{"id":1194,"date":"2008-06-07T19:51:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-08T02:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2008\/06\/07\/the-great-experiment\/"},"modified":"2008-06-07T19:51:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-08T02:51:00","slug":"the-great-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/2008\/06\/07\/the-great-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"The Great Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am nothing if not malleable. Barely three weeks after complaining<\/a> that I couldn’t buy and download the TV shows I want to watch on my computer, I’m trying out the available options to see if I can live with them. So far, I’ve bought five episodes of Reaper<\/span> from iTunes, and D and I have watched two of them. After this, it’ll be House<\/span> from Amazon Unbox.<\/p>\n

So far, it’s been pretty convenient, and I’m more than willing to pay $2 for an episode of a show I love–especially because it’s a purchase<\/span>, not a rental, and I get to keep the file for as long as I want. True, there’s still crappy DRM attached, but it is the least of the associated evils.<\/p>\n

Why don’t I just use BitTorrent? Well, it’s not terribly convenient, for one. I’m not a big fan of hunting down the right torrent and hoping that the download actually finishes. (Before you post your pollyanna comment: I’m glad it works for you. It rarely works for me.) Reliability is also a problem–especially at the moment, when we’re dependent on hotel broadband that is usually sketchy and often throttles even streaming video traffic.<\/p>\n

Another big issue is quality. True, iTunes video is nothing to write home about, and you can find HD content via torrents, but there’s also a lot of low-quality, truncated, or simply mislabeled stuff out there. Given the choice between a data set that oscillates wildly between very good<\/span> and very bad<\/span>, and one that stays flatlined at pretty good<\/span>, I’ll take the linear fit, thank you.<\/p>\n

Finally, I’m voting with my wallet. I have never been part of a Nielsen family (or even known any–have you?), and even when I’m using TiVo, I have very little confidence that the networks will pay any attention to my viewing habits, because they consider me a thief<\/a>.* But if I’m actually giving them my money, and that money-giving is clearly attached to a particular program–well, I sincerely hope that even corporate executives are not that<\/span> stupid. Besides, I can feel good that I’m directly contributing to the writers’ residual payments, even if it’s only a couple of pennies for each episode I buy.<\/p>\n

* Yeah, treat your customers like criminals. That’s a great<\/span> business plan.<\/small><\/p>\n

~CKL<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am nothing if not malleable. Barely three weeks after complaining that I couldn’t buy and download the TV shows I want to watch on my computer, I’m trying out the available options to see if I can live with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[32,56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sci-tech","category-tv"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1194\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.curtiscchen.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}