Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

Sun Jan 14 07:55:14 UTC 2007

On Sat, 13 Jan 2007, Roland Dobbins wrote:

> again a la the warez community.  It's an interesting question as to whether 
> or not the energy and 'professional pride' of this group of people could 
> somehow be harnessed in order to provide and distribute content legally (as 
> almost all of what people really want seems to be infringing content under 
> the current standard model), and monetized so that they receive compensation 
> and essentially act as the packaging and distribution arm for content 
> providers willing to try such a model.  A related question is just how

You make a lot of very valid points in your email, but I just had to 
respond to the above. The only reason they have for ripping, adremoving 
and distributing TV series over the internet is because there is no legal 
way to obtain these in the quality they provide. So you're right, they 
provide a service people want at a price they want (remember that people 
spend quite a lot of money on harddrives, broadband connections etc to 
give them the experience they require).

If this same experience could be enjoyed via a VoD box from a service 
provider at a low enough price that people would want to pay for it (along 
the prices I mentioned earlier) I am sure that a lot of regular people 
would switch away from getting their content via P2P and get it directly 
from the source. Why go over ripping, ad-removing, xvid-encoding, 
warez-scene, then to P2P sites, then you have to unpack the content to 
watch it, perhaps on your computer, when the content creator is sitting 
there on a perhaps 50-100 megabit/s MPEG stream of the content that you 
directly could create a high VBR MPEG4 stream from via some replication 
system, and then VoD to your home via your broadband internet connection?

There is only one reason for those people doing what they do, it's because 
the content owners want to control the distribution channel and they're 
not realising they never will be able to do that. DRM has always failed, 
systems like Macrovision, region coding (DVD), encryption (DVD) and now I 
read that the HDDVD system, are all broken and future systems will be 
broken.

So the key is convenience and quality at a low price, aka 
price/performance on the experience. Make it cheap and convenient enough 
that the current hassle is just not worth it.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se