Dear Hollywood Movie & Television Studios,
I give up... you win!
For decades you have been trying your best to keep my from buying your movies and shows, but I've resisted. You've treated me like a criminal, you've crippled your products so that they don't work, you force me to watch advertising, you've even flat-out refused to sell me stuff I want to buy... but I persisted. The more you abused me, the more products I bought. The more you hated me, the more money I spent. The more you betrayed me, the more of your stuff I added to my collection.
You have done every shameless, dirty, despicable, evil, horrifying act you can think of to get rid of me, but still I kept coming back. Which is not to say that I wasn't tempted by those glorious DRM-free, advertising-free, menu-free, illegal copies available at no charge on the internet...
Except now you've finally done it. You've finally lost me as a customer after years of trying so hard.
Congratulations!
Just in case you're wondering, it's your new piece of shit "UltraViolet Digital Locker System" that was the last straw. Just like your DRM-crippled Blu-Ray disks that are so fucked up that I can't get them to work on my Blu-Ray player, your "UltraViolet Digital Copy" bullshit is so fucked up that I can't get it to work on...well... anything. I jumped through all your hoops, put up with your violation of my privacy, and agreed to terms so one-sided that I think I agreed to be your sex-slave for life, but still your stupid shit doesn't work.
And so I'm done.
Those thousands of VHS Tapes, LaserDiscs, S-VHS Tapes, DVDs, and Blu-Ray Discs I purchased are the end of the road.
For the most part.
With television shows, I can buy them digitally from Apple's iTunes store and stream them to my AppleTV or download them to my iPhone. At least their shit actually works... but the iTunes digital copies cost a lot more than DVDs/Blu-Rays for some reason (and don't come with any extras), so that's rarely an option. Hopefully Hulu and Netflix Streaming will allow me to watch TV shows I want, but who knows how long that will last.
When it comes to movies, I guess I could buy them from iTunes, but you don't allow Apple to stream them. This means I've got to keep the copies (and backup copies) myself, which is too big a hassle. I guess I could buy DVDs and rip legal "digital backups." That way I can always re-rip if I lose the file or don't have hard drive space. But that's an even bigger hassle (and the files aren't even hi-def!). Perhaps renting movies via iTunes or Netflix Streaming is how it'll have to be from now on... assuming they're even available.
Or maybe I should just become a pirate and download everything illegally? This does, after all, seem to be what you are wanting. If you didn't want people to acquire your product illegally, wouldn't you strive to treat your customers well, sell them product that works, and make legal purchases be the most user-friendly, easiest, most desirable, best way to own TV shows and movies ever? I mean, people are fucking paying you here, after all.
But I have no desire to go to jail or be fined for something that's not critical to my well-being, so it's not a pirate's life for me.
Guess I'll just have to learn to get over your product the same way I am now over your bullshit.
Congratulations again on your victory.
It's hard for me to be upset when you've worked so fucking hard to win it.
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Just so ya know… Netflix, on top of their other boneheaded moves lately, could not reach an agreement with the STARZ Networks for any and all films that are associated with their company, which means a rather large chunk of rental movies that were available on Netflix are no longer going to be available at all!
Man, Netflix really crapped the bed, didn’t they?
GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
Also – Aaaaaamen.
My office mate tried three times over 10 hours to download the Green Lantern ultraviolet copy. When he finally got it, he discovered he couldn’t get it imported into iTunes. He’s not happy at all.
Man, I’m so happy that I don’t give a crap about streaming and downloading video content after reading up on this UV thing.
No, thank you, I want my content stored locally, not depending on any remote cloud server providing it to me (or its license). I still don’t see all those services stay around for the rest of our lives, including staying compatible with future hardware.
Therefore, burning DRM’ed content to DRM’less standard media (mostly audio CDs in my case), is still the best way to ensure access to this stuff in the long run.
Over the last few years I’ve found that there’s so much new video content available to me (via Netflix & TiVo), that I rarely find an opportunity to re-watch movies I own. Thus, I almost never purchase movies anymore.
Thanks for taking the time to write that. You have to laugh at the situation or you’d crack up instead.
When you pirate movies you don’t have to put up with the annoying pirate warning video before the movie… I’m just saying.
Licensing and DRM is hurting, not helping. The move to digital media is a negative in many ways, compared to the physical copies of the media. Even with their DRM. At least there are ways of getting around the DRM for some of these physical media types (remember, if you own the physical media, and you are not publicly sharing your hacked media, it’s possible to make this workable for your personal viewing).
This transition to all digital media is going to be pretty wild to see what ends up happening.