“There’s still no rhyme or reason to what films are available in any digital form. If, for example, you happen to have a videotape player around, you can watch an old VHS version of The African Queen. But you can’t buy it on DVD or download it from any of the Hollywood-sanctioned online services,” Stephen H. Wildstrom reports for BusinessWeek.
“The basic problem is that Hollywood is attempting to preserve an analog business model in a digital age. The result is a crazy quilt of availability in different media, in different geographies, and at different times,” Wildstrom reports.
“All of this makes little sense in a world where digital copies, legal or otherwise, are freely available,” Wildstrom reports.
“I don’t want to condone piracy. Yet it’s hard to condemn—or resist—when there’s a commodity item out there on the market and the vendor, for no particular reason, neglects to make it available to buyers. In short, the effort studios are making to preserve a dying business model seems increasingly pointless,” Wildstrom reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote just yesterday, “We continue to recommend Apple TV highly (over time, the device just keeps getting better and better for free) while warning prospective buyers that Hollywood seems to be stingy with legal content (movie rentals especially) for the device. If you purchase an Apple TV to play movie content (the device offers many more features and shines in many of them), you may want to take matters into your own hands if what you want to see is unavailable. Learning nothing whatsoever from the music industry, the Hollywood studios are stupidly encouraging piracy by not flooding iTunes Store and Apple TV with content.”
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James W.” for the heads up.]