You Can't Rent Bits

I've been thinking about how iTunes is now looking at providing movie rentals. And really, you can only "rent" a movie if you've got some sort of DRM that means you don't truly control your device -- because otherwise you can copy the bits to some other location and see it again.

Of course, that's one of the challenges of distributing data electronically. Most movies and television shows you only watch once. Others, you may watch many times. And really -- no matter how much space you have, video takes up a lot of room -- and there are many things I wouldn't worry about keeping if I knew that I could easily get them again later. It's why I like Netflix, even though I've been watching fewer DVDs from them as my life has been busier lately.

So the challenge is -- from a business standpoint, yes, I really want to "rent" video. But as someone who does not like DRM -- I'm well aware that it's really impossible to do that digitally if you want to control your device.

Holding On to Television

It looks like the potential writers strike may claim the Heroes spin-off. I'm not sure one way or the other on this -- but I think the nature of television now is that a strike can cause a lot more damage to shows than they did in the past. Since repeats aren't as valuable, they can't easily go to those, and for shows that have continuing storylines, a bunch of second-class scripts can kill a show.

We'll see what happens...I can understand why the media companies are struggling so much in what the proper way for people to get paid for what they do with all of the different changes in multimedia and distribution. And the competition is stronger than ever, really.

More on Convergence Culture

One thing I forgot on my last post -- there's also a whole site towards the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium. The most recent story is about wrestling's success on Sci Fi, and the risks that it brings about. I know that I've seen a fair amount of complaining about this move on the Sci Fi Channel, made even more painful when Wrestling is twice as successful as anything else on the channel...