Preamble: Yes, I wrote another blog post. Yes, it’s been almost three years since my last. No, it did not take me three years to write this. I’m hoping to get into the habit of writing these a bit more frequently, but I don’t know what form they’ll take. This one’s basically an essay, and there aren’t even any pretty pictures or anything. Enjoy.
Alright, I’d say that by now everyone is familiar with the concept of digital distribution. If you’re not, then you have just completed my clinically proven one question test for being either Amish, or my grandmother. In the case of the former, perhaps you’ll familiarize yourself during Rumspringa. In the case of the latter, hi grandma! Anyway, it seems like digital distribution is set to become the way we deal with media of any sort. In fact, it’s well on its way now with Netflix, iTunes, and products like the Apple TV — which exist solely to pump digitally distributed content into your home. Heck, these days even high-end TVs and all three mainstream gaming consoles offer multiple methods of getting digitally distributed content, and you can even opt to buy video games as downloads now too.
There are some pretty sweet benefits to DD (give me a break, I’m getting tired of typing it out every time). Having a large selection of content that you can start consuming (that’s the industry jargon) within mere seconds of even thinking about it comes to mind. Of course that goes hand in hand with the benefits of not having to deal with the arduous walk/bus/drive to the store to pick up that album or rent that movie. It’s hard to argue with being able to pick out a new-release movie, pay for it, and start watching it in under ten seconds, without even having to get off the couch, or reach for your wallet, or worry about it being rented out, or returning it the next day. Pretty much the same can be said for buying a song or album off iTunes. So DD totally rocks, right? Not exactly.
Perhaps I’m alone here, but I think there’s something to be said for physically owning something. I can’t put a downloaded movie or album on a shelf with the rest of my collection. If I download an album, I can’t look at the art (beyond the cover), check out the lyrics, see who got thanked, who the artist worked with etc. In the case of movies, DRM (Digital Rights Management) prevents me from lending something to a friend, or even playing it on anything other than an iPod/computer/set top box specifically registered to my account. The same was true for nearly every single song and album on the iTunes store until recently as well. Call me a stickler, but when I shell out $15 for an album or $30 for a movie as I am wont to do, I expect to be able to do just about whatever the hell I want with it, not have the studio/label restrict me to only using it how they’ve sanctioned it. In fact I think it’s completely absurd that the kind of restrictions put on DD media are even considered legal. But whatever, I still need to complain about other stuff.
While I had some optimism that my first point would resonate with others, I know that I’m pretty much on my own for my next one: Quality. I’m going to try to avoid getting overly technical here, but no promises. DD music tends to be very heavily compressed (and in this context I mean they compress the file size of the song) — about a 12:1 ratio from CD audio, actually. In order to make a song that much smaller in file size, mp3/mp4 encoding removes certain elements that most people would have a difficult time noticing. This is totally fine for blasting tunes at a party or listening to stuff with the shitty ear buds that came with your iPod, but I’m kind of a critical listener when it comes to music, and once you start noticing things not sounding right, you can’t stop hearing them. I know, I know, not everyone’s an audiophile. Fine, but it’s an even worse story when it comes to DD movies and TV shows. You make similar sacrifices when compressing video, except the changes are a lot more apparent. Heavily compressed video looks really soft, and gets blocky when there’s a lot of movement. A Blu-Ray disc holds nearly ten times the amount of data a DD movie ends up getting compressed into. Just like with music, you can’t expect to shrink something down to a tenth its original size without making serious sacrifices. It’s perplexing that there’s been this huge shift to HD in the past ten years, and now that we all have our HDTVs, we’re flocking towards content that barely looks any better than DVD. I didn’t spend the money on a nice TV to look at content that’s nowhere near as good as what it can display, and I sure as hell am not spending six bucks for the privilege either.
I’m going to try to roll my next two gripes into one here. Transport and storage. Thanks to evil companies like Rogers and the CRTC, most internet service providers cap the amount bandwidth we can use in a month. Basically this means that if we go over x number of gigs downloaded in a month, we start paying $1.50 or more for every additional gig we download. Most people I know are capped to less than 50 gigs a month. Say you download two five-gig DD movies a week. Chances are by that time that month is through, you’ve surpassed your quota, and that’s not even factoring in other daily bandwidth use (and those Youtube videos add up a lot faster than you’d think). So now you’re paying extra on your internet bill because you’re downloading movies you’ve legitimately paid for. This isn’t because there’s not enough bandwidth to go around either; it’s strictly because companies like Rogers don’t want you to cancel your cable TV subscription because you’re downloading everything instead, so they cripple your ability to do so. As for the issue of storage, one of the great things about buying physical media is that you don’t have to worry about storing the data (beyond physically putting the disk somewhere). When you download a movie or song, you store it on your hard drive. Music files might be relatively small, but video isn’t. I don’t want to lose hard drive space because I bought a movie. More importantly, what happens when your hard drive fails, or your PC gets a virus, or the cat pees on it? That massive movie and music library you spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars on is now nothing more than a pile of scrap metal and cat urine. No, you can’t re-download it all again without paying for it, and even if you could, remember that bandwidth cap thing I just told you about? Sure, you can spare yourself all that headache by maintaining a backup, but why should you have to? My movie/music collection is completely safe from hard drive failures and viruses (and even cat piss), and all I have to do is throw it on the shelf.
So now that I’ve run through my diatribe on DD being awful, I should probably point out as I did earlier that DD has its merits. Instant gratification is hard to argue with, and the majority of consumers don’t (seem) to care at all about the points I’ve raised. Hell, a cursory glance at my iTunes library tells me I’ve spent over a hundred bones in the past three years buying singles that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, and I’ve definitely spent a few hundred by now on DD apps and games for the iPhone and PS3, so clearly I’m quite willing to forgive DD’s shortcomings in certain situations too. So why do I still have such a hate-on for it? Because digital distribution is quickly taking over. iTunes surpassed Wal-Mart a year or two ago as the largest music retailer in North America. Brick and mortar video stores like Blockbuster are filing for Chapter 11 in the wake of Netflix. Again, for the vast majority of people this isn’t a problem because they either don’t care or are ignorant to DD’s limitations and restrictions. However there will always be people like me who have good reason to buy/rent physical media, and in a few years time that won’t be possible anymore. DD certainly has its place — even in my physical media-centric world — but both need to coexist, and it’s pretty clear at this point that consumers won’t wake up to that fact till it’s too late.
