Category: Video Technology

Help! I’ve violated my own copyright – terminate me immediately!

Posted by Martyn Drake – August 23, 2010

Apparently I’ve been told that I had to submit a copyright notice against myself for my old orphaned YouTube account in order for my videos (and old account) to be deleted. Having just received what I assume is a human response asking for more information on my copyright claim, I’ve written a couple of paragraphs explaining the whole situation. I’m hoping somebody at YouTube/Google can do the right thing without terminating both my YouTube accounts and causing an even bigger mess.

Oh Lordy – why did Google make all this so unnecessarily bloody complicated?

Bring back the days of VHS, I say. It was nice a simple. Until you had to program the blasted video recorder, that’s when you ran into problems..

Want a decent 3D performance? Leave film alone, go to the theatre instead..

Posted by Martyn Drake – July 5, 2010

Let’s face it – while film studios clamber over themselves to 3Dalize everything in their sights, a better experience would be to go to your local theatre and watch a play – a drama, a comedy, science fiction – whatever you want. Obviously the visual effects aren’t going to be as grand as that of a $200 million film, but at least you’re getting to watch the performance in solid 3D and without the need of special glasses which may/may not (depending on what research papers you read) can bugger up your vision long term. No, a proper live performance is all the 3D I need.

I’ve said it before, but the ONLY two people I think have got 3D films remotely right are James Cameron and Robert Zemeckis. They are the only two filmmakers whose 3D work has actually vaguely worked with my wonky eyesight. Everything else has been about as effective as Gordon Brown as PM. I really do not want every bloody film to be released as being in 3D. Or least work on a 3D system that doesn’t involve flickering imagery, special glasses or anything else in-between. In other words: bring on holograms.

I’m waiting, film industry.

Universal Pictures film rental: Blockbuster, LOVEFiLM, or iTunes?

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.

Universal: 1, Blockbuster:1, Cinema:1, Me: 0, LOVEFiLM: 0

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!).

Film studios forming online distribution alliance?

Posted by Martyn Drake – March 5, 2010

I was intrigued by this article from Ars.Technica about Apple’s potential plans to introduce “cloud” storage to the iTunes ecosystem.

As the article suggests, Apple may either allow iTunes customers to store backups of their purchased music, movies and TV shows so that they can recover them should their computers and own backups fail (after all, while the cost of storage is coming down all the time, there are few households with decent fault tolerant SANs), or to stream the content direct to the desktop, iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. I’d go for the former – one can recover purchased Apps from the iTunes Store but not music, films or TV shows. This necessitates that one has a bloody good backup plan in case of failure. I myself backup to blank Blu-Ray media, external hard drives, and online backup services such as SquirrelSave (UK) and Backblaze (US).

However, the article suggests that as far back as 2008 (it may be nearly two years ago, but that’s an age in the digital era), the major film studios (NBC Universal, Warner Bros., Sony, Paramount and Fox) got together to flesh out something called the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (or DECE for short). This is a system that intends to implement some form of universal DRM that would allow any device to play digital content such as video or audio. Thus iPhones, Android devices, Chrome OS netbooks, etc. could all play the same content across all these platforms, yet the content provider keep a tight leash over when the content is played – and by whom. The studios would be free to negotiate their own price points, terms of access, etc – something that they’re currently restricted by when using a third-party CDN such as iTunes.

I’m not certain DECE will be a success. It would require a complete industry acceptance of the system. Look what happened with HD DVD and Blu-Ray: studios such as Warner Bros., Paramount, and NBC Universal all initially supported and backed HD DVD over Blu-Ray. Fox was one of the few studios not to. Arguments over the technical details soon started to cause drifts and eventually the format lost out to Blu-Ray. The same could go the same way of DECE unless EVERYBODY agrees on how it is to work.

In short: Hollywood is unable to get together to agree on anything. It’s history of petty squabbles, fierce competition and greed has resulted in a horrible experiences for the consumer who ends up paying the price because nobody seems to be able to agree to anything. Will DECE produce something viable? Might do, but given the dominance of Apple and iTunes – it may be too little, too late.

The call of *COUGH* Hulu

Posted by Martyn Drake – February 10, 2010

Well, I had to sneak that one in.

This blog post has nothing to do with great old ones, but plenty of current great ones.  I’m currently playing with SeeSaw, an IPTV platform which was previously known as Kangaroo, the controversial video-on-demand system which was blocked by the Competition Commission back in 2009.  Kangaroo was then sold to Arqiva and has been since become SeeSaw.

Having been given a beta invitiation, I’ve had relatively short amount of time to give it a spin.  It’s not without it’s problems, but looks promising.  I’ll give a more informed opinion once I’ve had a chance to play around a bit more.

What about Hulu?  What about Canvas?  Well, at this point my head is spinning with all these different systems and I’m not one to be confused easily.  All I want is a open standard platform which I can watch what I want, when I want, and in a format of my choosing.  I don’t care how it’s done, I just want it to work without too many (if any) restrictions.  The day Murdoch and chums play nicely with the Beeb, Channel 4 and Channel 5 will be the day I’m tap dancing naked to work.