Porn, Hollywood, and Microsoft

It’s a wonder why you and I are still viewing movies via physical
mediums like DVDs.  To be honest, I’m really not sure why there’s
even such a huge fuss over BluRay vs. HDDVD.

About three or four years ago, I was working at Dreamzotic (NSFW!!). 
First of all, from what I understand, Rob, the founder, was streaming
video via Dreamzotic all the ways back in 1996!  Yes, almost a
decade ago.  When I worked there, we were streaming up to 300
Kbps.  Today, I don’t know the exact number as I no longer
work there, but it would seem that Dreamzotic is offering near 1
Gbps!  On top of that, they also have a managed download so that
you can grab the movie in its entirety.  The DRM protection
prevents the video from being played on any machine other than the
original.

I was once told that porn has been one of the largest forces behind
innovation in Internet technologies.  To some extent, I think we
can all agree that this is very, very true, especially in the case of
streaming video.

So what I don’t quite understand is what Hollywood doesn’t understand
about the current state of the movie industry as a whole.  With
the introduction of large, high definition televisions and cheap,
affordable surround sound systems, the theater going experience is
dated.  To be clear, I hate going to the movie theater to
see new releases.  Hate it, hate it, hate it.  From the
stupid kids with their cell phones to the jokesters that try to be
funny during a film to the dirty, dirty floors and restrooms, what is
there to like?

For the past 8 months, I’ve been using Netflix and basically
avoiding the movie theater (which is right across the street from our
development).  It’s quite obvious that the only two downfalls of
Netflix is the method of distribution and the fact that no one has the
balls (or insight) to do a simultaneous theater + DVD release (well, Mark Cuban has both, but I haven’t seen anything major from him yet).

Whereas the porn industry has been chugging along (especially with the introduction of DRM to Microsoft Windows Media Services), you really have to scratch your head at all of the fuss in Hollywood and why it’s taken almost a decade to catch up.

Bill Gates gets it right regarding BluRay vs. HDDVD:

“Well, the key issue here is that the protection
scheme under Blu-ray is very anti-consumer and there’s notmuch
visibility of that. The inconvenience is that the [movie] studios
got too much protection at the expense consumers and it won’t work well
on PCs. You won’t be able to play movies and do software in a flexible
way.

It’s not the physical format that we have the issue with, it’s that
the protection scheme on Blu is very anti-consumer. If [the Blu-ray
group] would fix that one thing, you know, that’d be fine.

For us it’s not the physical format. Understand that this is the
last physical format there will ever be. Everything’s going to be
streamed directly or on a hard disk. So, in this way, it’s even unclear
how much this one counts”