Wake up call for the media companies
Just read an article on Mashup.com about how Disney has bought a stake in Hulu.com – the number one on-demand HD-site in the US. Great stuff I thought…but at the same time my old grudge popped up and I wrote a rather heated comment to the article…almost like a blog post of it’s own….hmmm…
So here goes.
The news is all nice and dandy for the viewers in the US but when will the studios and other content owners realize that they need to give up the old revenue streams of gradually milking the non-US viewers by releasing their shows and content in phases to us poor saps? First sell to the TV-networks…then put out a DVD…a Blu-Ray and maybe if we get lucky we can at some point then view the content on-demand and in HD. And oh yeah…a few re-runs on TV just for the hell of it.
Come on guys…get your head out of…well you know…and don’t repeat the mistake the music industry made by clinging on to their “good ‘ol days” and by doing that teaching us that to get music online equals P2P. You might still have a chance if you move fast.
No wonder torrents are getting more and more popular. The mechanisms are in place (I’ve got iTunes, XBOX360 with a Live subscription and….yeah – a browser + a 100meg broadband) but for some reason there is no way for me to legally watch the HD content I want and when I want online.
It’s not that people are by nature purely evil and want everything for free (well not all of us anyways) but it’s quite simply that the powers that be at NBC, Disney, Fox, ABC, HBO, Warner (the list goes on…) are not even giving us the opportunity to do the right thing.
As I write this I’m listening to Spotify for which I’m paying 10€ / month. That’s right…streaming music and happily paying for the great service. So give me my BSG, Lost and 30 Rock in HD and I’ll pay happily (as long as you don’t try and rip me off like you are doing with Blu-Rays).
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