DVD industry: all you need to digitise your collection is a car. And money. Everyone else: what?
You’ve got to hand it to the DVD guys. Clearly responding to the kind of dickishness I wrote about recently, they’ve now set upon a course of action that will—shock!—enable you to unlock your DVDs and format-shift them to digital. Hurrah!
What’s that? There’s a catch, you say, Michael Weinberg, reporting for Public Knowledge?
The program, which would have merely been ill-advised had it been announced ten years ago, today stands as a testament to the ability of movie studios to blind themselves to reality.
*popcorn*
The entire program is designed to give consumers a way to take movies they already own on DVD and turn them into more portable digital files.
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me…
As reported by the LA Times, the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store
Sorry, what was that?
As reported by the LA Times, the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store
Right. I thought I’d gone insane for a moment and you’d said the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store! That would be bonkers!
As reported by the LA Times, the first phase in this process is to let DVD owners bring their DVDs to a store
Oh.
that will handle the digital conversion. Tsujihara described this process as allowing consumers to convert their libraries “easily, safely and at reasonable prices.”
If only there was a way for people to convert their libraries easily, safely and at reasonable prices at home, with, say, a PC or a Mac and a copy of Handbrake or similar software. Although, clearly, that wouldn’t help regarding the ‘safely’ bit, because, as we all know, Handbrake has a little-known ‘fire shuriken from your display’ feature that is randomly activated. [SUB: PLEASE CHECK THIS INFO PROVIDED BY A DVD GUY]
Oh, but hang on! This is about money, isn’t it? These guys want you to pay again for the content you’ve already bought and have therefore finally figured out a typically inept industry means of having you do so. Those scallywags! But really: taking your DVDs to a store? Waiting while the conversion is done? Waiting for some unspecified point in time where “Internet retailers like Amazon.com will email customers to offer digital copies of DVDs they previously bought”? Saying that ‘eventually’—presumably when cars fly through the air and meals are consumed in exciting sci-fi pill form—consumers will be able to put DVDs into PCs that will upload a copy, like how, um, Handbrake works right now?
[…] example of how behind the times the film industry is from Craig Grannell. The LA Times reports that Warners are launching a programme called ‘Disc to Digital’ […]