If you follow me on Twitter, you’ll have noticed earlier today that I went off on one about shiny discs versus naughty downloads of TV shows and films. My rant was prompted by two things:

• Studios continuing to whinge about the eleven billion dollars per second they’re apparently losing through the evils of piracy, oblivious to the fact they are in part to blame for said piracy;
• A number of official pre-recorded shiny discs I’ve recently bought that made me want to hit things.

In the latter case, it’s commonplace to plonk your shiny disc in your shiny disc player and watch, getting increasingly angry, as the following happens:

1. Unskippable company logos, to remind you who’s wasting your time;
2. Unskippable piracy warning, to remind you who’s patronising you;
3. Unskippable adverts and trailers, to remind you about things you either already own, didn’t want to buy, or perhaps didn’t want to buy a while ago, when you first bought the shiny disc;
4. Unskippable advert about some other format that you don’t care about or already own, to remind you to add ‘the people who compiled this disc’ to your list;
5. Unskippable animated menu, to remind you that the studio’s art department are just as dickish as its marketing and legal teams.

Phew! That all takes a while. But at least now you can play your show—well, at least if the stupid unskippable animated menu doesn’t continue stupidly animating between pages, like some kind of stupid videogame where you get to control precisely nothing.

But wait! Then this happens:

1. Unskippable warning that the commentary on this disc might contain opinions that differ from those of the studio, to remind you that sometimes it would be better to put disclaimers on the box, or in a little menu option called ‘disclaimers’, like they do on websites;
2. Another unskippable piracy warning, to remind you that, yes, these guys really hate you;
3. Unskippable stupid logo for the stupid sound encoding the stupid disc makes, to remind you to hate related parties and not just the studio itself;
4. More unskippable logos, to remind you that you’ve just wasted minutes of your life, for no good reason.

I’ve recently bought discs that do exactly this, and it drives me nuts. In one case, I have an ‘acquired’ digital copy of some episodes of one of the TV shows, and here’s what happens when I select a file:

• It plays, immediately, and with no fuss.

“Aha,” you might argue, “studios are getting this! Just buy digital downloads, you idiot! They don’t have all this crap welded to them.” And that is true. Fire up an episode of, say, Castle on the Apple TV and it goes right to the content itself, without all the associated crap. But here’s the thing: studios still clearly want you buying shiny discs and not digital files, presumably because shiny discs provide more profit, or just because they hate you. I say this on the basis that:

• Digital content (in terms of access) is haphazard and inconsistent across territories, often being hugely delayed outside of the home territory and sometimes not showing up elsewhere at all;
• Digital content is often removed from services after a short time (such as movies that suddenly vanish from the Apple TV);
• Digital content is typically priced at least as high as a shiny disc, and older content is rarely discounted, leading to the absurd comparison of “shall I buy this TV show on iTunes for £40 or just grab the DVD for a fiver?”;
• Digital content is sometimes locked down with DRM, making it hard or impossible to transfer between devices you own.

By comparison, illegal content is:

• Available worldwide, shortly after broadcast;
• Typically available for a lot longer than official digital content;
• Free;
• Easy to transfer between devices.

The continued bitching of the film and TV industries and its support for draconian copyright measures is really pissing me off. The industries still refuse, for various reasons, to provide anywhere near the same level of user experience in bought media—be it digital or physical—that people can get with illegally downloaded content. There will, of course, always be people who refuse to pay for anything—but they are a lost cause; however, most people are happy to pay for convenience and immediacy. The thing is, they don’t want to wait. It’s no longer the 1980s, where you don’t really know right away what’s going on elsewhere in the world. When a new episode of House airs in the USA or Doctor Who on the BBC, everyone who’s a fan knows about this. If your studio isn’t then making this content legally available, affordably, and on a worldwide basis, shortly after broadcast, you’ve only yourselves to blame when people hit torrent websites and download it for free.

As I said on Twitter:

Companies do a lot better commercially when it appears they don’t hate their customers with a frenzied passion.

When some chunks of the music industry realised this, ditched DRM, embraced digital and mostly stopped being dicks, things started to improve. The same could be true for the movie and TV industries too, but they have to want to stop being dicks first.

The Appside reports Nvidia’s VP of mobile content predicting the future of mobile hardware market-share:

Apple is fabulously successful and I’m sure will continue to be so, but I do think Android will, over time, really dominate the mobile market. It’s nothing to do with who’s better, it’s just you have thousands of companies producing these devices… I think it’s going to be a repeat of the PC/Mac market, with 80% Android and 20% iOS.

First, that really isn’t a repeat of the PC/Mac market, which has mostly been closer to 95:5. Even now, with Apple massively outpacing the PC market by some margin, its share of computers remains in single figures.  But secondly, and most importantly, I find the argument that there has to be—or even that there will be—one dominant player in the mobile market without foundation. If we look back through the history of technology, and even examine the present, the PC/Mac market was an aberration. You don’t have people arguing that only one company will become dominant in TVs, cars, sound systems, and so on.

Additionally, we’re today able to enjoy a large amount of interoperability between different systems, largely thanks to the internet, and also through instant-messaging systems, social networks, and even the likes of SMS. Each hardware provider attempts to have its own lock-ins and ecosystems, but, increasingly, we have a mobile environment that can happily cater for and support a number of players.

I don’t doubt Android will retain the largest chunk of the market, although it does appear it will become increasingly fragmented—we may soon end up in a situation were Android is merely the underlying foundation for a number of systems that are, in a de-facto sense, individual entities. (Although I suspect most reporters will happily ignore this, in order to produce yet more link-bait headlines.) But iOS dropping to 20 per cent, or further? It’s possible, but I certainly don’t think we should be using the PC/Mac battles of the 1990s as evidence that it will. And Apple’s Q1 and Verizon’s Q4, where it was revealed more than half of Verizon’s sales were iPhones (CNET), shows that Apple can hold its own against the Android juggernaut, despite being the only company making iOS devices.

Late last year, it was revealed that Vector Tanks and Vector Tanks Extreme had been pulled from the App Store. The games were reasonably close tributes to Atari’s classic arcade game Battlezone, but did not use the original game’s IP. Ed Rotberg, creator of Battlezone, told me during an interview that he was impressed by Vector Tanks; Atari, unsurprisingly, was less so, and has of late gone on something of a rampage of destruction on the App Store, taking down as many apps that resemble its properties as possible.

After days of silence, Atari issued a statement to Joystiq:

For companies like Atari, our intellectual property portfolio is our most valued asset. While we have great respect for the indie developer community and greatly appreciate the enthusiasm that they have for our renowned properties, we need to vigorously protect our intellectual property and ensure that it is represented in highly innovative games. We have been actively engaging with numerous established and up and coming developers to help us re-imagine our iconic franchises, and outside app developers have already helped us produce two top 10 mobile game successes in Asteroids: Gunner and Breakout: Boost. We look forward to further developing strong relationships with the indie app development community through additional games that we will be releasing in the future.

Responses to Atari’s actions varied. Some argued it was unfairly throwing its weight around; others, such as Jared Newman at Technologizer, argued that Atari was perfectly within its rights, since Vector Tanks

rips off plenty of the Battlezone aesthetic, including the green wireframe tanks, the square- and triangle-shaped obstacles, and the wireframe mountains in the distance set against a black backdrop.

And while Vector Tanks Extreme adds more features,

it’s built on the same cloned foundation.

I find the case more troubling. There’s no doubt Vector Tanks was heavily inspired by Battlezone, but if that’s an argument, Atari needs to realise that the vast majority of its own IP was based heavily on other properties, too, judging by interviews I’ve done with the developers of many of its classic games. Very few games were truly original, even in the early 1980s. And even in today’s litigious society, surely Atari could have taken a smarter route. It talks about outside developers helping to produce updates of old Atari games, so why not just rebrand Vector Tanks as an iOS Battlezone series? Instead of killing the games, bring them sort-of in-house. That way, everyone’s happy.

Today, however, we see the Atari/Vector Tanks situation in reverse. Zynga has released Dream Heights, a game that appears perilously close to indie hit Tiny Towers by NimbleBit. Curiously, one NimbleBit developer said on Twitter that Zynga

did go the honest route and try to acquire us first.

The developer has since written a snarky open letter to Zynga, starkly highlighting the similarities between the games, and noting the difference in size between Zynga (2789 employees) and NimbleBit (three). What links this to the Vector Tanks spat is there’s as much Tiny Tower in Dream Heights as Battlezone in Vector Tanks, but I wonder what would happen if NimbleBit issued a similar take-down request to Apple. Would Apple comply? Possibly. But would the long-term results be the same? My guess: not at all. Zynga would simply unleash its legal team and NimbleBit would have no way to fight back.

This is the imbalance in the App Store. The same legal issues ultimately exist for the Vector Tanks developer, too. There is legal precedent that videogame mechanics are barely possible to protect—only direct IP (trademarks and so on) are; however, the small developer has no chance in fighting the big guns, regardless of whether it’s the one being inspired or the one providing the inspiration. On a gaming ecosystem that’s done more to level the playing field than any other since the days of 8-bit computers, this is a huge pity. Here’s hoping that Tiny Tower being first to market enables it to continue being a success, and that the Vector Tanks developers continue to produce great games that don’t resemble Atari’s IP enough for them to be the target of legal smackdowns.

A form letter for acquired start-ups.

We are excited to continue our core mission of connecting people with solutions at our new home.  Please realize that this is so vague a statement  as to be completely meaningless.  But we just made so much money that at the moment we genuinely believe this horseshit.  In reality, you will never hear about us or anything we create ever again.  We are probably going to end up, like, implementing a new scrollbar for Google Reader or something.

And then Google will hit ‘revert’ a week later.

Hat-tip: @joestump

New RIM CEO Thorsten Heins has a video on YouTube. And it’s, um… interesting. It comes across a little like a hostage video combined with a dollop of delusional, and although there are some fair statements lurking, there’s also quite a lot of PR disaster.

I joined this company four years ago, and it was growing but comparably it was still small in the wireless arena, as a player. We have taken this to totally new heights…

This is true. The now-booted co-CEOs really have taken being “comparably small in the wireless arena” to new heights by turning RIM from a leader in the field into a marginal player.

If we continue doing well what we’re doing…

If we continue doing bad things well…

I see no problems with us being in the top three players worldwide […] in wireless.

We might just be able to fend off Microsoft!

At the very core of RIM […] is the innovation. I mean, we always think forward.

Notice how we managed to easily defeat those upstarts iOS and Android!

We sometimes think the unthinkable […] We’ve learned to execute.

NOW WE FIND THE TRUTH BEHIND THE EX CO-CEOS! (That might possibly be a selective quote above.)

Unfortunately, your correspondent fell asleep at this point, due to Heins’s relentless monotone, and so we have to guess as to the remainder of the video’s content. It probably went something like this:

Blah blah marketing blah blah blah better consumer products blah blah need to be better blah already brilliant blah blah blah we are the future blah blah we are unique blah blah we will be back blah BlackBerry is great blah blah innovation blah blah blah focus blah blah quality blah blah THUD.

Also, remember that awful and dull seven-minute Tim Cook video when he took over the CEO role at Apple? No, me neither.