Quote:
Originally Posted by pwalker8
I think I've seen this movie before. Providers want to force consumers to consume exactly according to the provider's business plan, without regard to how the consumer may wish to watch. It generally doesn't work out well for the providers.
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+1, I would add "without regard to how
and when the consumer may wish to watch".
The main problem is that the rights holders' (and the lessees of those rights) strategies do not recognise what customers are and that "alternative providers" should be treated as "competition", albeit unwelcome "competition". They regard customers as consumers easily tamed by threat, rather like pets who get fed when and where their master says, and if tempted to scavenge free food from an easier source, gets threatened with a whipping. The competitive strategy should be to beat the "competition" in the market of customers rather than by complicating the enjoyment of their material by compliant to rules consumers through restrictions on how and when the material is consumed.
An easy example is that of the ordinary not too computer savvy person buying ebooks. It is in fact, for them, far less complicated with less hoops to jump through, and far, far cheaper to "buy for free" an ebook from direct download elsewhere or via torrent file providers than it is to obtain it from an ebook retailer. That those in the supply chain to the customer do not change their marketing model to a more consumer sympathetic one (as music has been slowly doing) is beyond understanding.
But I suppose that the completely blinkered acceptance by many of the public (often seen in such threads as this), to what is really an abuse of their ignorance of competitive marketing and their own place as customers, allows providers to implement a lazy and blunt, and ultimately ineffective marketing strategy based on protectionism and the threat of the customer getting a whipping if they stray outside of the tight rules of use tried to be imposed by providers. I will sit back and watch the bleating from the protectionism and whip the "thieves" is the only way, with some amusement.