Rant The start of the end, the death of megavideo

Mainly US ones, you can guess why. European ones and especially russian ones will probably stay. I mean rapidshare, netload, letitbit etc. Maybe they will restrict connectivity to non-US IP addresses only, but it is their (US) own fault...

 

Europe isn't immune from this stuff; At least not in countries like Ireland where we seem to love moronic legislation and letting ourselves get bent over by the big corporations:

News article:
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0124/breaking32.html

Petition:
http://stopsopaireland.com/

It was bad enough when a couple of ISPs here were forced by the court to censor the internet and block customers' access to the Pirate Bay, but that isn't enough for the record labels - Now they want it to be part of our legal copyright legislation so that they can shut sites (or ISPs) down at a whim.
It isn't the same as SOPA, but the problem is that the judiciary here have shown bias in favour of the record labels in the past, which means that in practice it's going to amount to the same if it gets through.

At least citizens of the USA were being given some kind of opportunity to intervene via congress/senate, but that wasn't even on the cards here until we kicked up a fuss about it via a petition.

 

What a massive waste of time and money.

There are already 100's of other sites that can do similar things and give it 48 hours and there will be 100's more to fill the void.

Shutting down one site here and there will not do anything to stop piracy.

Give us content that is easy to get and at a reasonable price, that will drop piracy overnight.

 

What is happening now is rather diferent, the other cyberlockers are running away and there are no new ones to fill the void.

 

Woohoo, no megaupload means we have to use crapidshare...

Content is already reasonably priced - the fact that you have to pay for it at all is what puts most people off. LOL.

 

wait what?

 

Uhm... Well, i am glad to finally have iTunes in my country, but there are still flaws to the system. For example the fact that movies have DRM attached to them, which is a huge problem for anyone using anything else but iTunes for video playback (in my case it is XBMC). And as a example, there is no TV shows category for me.

So if we scratch iTunes for TV shows and movies, what do most of non-US customers get ? No streaming movie or tv show service (no Netflix). Most of the times shows delayed by months or years, sometimes with crappy dubbing (localization) without the original english sound.

So what remains is a inferior DVD/Blue Ray technology, with copy protection and bad pricing - what i mean is while 10 euro price for a movie on iTunes is acceptable for someone with minimal income in UK (1000 GBP per month), but pretty much impossible to buy for someone with minimal income in central Europe (300-350 EUR per month) and let's not even talk about Ukraine or Romania (100-160 EUR per month).

 

And then you have services like hullu, spotify, pandora, etc... that are all region locked.
Lots of youtube videos are region locked.

And it is very much fun fun fun when a regular game cost something like 10% of my wage. I know i am not entitled to someone else's work for free, that is why i have not downloaded stuff in a long time, and not have i played anything commercial and modern in like... 5 years....

What i find sad is when the owners of the media start crying that people are not buying their games and that the internet should be eviscerated so that their profits may grow.

 

I certainly don't think it is.

What I'd like to see is services like netflix becoming more worldwide and with more content. I'd gladly pay a monthly fee to watch my movies and episodes.

I'm not going to go pay AUS$40 for a Blu-Ray which I may only watch once or twice.
The movie/tv/music industries need to shift their focus and update their business model.

The internet is here and it's here to stay, embrace it.

 

I'm glad to see someone else out there willing to come out and say it. Everyone's got their own sob story of how they've been repeatedly shafted by ridiculous prices and long waits for media to reach their country, fair enough (anime prices are brutal, I know the pain), but what you're not seeing posts from is the wealth of people who pirate things even when they're readily available and fairly priced. One of my housemates is part of this crowd, makes roughly $1200 a month with about left $300 after bills, food and gas. Skyrim comes out for $60, easily affordable, yet he pirates it. And we're not talking about some demo here or waiting for the price to lower, he loves the game and has over 50 hours played with no intention of ever buying the game because he just doesn't have to.

I'm all for media industries understanding what their customers want and providing services which actually meet those needs and how that would indeed stop a fair number of pirates, but you'd have to be blind not to see that there are people out there who will always take a free lunch when one is available and that file sharing/hosting sites will always be used for these people. Even the legitimate sites will always be facing this problem.

 

Just thought I'd share this on here http://www.kongregate.com/games/LemmiBeans/sopa-pipa

It's a short game that shows the impact of SOPA. I think I may have put it in another thread as well but what the hey!

 

So true - people can pirate stuff all they want for all I care, but I cba listening to the "cry me a river" tirade against and pricing etc.; I wish people had the integrity simply to admit that they do it because they can, and (more importantly, I feel) because there are no consequences.

 

Watch this:

http://www.3news.co.nz/Campbell-Liv...nsion/tabid/367/articleID/242116/Default.aspx