I had been reading about VoD for quite some time now. But I always thought this was yet another example of modern technology available in the Anglophone countries (America, UK, …) and not (yet) available here in France due to our various isolationist policies and our reluctance to import anything Anglophone and, God forbid, popular. However Arte has its own VoD site where one can download and watch documentaries and certain television shows they air. This series was the first they were offering on VoD and I was certainly going to be one of the first to test it out and show them that there is an interested public.
We have a computer hooked up to the (big) television in the living room. We have a wireless keyboard and mouse which we use from the couch. This is the first step towards a Media Centre and provides a certain amount of functionality which I personally greatly appreciate. As you can imagine I love being able to access the Internet from the living room without having to go to my office or my Blackberry. But we also have replaced the separate DVD player with the computer and run all of our DVDs through the computer. This also gives us the mouse to control the DVD features rather than yet another remote control. We also have a TV tuner card in the computer (Hauppage WinTV-HVR1300) which allows us to watch TV on the computer. But more importantly it allows us to record from the television to the computer. This allows us to record as much television as we want, to watch it over and over again without any notion of wear and tear on the medium (video cassette, DVD, …) and to be able to copy or back it up to other media as often as we wish. Unfortunately I am having a bit of difficulty getting the scheduling feature to work. This is yet another case of the cobbler’s barefoot children as I do not have a lot of time to work on the living room computer as I am spending all my time working on my clients’ computers. Nevertheless we can, and do, manually record television shows and they work wonderfully. When recording from the television, however, the quality of the recording can only be as good as the quality of the broadcast. This depends on the channel we are recording from more than anything else. I have personally always hated the idea that I have to plan recording from television, even in these days of wonderfully automated electronic programming guides (EPGs), one had to pre-plan and pre-think so much so as to choose what one wants to record and when that often much excellent programming gets lost in the mass of media.
One of the fun aspects has been to download and collect various video clips on the computer we can watch whenever we want. These include video clips from enhanced CDs, movie trailers, fun Flash/Shockwave animations and even bits and pieces from our home movies. This has obviously been improved upon, and almost revolutionised, by having You Tube available on our living room television.
But for me personally the Holy Grail, the epitome of the home entertainment experience, has been the notion of the online electronic entertainment library. I have been talking about this in my computing classes for a few years now as my vision of the future of entertainment and we are getting there bit by bit. In my mind the ability to watch what I want when I want, even at a price, is exactly what the convergence of the entertainment system and the Internet should be. I should be able to sit down in my living room, check out a library of programming and movies, pick out what I want to watch, download it and watch it (sometimes simultaneously). I shouldn’t have to have shelves and shelves of DVDs like I have. I shouldn’t have to pre-plan my week finding out what programming is available, scheduling the recording and then finding time to watch what I’ve recorded afterwards. I shouldn’t have to be told when to watch the screen and have to plan it. To repeat: I should be able to sit down when I want and watch what I want.
I guess our digital music system is really spoiling me. With all of our CDs inside of a music server we can all listen to what we want without having to find the specific CD or the song on a CD. With a combination of Sonos and Squeezebox players throughout the house we have the entire music collection everywhere. The Sonos system even plays the Podcasts I download so I don’t have to listen to them on my computer or download them to my iPod first. Nevertheless now that my iPod connects to the car stereo I also no longer have to burn my Podcasts to CDs to be able to listen to them in the car either. The only remaining limitation, and it’s a huge one, is that the current Music on Demand (MoD?) system, whether it be via iTunes or any other online music store, is handicapped by Digital Rights Management (DRM) and crippled quality.
Here on Arte’s VoD site I found I could watch every episode of this television series whenever I wanted. I pick the episode I want, I pay for it (2.49 € per episode) and I download and watch it. I had to try this out. To my great surprise it worked the first time and perfectly. Not only was I able to watch the show immediately, in full-screen looking exactly like a film rather than a computer file, but it was also of a better quality than when I watched the show via cable broadcast. Excellent! This is revolutionary for me. I don’t have to remember to schedule a recording, or find out when the show is on, or make sure no one else is watching something at the same time, or plan on when I will watch it after I record it. I just sit down, decide I feel like watching the next episode and in 7 minutes it’s on and I’m watching it. I watched episode 11, out of 13, last night!
I obviously realised that VoD could be more than just television series. About 95% of Arte’s offerings actually are documentaries many of which are excellent. I then started to look around, without much hope, as I dreamed of being able to have VoD cinema in France like I’ve read about elsewhere. It’s happening slowly but surely. Of course even when I do find French VoD sites the first great limitation is VoST. Most French sites only offer French films or films dubbed in to French. Very few offer films in VoST and when they do the selection is very limited. But it does exist and recently we’ve expanded our family arguments about what to watch on a Friday night to include the VoD offers as well. We’ve watched several movies now from the VoD sites and have been quite pleased with what we’ve seen. I am under whelmed by the selection and choice at the moment. But I hope that will evolve and improve with time. Some of the sites we use:
- Canal Play: Canal Plus’ VoD site with a reasonable selection of films in VoST and the ability to search/filter for just those --- television series (dubbed), most films are for rental and a (relatively small) selection of films for purchase
- Virgin Mega VoD: A very good selection of films, some in VoST but no way to search for those separately, some documentaries --- most programming is for rental with a very small selection of films for purchase
- TF1 Vision: No films in VoST --- most films are for rental and a very small selection of films for purchase
- Imineo: Huge selection, very few in VoST, all films available for purchase and not rental
- M6 Video: Lots of television series, a few movies, everything in French or dubbed with nothing in VoST --- all for rental only
- Vodeo: Exclusively documentaries, almost exclusively in French or dubbed --- all programming available for rental or purchase.
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
DRM is what has killed commercial music downloading for me as well as commercial eBooks. DRM may even kill electronic media distribution completely if it continues to evolve in the direction it is going at the moment. We, the consumers, need to revolt against DRM.
I purchased hundreds of songs from iTunes over the years. Then I got my digital music systems and realised I can’t play my iTunes songs. Then Desney got an MP3 player which is not an iPod and I realised I can’t give her any of these songs either. I want to buy music online. I want to be able to get the music I want immediately and I want to pay the artists, not necessarily the music labels but that’s a different story, for the music I listen to. But I expect to get the same, if not an actually better, experience from this purchase as I would if I had gone to a store and purchased a CD. The fact that I can not use the iTunes songs I purchased nearly as easily, flexibly and on various media as I can with songs I rip myself from my CDs has completely removed me as a customer of DRM-protected musical content. I even went so far as to burn all of my iTunes songs on to CDs and then rip them in to MP3 files so as to add them to my digital music collection. But never again.
In addition the best I can purchase and download (192 kbps) is almost half the quality of what I get when I rip the songs myself from a CD (320 kbps). With digital music at least I have another option: I can always procure a CD and rip the music as I wish. I have to admit that I am now a rather regular customer at our local libraries’ mediathèques where I borrow 7 CDs at a time and rip them to our digital music library.
With eBooks unfortunately there is no other choice. Either I purchase DRM-protected commercial eBooks or I purchase the paper version (hardcover or paperback). There are a certain number of DRM-free eBooks. But these tend to be older (public domain) publications or textbooks. As an avid Palm user I purchased over 70 eBooks over the years. I adored reading them on my Palm and especially being able to carry a dozen books or more with me wherever I may be. Then I got a Blackberry. The same would be true if I got a Windows Mobile device instead which I will more than likely be doing in the relatively near future. I found out that I could not transfer the eBooks I had purchased for my Palm on to my Blackberry. I then realised there were very few places I could transfer my DRM-protected eBooks at all. There are some I can’t even read on my Tablet PC! That decided it for me. eBooks could have been the electronic revolution to get people like me reading again by providing the “always available” convenience of having books with me wherever my handheld device was. The other great advantage for me personally was being able to buy English language books as soon as they came out rather than having to wait a very long time, sometimes years, for them to come out in France if ever. But I will no longer purchase a DRM-protected eBook.
As regards VoD there are 2 choices: either we can rent a film which we can watch for a limited time (generally 48 to 72 hours after the first viewing or in some cases up to 7 days) or we can purchase the film. In my opinion the rental prices should be the same as, or actually cheaper than, renting videos in a video rental store. This is especially true as there is no media production price nor the need for handling back and forth. However VoD rentals are actually a bit more expensive than normal video rentals. Most films run around 5 € for a VoD rental. Generally you can rent the DVD for about 3 or 4 € for a day or two and you can buy the DVD for about 20 €. Purchasing a move via VoD, on the other hand, does tend to be cheaper than buying the DVD: about 12 or 14 € in comparison to 20 to 25 €. Where it falls apart for me is the aspect that I find the most interesting: individual television episodes. I pay 2.49 € per episode to watch my favourite series. I can watch each episode for 48 hours after that my file is no longer valid. At the end of a 13-episode season rented this way I will have paid 32.37 € and can not watch the episodes again. But I can generally buy an entire season of a given series on DVD, which I can watch as often as I want and as long as it lasts, for about 25 €. Even though this isn’t going to be stop me, as I am currently willing to pay the price for this type of freedom and flexibility, this is the type of thing that needs to evolve and change.
The PC as a game console
One of the other reasons I had hooked up a computer to our computer, aside from professional reasons which were appropriate at the time, was to prove that the PC could be a better game console than a Playstation (now PS3), a GameCube or even an Xbox 360 who's graphics I find unbeatable. I went out and got 2 wireless gamepads (Logitech Cordless Rumblepads), spent a weekend trying to get them to work simultaneously and tried out a few PC games. Every now and then, hopefully more then than now, I have to admit it: I was wrong. The PC, at the moment, just does not live up to the game consoles for the gaming experience. It should. It's got better graphics, better connectivity and better processing power. But it just has not been oriented towards games (yet). The games look great on the screen and, in my opinion, better than on most consoles. The XBox 360 comes close. But it's practically impossible to play with more than one person at a time and almost all of the games appear to be designed for one person sitting in front of a screen with a mouse and a keyboard in front of them. It just doesn't work as a living room game experience.
I have been reading about Nintendo's Wii for quite some time now and finally got the chance to actually play with one in a store. Having spoken to many people who have used it I was intellectually prepared for the experience. But the feeling itself is just plain wonderful. The revolution is the gamepads, or remote controls, which completely immerse the player in the game and (finally) get the player off of his/her ass to play. This is not the couch potato's game console. I had seen the advert. When you play golf you get up and swing the club; when you play baseball you stand and swing the bat; when you bowl you... well... bowl. But without the heavy ball. This is what the game playing experience should be like. You'll find one in our living room sometime soon...
Regenesis
All of this started because I watched the first episode of a Canadian series called Regenesis. My children recognised immediately that this was going to be my kind of show. In their minds it’s all about a bunch of scientists who work with modern technology and talk gibberish. The show is about a bunch of bioscientists (geeks), who are workaholics obsessed with their jobs, experts in their field and who work solving problems under stress every day of their lives. I admit it. I can relate. But the major enjoyment for me is that these are geeks with lives. There is one stereotypical geek who is unable to properly live and communicate in the real world with people and is much more comfortable in the science lab. But there is only one of those! The lead character is an internationally-renowned bioscientific expert (Ubergeek) who, in addition to finding viruses and cures and genetic advances, actually is quite cool: he curses like a truck driver, drinks regularly, smokes grass and has sex with most of the sexiest females who appear in the episodes (scientists, victims, intelligence agents, …). That is what a geek should be like and that is what *I* watch the show for! These people may work with biotechnology rather than computers and converged tech but I can definitely relate. The dialogue tends to be quite intelligent, sometimes a bit too scientific or technical for most people’s tastes I can assume, and it is a real pleasure for me to watch. Their web site ain’t bad either and I’ve just started listening to their Podcast. I’m a fan.
No comments:
Post a Comment