I just have to vent for a minute, because I find this almost unbelievable.
So I knew that Amazon.com was going to have X-Men: First Class available last week on their streaming video service. I've kind of been psyched up over it because I didn't watch it in the theater, but anticipating that it would be pretty good, I figured I'd just buy it once it comes out. I do that with a lot of movies I want to see these days, just skip them in the theater and buy them later.
Anyway, I go to Amazon.com tonight, and hot damn, there it is. For $15, I can buy it, and watch it via their Video on Demand. Woot, Belle and I get to see a movie! Except...
When I click on it to buy it, I get a message. To paraphrase, it says that due to content restrictions, after February 22 next year, it will be unavailable to stream or download for some indeterminate amount of time. If I want, I can download a DRM-laden version to my Windows PC and watch it using
Amazon's Unbox software. Of course, if I ever want to watch it on another PC, I'll have to jump through hoops to convince Amazon that I'm not trying to pirate it, and Amazon's Unbox software worms its way into your startup and always runs, and god forbid I want to watch it (gasp!) on my Linux laptop. Long story short, that's a huge "NO!" to Amazon Unbox.
So what happens after February? Well, I'm not quite sure, beyond the "you don't get to watch the movie you paid for" part. I know that the MPAA has, in theory, determined that by making movies exclusive in certain channels at certain times, it maximizes sales and rental income. In other words, I think the theory is that if I can't watch my streaming copy of it after February, I'll go out and buy another copy on media (DVD or Blu-ray) to watch. That's right, kids, they're going to
take away something I paid for honestly in hopes that I'll spend even more money on it again in five and a half months. At some point in the indeterminate future, I may--no guarantee, mind you, but
might--be allowed to watch it again once it's cycled through their channels.
Now, studio executives and MPAA lawyers
love to bemoan how awful copyright infringement is. It cost BAZILLIONS of dollars! Those poor starving actors and producers! However, needless to say, I am most definitely
not plopping down $15 to buy a movie just to have it taken away later. If they're lucky, I might drop $4 to rent it at some point. So the industry has just lost
at least $11 of my money, possibly more. Now, multiply that times the 10 or so movies I would buy each year that I don't. (This isn't the first time nor will it be the last time this probably happens.) Now multiply that by thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, of people who would buy movies if the MPAA and movie studios weren't such insufferable pricks.
Here's the extraordinarily frustrating part, the part that some of you are probably already thinking. If I were to go out to a torrent site, I could download the thing for free. It wouldn't have DRM, and I could watch it forever without restriction. I could copy it to my iPod, stream it to my television, watch it on my Windows PC, my Linux laptop, or if I still had it, my Apple MacBook Pro. I could burn it to a DVD and give it to a friend to check out. What I'm getting at is that this is, in every way, a superior product than what I can legally purchase, yet the industry insists on locking things down tighter, hindrances that
only affect people like me--honest schmoes that are ready and willing to spend money on their products, but that find these restrictions simply untenable.
It boggles my mind that there's even a movie industry left, with people like these running things.
