Hoping to a better model for digital video
A number of things have gotten me thinking about digital video again of late. My thoughts re: streaming cropped up while traveling. I was sitting in SFO waiting to board the plane and annoyed that I couldn’t continue to watch the rest what I had been watching on Hulu while I was waiting once I got on the plane and in the air. For me the lack of an offline viewing mode without acquiring the thing for good is one of my biggest problems with streaming media. I love Hulu and I love Netflix on demand but I can’t get them unless I have wi-fi. (the fact I can’t get them on an Android phone yet also makes me grumpy) I sort of like the model which Apple uses where you can “rent” stuff but I’m not a fan of the fact that I have to have an iPhone/iPod Touch to watch said content.
Which led me to my second thought which I had over the holidays which was why doesn’t everyone make a digital copy part of the purchase of a DVD? I got the new Star Trek for Christmas and was excited to see it came with a digital copy for my use. Yay! Only problem was that to get the digital copy one has to put the DVD in the computer, fire up iTunes and enter the code provided with the DVD to download the digital version. Pretty cool, except I had my Mac Air with me so no DVD drive. It wouldn’t been nice to just be able to go to iTunes and input the code without the DVD.
More and more I’m discovering that I want to access things where and when I want without having to be wedded to a specific device. Sometimes, like with my music, this is possible. Other times like with video it isn’t. It sort of makes me scratch my head. Back in October at LITA forum in October I was talking to some colleagues about digital media and nearly all of us agreed that we were willing to pay to acquire media. At the same time, nearly everyone had gotten content via other means. Why? Well the two biggest reasons seemed to be: format availability issues (won’t play on or isn’t available for my X) and not available digitally period. I recently read a post from Mashable which a colleague had starred that talked about a new format for digital video. Seems like lots of companies are on board: except Apple. Big sigh. I love my Mac but I don’t love having to have a iPhone/iPod Touch to play my media. I’d probably buy more digital video if it weren’t for this.
Honestly I feel the same way about ebooks, I don’t want a Kindle because I don’t think its fair to have a format that locks people into a particular device. I know the device and the ebooks themselves are separate but every other ereader is using a different digital book standard which seems to inter-operate on all those devices. But I digress. My point is that we’ve been through this with music and it turned out that people wanted a single DRM-free format that played on all devices. I don’t think that the format has to be DRM free for video and ebooks but I do think it needs to be device independent. Until my personal digital video and ebook consumption is going to be stunted.