Cursed Tongue: Media Wars: Episode II – Attack on the Consumer

Posted by CursedTongue on December 4, 2006

If you’ve been holiday shopping at your friendly neighborhood electronics megastore, you may have noticed the end of an era. There is not one VHS movie to be found on the shelves. VHS tapes have been relegated to the blank recordable media section and the odd dust-covered VCR head cleaner in the back. The VHS is slipping quietly into bed next to the 8-track for an extend dirt nap in secondhand stores and pawn shops.

Front and center, the movie aisle at the megastore is now split into thirds. New DVDs take one section of shelf. And side-by-side is the latest, greatest concept for swindling and generally abusing the consumer: the Blu-ray Disc and the HD DVD.

Unwilling to learn from the Betamax fiasco, the companies that develop new media have foisted competing formats (both of which will be smudged, scratched and skip entire scenes after the third time you watch the movie) on an unsuspecting public. Already confused about hi-def in general, consumers shouldn’t have to be gambling when they purchase a hi-def movie, let alone a $1,000 player on which to view the movie.

Part of the problem of “buying in” to one format, is that different movie production companies have backed different formats. Very few movies are available in both formats. Some movies will only ever be available in either Blue Ray or HD DVD, because Sony and Toshiba never learned a thing in Kindergarten.

This New Year’s Eve consumers can sing “Auld Lang Syne” to fair use. Major movie studios are no longer releasing their movies on VHS. Which are easy to make copies of if you can connect 2 VCRs and figure out how to make them play nice together. With the advent of the hi-def digital media format, movie companies have included deterrents far more effective than a scary FBI Copyright warning.

The new formats will include Digital Rights Management, or DRM so that hi-def recorders will not make copies of movies. People won’t be able to copy the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, so they can watch the copied version instead of risking scene-ruining scratches to the original. Of course, at this point, it would probably be easier and cheaper to buy a second copy and vacuum pack it.

Movie companies have long ago forgotten who it is that makes it possible for them to serve up reheated plot lines and stale acting like so much suspect institutional stew. Like the paranoid main character inhabiting a dystopic Sci-Fi flick, movie studios seem to believe that consumers are conspiring against them. They never stop to consider that they might not be making projected profits because they released Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj.

I realize that there are plenty of people selling illegal copies of movies, but DRM and other security baffles that drag fair use behind a shed and beat it with its own crutches aren’t going to stop criminals. Criminals will write software to bypass the watermarks and sell illegal copies because they are criminals. Most regular consumers are still trying to figure out how to program their VCRs.

Personally, I hope that for the most part consumers reject both the HD DVD and Blu-ray, in anticipation of movies-on-demand, beemed directly to your entertainment center via the Internet. I’m confident that movie production companies and media developers will find plenty of ways to flagellate consumers in this format, too. But at least we will not get to the ogre in the girl’s bathroom scene in the first Harry Potter flick and have the screen degenerate into digital blocks because I dropped the disk that one time.

As for my VHS tapes, I think I’ll be vacuum packing them and shoving them in the attic. Maybe they’ll be worth something by the time my grandchildren are mucking through Nanna’s attic to see if the old bat left them anything valuable enough to sell.

- Sarah Letnes

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Tags: christmas, humor, shopping

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