Being a fan of South Park in the UK isn’t easy, especially since I’m not also a fan of downloading torrents (both for bandwidth and moral reasons). For years, South Park releases in the UK rather absurdly stalled at season four, requiring fans to buy the region 1 releases (which in itself makes certain studios spit red-hot fury). Even when this changed, the releases retained the most boneheaded aspect of the US editions: making you wait several minutes to access any one episode—see Helpful Hints for DVD Producers for more on that.

Today, I was helpfully spammed by Amazon about South Park – The Hits Volume 2, which is now excitingly available. Containing random, out of context episodes I already own on DVD, this DVD with one of the laziest pieces of cover art in history (name, eyeballs, rating—it just screams ‘bargain bucket’) could be mine for just £6.49!

Never mind the fact that I’m still waiting on season 13 of the series, which was released on Blu-ray (for £49.99) back in March. Another search reveals, though, that Paramount Home Entertainment is finally going to allow people with a DVD to buy the series (for £24.99), albeit in September, six months after the Blu-ray release (which, remember, costs £49.99, which in NO WAY is the reason for the DVD version’s delay).

No doubt said DVD will still be stuffed full of adverts and anti-piracy garbage you can’t skip, along with a tiresome and lengthy snippet from an episode, before the menu appears. And companies wonder why so many people are drawn to torrents these days. As noted in the title of this post, Paramount Home Entertainment hates South Park fans—unless they own a Blu-ray and have deep pockets.

In my recent 5 things article, I noted that digital storage is slowly seducing me, to the point that I now rarely feel the need to buy physical media when it comes to music; soon, I suspect I’ll be buying digital movies and TV series, and only the lack of a robust solution for playback is currently stopping me. *

The media industry of course knows this and is scared by the prospect of falling physical media sales and the decrease of control digital brings, having ceded a lot of power to the likes of iTunes and Amazon’s MP3 store. Now, people can cherry-pick music tracks and individual episodes of TV series, without grabbing an entire album or box-set.

In an article over on Billboard.biz, Kristin Hersh argues that there is still a place for physical media. “I disagree with the recording industry which claims that music has been devalued by the Internet, but I admit that CDs have been devalued by an industry that put so much crap on them,” she says. “I wanted to push the idea that music is measured in impact rather than plastic while still giving people something beautiful to hold in their hands.”

Fundamentally, this is about value for the consumer. When the perceived and actual value of a physical object betters the digital equivalent, people will still buy it. However, the days are long gone when a recording artist can shove three great singles on to an album alongside a load of crud, and where a format-bump is enough to convince most consumers to buy all their favourite movies yet again.

* On that note, if anyone knows of a really good wireless or ‘connect to a wireless drive’ system that’ll happily playback DVD rips, QuickTime movies and so on, I’d love to hear about it.

On Twitter yesterday, I posted this:

BBC ‘rip off’ in perspective: licence fee = £2.80/wk (for TV, radio, websites). New Times paywall = £2/wk (for two websites).

I had two reasons for doing so. First, it shows that the BBC offers great value compared to supposed ‘direct’ commercial alternatives; secondly, it shows costs compared to a service from a company driven by Rupert Murdoch, the BBC’s main critic.

Predictably, responses have been split. The tweet got retweeted by a bunch of people and also ended up on Twitter’s home page for a while. Others have been angered by what I wrote, noting that you aren’t ‘forced’ to buy the Times Online if you want to read a newspaper, whereas you are ‘forced’ to fund the BBC if you want to watch Sky.

Two responses of my own to this common argument:

First, I equate the BBC to a public service that just happens to be very similar to commercial products. This happens elsewhere in the UK for funding things of cultural significance, such as museums. I’m ‘forced’ to fund museums I’ll never visit, but nonetheless have to pay to visit ones I’m interested in. Rather than stomping my feet about the unfairness of it all, I got over it in about a nanosecond, realising that the funded museums are there for the good of the country and are essential to the UK’s cultural landscape, providing what more commercial enterprises cannot or will not. I believe the BBC is the same.

Secondly, a lot of people are getting taken in by spin, which is mostly coming from Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing media lapdogs. They argue that the BBC is bloated and offers poor value, and the public is starting to lap this up. The thing is, this is total bollocks. The ad-free BBC, with its four main stations, radio and websites, is excellent value compared to commercial competitors.

However, Murdoch doesn’t really care about the ‘value’ of the BBC anyway. He just wants to see the BBC reduced to nothing, because then more people will be reliant on Sky for quality programming; he and his media cronies also dislike the BBC because it has the audacity to offer a relatively impartial stance when it comes to news, unlike Sky’s output that’s alarmingly tending towards the garbage you see on the likes of Fox in the USA.

So even if you don’t care for BBC content, realise that it needs to be there. And if you do care for it, now would be the time to say so to ensure its survival.