I don't think it's a coincidence that the decline of CD coincided with the boom of DVD. At least that was the way I saw it. I saw these cheap DVD and thought damn, I get a two hour video with audio for the same or less price as a 1 hour audio recording. And by the same token, the relatively high price of CDs make DVDs an awfully tempting purchase.

morriscroy

My turning point was when I noticed many tv show season sets were showing up for $15 in the local dump bins.

Back in the mid to late 2000's, I largely turned down buying tv show dvd sets when many were still $30 or $40 a pop (or more). Back then I didn't think Star Trek was worth $50+ per season set.

orangerunner

The CD vs. DVD comparison is interesting and probably very true.

My CD buying days ended in the late 1990s before I even bought a DVD player but in the mid-1990s I recall buying the CD soundtrack for a movie at $13.99 and the VHS tape at $19.99 and thinking that was fair because you were buying the whole movie to watch, not just the soundtrack.

By the early 2000s there were many catalogue DVDs for $7.99 but the CD soundtrack equivilant was still $13.99.

joliom

The five biggest record companies and several prominent retail chains were busted for price-fixing, colluding to keep the price of CD's artificially high between 1995 and 2000. They had to pay $67.4 million and agree to donate $75.7 million worth of CD's to non-profit groups as part of the settlement. So I guess we really were getting screwed.

Adam Tyner

...or place more value on being able to watch something now and not have to suffer through pawn shops or Craigslist in the hopes of finding a movie I'd like.

Adam Tyner

I'm not putting down people who enjoy shopping that way, but I bristle at being called a "fucking retard" for buying what I want when I want it.

slop101

Who's got the fucking time? Seriously, my time is worth more to me than money. I have plenty of money, and I can always make more money, but I'm never going to get more time, and I'd rather not waste it by looking for deals that will only save me a handful of dollars.

slop101

Who the fuck's buying that many dvds at once? Even if you are, a great majority of them will be crap that I'd be embarrassed to own. And then, what about the time to rifle through all those dvds, most of them useless, adding them to the collection, throwing some out, selling others, etc.? HUGE waste of time - especially when I only buy one or two titles a month. Why waste time on more than that?

morriscroy

Everyone has their own preferences, regardless of how boring or crazy it may sound.

PhantomStranger

There was definitely a decided value difference between movies and music in the past decade. Paying nearly $20 for 40 minutes of music on CD seemed expensive when entire television seasons were getting dumped for $10. Of course, the market for any one music album is smaller than the market for most movies, which is why the music industry always resisted cutthroat pricing.

I'm not one to throw stones, I still regularly pay $55 for special Japanese CD imports.

orangerunner

Hmmm... I wonder how iTunes and such have gotten away with $.99 for a compressed, inferior-sounding song, which in many cases is more expensive than a 14 song CD for $13. The real kicker is there are no manufacturing, distribution and transporting costs involved.

I would argue the current model is screwing us even more.

hanshotfirst1138

iTunes compresses music and the various downloads from it don't sound as good a CD? The hell you say!

bruceames

Are you calling me a retard? All you do here is whine and complain like a little baby and put people down. Go take yourself and the stench of your bitterness somewhere else troll so this thread can get some air.

slop101

You give people an inch, they'll grab a mile. We've devalued this shit so much, no one wants to pay for music and movies anymore - it's background bullshit to most people anyways, so why spend money on it?