on the ongoing digital media revolution
Once again the lightning rod around which my inspiration chooses to strike is the same. This time Marco Arment’s thoughts on digital media are dovetailing nicely with my own:
I hate watching video on my computer, and don’t have cable TV. Instead, I have an Apple TV and an Xbox 360 with Netflix’s on-demand streaming app.
I wanted to watch this. iTunes doesn’t have it for rental and it’s not available for Netflix streaming, so I put it in my Netflix DVD queue.
But since I hate DVD menus and the Xbox 360 isn’t a great DVD player (too much fan and disc noise, no deinterlacing even over HDMI outputs, and awful remote-control angle), I usually rip movies with Handbrake, deinterlacing if necessary, and play them with the Apple TV.
Except this time, the plastic disc holding the 8.5 GB of MPEG-2 was scratched too much and couldn’t be reliably read by either my DVD-ROM drive or the Xbox 360 for playback. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it can’t really be avoided, although Netflix is very good at minimizing it. I went to their site and told them it was scratched, and now I need to wait two days for a different plastic disc with the same MPEG-2 data that hopefully isn’t scratched so my computer can read it and bypass the trivial encryption and remove the prohibited user operations and strip the menus and convert it to the format that works best on my TV because it’s not the same format as older TVs and I don’t want to buy another box with another remote and another video signal to collect even more dust in my “entertainment center” that needs to exist to hold all of these boxes that all do the same things but with different publisher deals and content availability and in slightly different and incompatible ways.
This all seems so archaic.
One reason HD-DVD died and Blu-Ray has had a slow pickup is that the geeks like me, who buy the cutting-edge technology before it’s mainstream, are completely disinterested in dealing with discs. Every time I put a disc into a drive, I feel like I’m waiting for a VHS tape to rewind before I eject it and drive it back to Blockbuster: that feeling that this seems completely unnecessary with modern technology and it’s probably not long for this world.
Our grandchildren (and, for the younger generation, even our children) will probably never hear a dial tone or busy signal, use a tape rewinder because we told them the expensive VCR would wear out its motors if it rewound too many tapes itself, bring the empty case up to the Blockbuster clerk to get the real movie, or be disappointed to open their new CD’s case and find that the spokes have cracked and are rattling around inside. Do you think they’ll be shuffling movies around on plastic discs transported by mail or automobile and exchanging them for different ones because they’re too scratched to play?
The frustration outlined here by Marco is something I’ve shared for a while, and it has continued to drive me to digitize and collect the media I want to enjoy. The desire for an appealing and modern user experience is so strong, I’ve begun to investigate the feasability of digitizing the books I own, so that I can study my photography books on a massive desktop display, and read my narratives on a Kindle or a phone.
One of the fundamental problems at this point in the digital revolution we are all living through is how to balance personal preference with legal standing: If I scan my copy of The Rum Diary, should I feel obligated to retain the tangible original? Present copyright law is clear on this, but the rational conclusion is that keeping boxes of unused physical material is simply unreasonable.
Further, I believe that securing and maintaining digital versions of the media I patronize is far more easily accomplished than with their physical counterparts. One of my closest friends Megan now has a distorted, water-damaged copy of Rubber Soul; the unfortunate result of a fire in her apartment last year. While the nostalgic part of me may believe that vinyl represents a subjectively ’superior’ sound, another good friend and unapologetic audiofile has concluded that the majority of his music collection will soon live on a Mac mini in a lossless digital format. Nirav’s digital library will be able to be seamlessly duplicated (for security purposes) and effortlessly enjoyed across locales and scenarios (courtesy of the digital device ecosystem).
The invention of sound compression techniques has forced music into the vanguard position in this revolution, which has shown us the multitude of possibilities, including portable players and network streaming. The best example of this in my experience has been the Zune experiement coming out of Microsoft. It has certainly progressed along similar lines as most of the innovations coming out of Redmond, in that the appeal become clear in the first two versions. Zune started as a pedestrian piece of desktop software and a laughable portable gadget. This month though, The Zune HD begins to offer up the ability to tap into a essentially infinite library of audio content, all of which is available for unlimited consumption for a cost equivalent to five cappuchinos a month. And when the option to permenantly retain a CD’s worth of that music each month, the value proposition becomes truely astounding: Buy one album per month, and you’re entitled to listen to everything in the store as much as you like (to really put that in perspective, imagine if Netflix charged you a fixed rate for unlimited monthly video streaming, and they let you choose one movie to keep forever).
The elephant in the room here is DRM, which is already showing signs of fading, with iTunes Plus on the bright side and Amazon’s absurd 1984-on-Kindle debacle on the dark side. For me what this shows is the market motivations against being unreasonably restrained and for being given reasonable responsibility (iTunes continued to sell more music legally after removing DRM from their equation). I hope with time, other content providers will hear what the market is saying to them. Ryan Block’s A day in a DRM-free world is a wonderful vision for this version of the future.
In the end, those of us who are actors in this revolution of media consumption must behave accordingly, which is to say we must revolt in order to push things forward. For me this means violating laws in order to help illustrate future normative behavior and influence the revisions of those laws. So I will continue to form a digital basin of content, whether inside or outside the realm of copyright allowances and End User License Agreements. I will be able to patronize in ways that are most comfortable, as well as evangelize the potential of new technologies to those who remain on the fence about whether to join the revolution.