Sassafrass & Coffee

Recently, one of my most frequented sites (tv-links.co.uk) went down and the owner was arrested for “facilitation” of piracy. This leaves me with very few options to continue with my streaming video of the documentaries I watch. I’m not big on the movies that were up there as they were either way too slow to load in streaming, or they weren’t something in a genre I enjoyed. I was much more into the documentary listings.

The guy was essentially a middle-man. He did not have any illegal content on his actual webpage; the point was to direct you to where there was content. He hosted nothing. And yet, he got arrested for linking essentially. It’s a little upsetting.

This event got me to thinking. People clearly have a desire to get things in streaming format. Sure, you lose quality of the video sometimes, but personally, I’d rather watch something in streaming than to use a torrent (which requires a time commitment). I don’t want to sit around for a while, waiting for my files to finish so I can watch the first 5 minutes deciding it’s something I don’t want to watch at all.

That’s the blessing of streaming video/audio – for a small sacrifice of quality, you can get instant gratification for the piece of work you want to view.

There seems to be little-to-no service on this idea out there. I read recently that Netflix is offering a streaming audio in limited titles and with restrictions on hours which you get to watch streaming video. Surely a good start, but it doesn’t address the situation entirely.

I want a comprehensive service where I pay a “rental fee” to view a video file in streaming format. I don’t either want or need to download the goddamn movie – I just want to WATCH it. I also don’t want to wait 2 days for a DVD to show up in my mailbox so I can watch it in 48 hours. I may as well download it at that rate. (Which is, ha ha, one of the reasons a lot of people download shit illegally, you incompetent fools).

Here’s a hint on how to do you, you horribly stubborn industry.

While I generally dislike most Apple products, iTunes came up with a revolutionary idea: selling music online, easily accessible to the end user, in ways which were enticing.

Why can’t we get a service that charges maybe $4 to rent one movie (cheaper than Blockbuster, you know), or a monthly subscription to different levels of membership? It really can’t be that hard!

Any movie you want – thousands and thousands of titles, in different languages even. If the pirates can do it, why can’t the industry? There’s definitely a motive to create such a service! And imagine the money you could rake in from people who WANT this service?

Maybe *I* should look into trying this out.

The industry seems to rather want to stand there, hands on it’s hips, tears streaming down it’s face crying about the people who are getting gyped in the industry. Maybe if you jackasses caught up with the times, you wouldn’t have to make such fools of yourselves.