Posted by
Martyn Drake – March 30, 2010
With the news that Blockbuster is in trouble (thanks Ijaz!), it makes me wonder what the heck consumers are going to do in order to rent Universal Pictures films? Oh, sure, one can buy them, but is that really economical or cost-effective buying every single film you want to watch? I use rental as a mechanism into buying what I like. Given the limited amount of money I have, I have to be careful with the pennies. I do not have the luxury of buying everything thing I want to watch – especially since buying a Blu-Ray is far more expensive than going to the cinema..
As you will know by now, NBC Universal are not selling any new titles to LOVEFiLM due to a spat regarding the prices paid for allowing LOVEFiLM to rent their titles (in short: Universal wants more money and whatever it is they want, it appears that LOVEFiLM are not prepared to pay it). As far as I know, the only DVD/Blu-Ray rental company that has agreed to the deal is Blockbuster, who are now in financial mess due to agreeing to the “deals” imposed on it by Hollywood studios. The consequence of which is that renting DVDs and Blu-Rays may take a bit of a nosedive. Would this mean that Universal’s biggest rental outlet in the UK would be via iTunes? Hardly ideal for consumers.
Mind you, I’m sure Blockbuster will bounce back. At one point I thought Apple would nosedive during the early 2000s, but it bounced back spectacularly and now has it’s fingers in many pies – especially in the video on demand and music sales business courtesy of iTunes. But it goes to show that Hollywood is either becoming increasingly arsey and is used to getting it’s own way, or is desperately losing money through bad decisions/deals.
Posted by
Martyn Drake – March 29, 2010
Well, it’s a sad day. Today I’ve left LOVEFiLM to run into the arms of Blockbuster. You may ask yourself why, given that I’ve stood up for LOVEFiLM after I found out about Universal refusing to sell new titles to LOVEFiLM over a dispute about rental returns. Given how LOVEFiLM are Britain’s biggest online DVD/Blu-Ray rental service, and that Universal are a very big studio who are used to getting their way, I stood up for the not-so-little-but-littler-than-a-film-studio guy.
Having started to use iTunes to rent movies from Universal and getting poorer quality video encoding that I was expecting, I decided to re-examine my rental package with LOVEFiLM. I was paying £16 per month for 5 discs out at once and up to 10 rentals per month. This is was fine when Jennifer was working shifts and I was left to my own devices, but since Jennifer has a more sensible work pattern I found I wasn’t watching these films as quickly or regularly as before. So I decided to downgrade to a lower end package – only to find the LOVEFiLM web site didn’t give me any indication as to what I had done. I was still on the £16 tariff according to my account details. So I went over to Blockbuster’s web site and had a look. Had the package that I wanted, and the titles from Universal, so I decided to cancel LOVEFiLM. And that’s where the problems started.
Re-establishing my Blockbuster account was a complete pain in the arse. The sign-up process was slow with massive delays between the various stages as I waited for Blockbusters web servers to play catch-up. Then I go to enter my payment information in only to be told that the payment information was already in the system (Blockbuster had kept my payment details for another email address I had set-up with them a while back). So I had to call their customer service line to clear that up. After about 5 minutes I tried again. Slow web server once more – took 10 minutes to get to the end. Entered payment details, wait wait wait, then security details and Click Safe data. Payment gateway timeout. Payment gateway timeout. Called customer services again – spoke to the same person – who told me to try again later. Apparently there are known issues with the Mastercard gateway. Tried again after 10 minutes. More waiting, but FINALLY – it went through.
Have now added 23 titles (Blu-Ray) to the list. We’ll see how it goes. But Blockbuster really needs a better mechanism to separate Blu-Ray and DVD – it seems to assume DVD at all times unless you navigate through the Blu-Ray links. I can actually see Battlestar Galactica The Plan – although not available until May.. BAH.
We’ll see how this goes, but I’m not holding my breath. I may just give up DVD and Blu-Ray rental and just stick with going to the cinema instead. The film studios are winning. Experiencing films on local media (whether through rental or bought, and Blu-Ray is STILL too expensive to buy) or through VoD is becoming a complete pain in the arse, and I think the studios know this and are looking to get more bums on seats. The cinema is not dead, and isn’t likely to go away any time soon (which suits me fine – much prefer the big screen anyway!).
Posted by
Martyn Drake – March 28, 2010
Had a wonderful weekend in Reading (yes, I know, should one admit that?) staying at the Novotel in Reading and generally taking a break from just about everything. Didn’t get up to much other than taking advantage of the swimming pool and steam room, the free movies and the 5pm checkout on Sunday. Ate by the riverside and wandered back slowly via Guildford and now preparing for the next four day week (the last two Fridays I’ve taken off, and this weekend is Easter so it’s been a short month for me!).
I’ve only been to Reading once before, and that was to film an interview with author Kit Berry for the now defunct Friends of English Magic. Didn’t get to see much of Reading back then (after all, I was carrying around a fair bit of video kit including tripod, a £3k camera, radio mikes, lights and the whole caboodle), so it was good to have a chance to explore it in a bit more detail. Reading strikes me as being like Kingston-upon-Thames before the chavs took it over – middle-class and full of teenagers with plenty of money to spend. We lived in Kingston for just over 3 years (one and a bit was spent living a house owned by none other than Lawrence Dallaglio – yes, this guy) and found that it soon went down hill fast. Which is a great shame.
Speaking of which, there was some kind of flashmob today (Sunday) in which a whole group of teenagers were stood, statuesque, in the middle of the pedestrian shopping area. No idea as to how long they were standing like that for, as we made our way to the riverside, but it certainly amused the passers by.
So a good weekend. A most excellent Kick-Ass preview on Friday, and a nice little break away in Reading. Next week: building desks and doing the lawn. And probably breaking things.
Posted by
Martyn Drake – March 26, 2010
Lame blog titles aside, I am going to be astonishingly brown-nosey on this post towards the team behind Kick-Ass because they’re created a HUGELY entertaining film that for two hours makes you laugh, cry, cower and (almost) clap. Mark Millar has done it again by creating an astonishingly diverse universe populated by interesting characters. Jane Goldman and Matthew Vaughn have taken Mark’s universe and expanded it to give it proper three dimensions (as opposed to 3D used by every bloody studio around at the moment in the hopes it’ll attract audience – well studios, pay attention to Vaughn and Goldman who can do three dimensions without cheap gimmickry – it’s called the STORY).
I’ll post a more in-depth review later, but my goodness I’ve not enjoyed a film more as I have done with Kick-Ass. Not as gruesome as I expected (a plus point – I was expecting something along the lines of Monty Python blood gushing), and much funnier too, Kick-Ass will delight and shock in equal measures. As the late, great Kenny Everett used to say, “It’s all done in the BEST possible taste!”.
Posted by
Martyn Drake – March 26, 2010
Well, it’s been a nice relaxing day off. I’ve been watching a few movies at home – namely 9 (produced by Tim Burton and Timur Bekmambetov (director of Nightwatch, Daywatch and Mark Millar’s Wanted) and A Private Function (written by Alan Bennett and is a riot – a very funny film).
Now just about to get ready and head off to Guildford to see Kick-Ass (a film I’ve wanted to see for two years – it’s comparable to being 7 again and gearing up to seeing Return of the Jedi at the local Odeon – it was so good I saw it twice). Thoughts and opinions to follow later tonight or sometime tomorrow morning (although we’re heading off for a weekend break so it may even be Sunday/Monday before I get to blog again).
Posted by
Martyn Drake – March 25, 2010
Decided to download the Thinkjam Flash video stream directly and upload it to my server since their poor server seemed to be struggling coping with the instant demand for this video.
This is provided as-is without warranty, and should Universal/MARV want me to remove the video then it’ll be gone in a flash (although it’d be in their interest to get as many eyes watching this video as possible and they really should have (a) approached YouTube to allow them to upload videos greater than 10 minutes and (b) allowed third party embedding). As of 25rd March, 10:22am, this isn’t even up on The Time’s Q&A web site! Content served by two servers, with a third about to be added (update: 3rd server now live and online – still based in UK). It’s completely random as to which one will serve the video, although most of them are of similar spec and bandwidth.
So, here’s 34 minutes of banter between Jonathan Ross and Matthew Vaughn talking about what could be this year’s best movie..
This text will be replaced
