$2 each....
Jul. 26th, 2006 08:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
laurionBabylon 5 has now made its way onto the iTunes store. Season one so far, but others are on their way. As someone who (he admits sheepishly) has only seen a handful of episodes, this is a dangerous thing.
On an unrelated note, people who do technical work are frequently called technicians, but very few people who do medical work are called medicians.....
On an unrelated note, people who do technical work are frequently called technicians, but very few people who do medical work are called medicians.....
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Date: 2006-07-26 02:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-26 05:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-26 04:54 pm (UTC)I'm still waiting to get a copy of B5 seasons 4 and 5 so I can finish seeing it. I never followed it when it was on the air, either. I saw a few isolated episodes, but it required regular viewing for most of them to really make sense, since the story arcs are such a big part of the show, so I never got into it.
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Date: 2006-07-26 05:31 pm (UTC)1) No loss of physical space
2) Buy just the pilot to try the show out, or just the episodes you want, and not have to buy the whole season at once.
3) Portability. Watch it on your iPod!
4) Convenience. Instant gratification. No need to go to the store, no need to wait for something to ship.
None of these are particularly good reasons necessarily, and to be honest, the box sets of B5 have been on my wishlist for years, and that won't change. I might pick up the first episode or two to see if I MUST BUY BOX SETS NOW, or if they can stay on my list until some relative says "I don't know what it is, but they asked for it..." and gives it to me as a gift.
And CDs are a different argument: Many times I find it cheaper to pay $12 and no shipping on iTunes than $15 plus shipping online, or $17 dollars at the store. The sick thing is that CD prices have only gone up since the format hit mainstream, not down, despite the fact that a disc costs about 4c with packaging to produce... Actually, when CDs first came out you could buy them for $10 each, and casettes were cheaper (probably still are) despite costing an order of magnitude more to produce. Let's not even compare iTunes to import costs.
And the first thing I typically do when purchasing on iTunes is burn the tracks to disc. I know I'm getting compressed audio, and no liner notes, but that's ok for the most part. I only buy CDs on iTunes a few times a year, and end up buying most of my CDs through CDBaby or small special niche retailers (a-cappella.com). With a collection getting close to 600 CDs though, all of which sit sleeved while I listen from my iPod, I have to start considering the reality that I don't treat my audio like a physical medium...
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Date: 2006-07-26 06:02 pm (UTC)Sampling a show you might not watch makes sense, though. $2-4 to determine whether you like something is fairly trivial. On the other hand, renting it also works pretty well (that's how I determined I liked Stargate SG-1 enough to buy, as well as, more recently, Battlestar Galactica) and with things like Netflix, the cost of that is fairly low as well.
You do have a point about loss of physical space with DVDs, though. We've got a closet devoted to movies and such, and, while the space is used somewhat inefficiently, it's overfull and only gets worse. Trouble is, We pretty much just watch movies and TV series on the actual TV, and occasionally a computer screen, so digital formats don't make much sense for us.
I prefer to avoid buying physical CDs anymore as well, for most of the same reasons, though my collection is only about a third the size of yours (even including my wife's, its still less than 400 discs). I listen to them pretty much exclusively on my computer or through my iPod anyway, so I may as well just own them in that format. The liner notes aren't that important to me, since most of the time lyrics can be found with a web search if one cares, and otherwise they sit in a sleeve on a shelf collecting dust, along with the discs.
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Date: 2006-07-26 06:40 pm (UTC)Renting costs at least $2, and has less convenience than an iTunes download. Netflix works if you have it, but I haven't the time for it, so it would actually be of less value for me.
I built my own DVR (TiVo), so my TV is a computer monitor of sorts, and it would be trivial for me to watch an iTunes purchase there if I chose. In my case digital formats do make sense. I still do almost all my watching with material that comes over the cable connection, but the very first thing that happens is the DVR captures it digitally (and then set skippoints so I don't get commercials). I don't even have a video iPod, actually. (I have an old 40GB B+W)
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Date: 2006-07-26 06:53 pm (UTC)We still haven't got a DVR, though we've talked about getting one recently, nor do we bother with true cable anymore--we only get about a dozen channels total--so much of our viewing is done via DVD. We both have our own Netflix accounts, and, on average, go through at least 6 discs apiece per month, and often more. That comes out to slightly more than $2 per disc, but if I were to DL them from iTunes, I'd have to convert them into another format and burn them to disc for us to watch them on a proper TV, so I figure the half a dollar or so extra is worth it--especially since the selection on Netflix is much larger than iTunes.
But I can see how that option would make more sense for you than me. Our circumstances differ, so the direction we're likely to take to arrive at the same endpoint is likely to be different.
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Date: 2006-07-26 07:28 pm (UTC)The 2 Netflix accounts has more to do with the fact that we each had it before we moved in together than anything else. At that time, it wasn't possible to set up profiles for multiple people on a single account, as it is now, and there's also the fact that we've both got queues numbered in the hundreds, that neither of us wants to take the time and energy to recreate on a new account. Our combined accounts cost cost the same amount as the 6-at-a-time version does (actually, oddly, its 1 cent cheaper), so there's no reason to change it, really.
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Date: 2006-08-01 05:13 pm (UTC)Mayyybe. To the hacker, likely true. But at the consumer level, it's becoming steadily harder, quite rapidly. Most consumer-grade tech these days obeys the copy-protection bits, and it's getting to the point where consumer-grade computers are doing so as well.
So while I suspect that the dedicated hacker will always be able to circumvent copy-protection, it's fairly likely that those avenues will close for 95% of the public, fairly soon...
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Date: 2006-08-01 06:12 pm (UTC)On the other hand, 95% of the public can't navigate the internet as well as I can, most likely (that's not intended to sound arrogant or anything, it's just probably true), so you're undoubtedly correct all the same.
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Date: 2006-07-26 07:26 pm (UTC)Re: cable, I find there are two people out there, TiVo people and NetFlix people. People use one or the other to fill their watching hours, and no one really has enough time for both (although I know people who have both). There are definitely arguments on both sides of the camp. Me, I like watching shows when they are first broadcast, and don't want to wait for them to come out on DVD, so I TiVo. Both options give you a huge amount of variety, and a great deal of flexibility with your time.
I do marvel a bit that you have two netflix accounts. Wouldn't it be cheaper to have one that allowed for more discs out at once?
[Edit: Updated with more useful links]
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Date: 2006-07-27 12:59 pm (UTC)Most fans of the show would say that the first few episodes are not a good sample of its quality. I disagree, but I'm clearly in the minority.
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Date: 2006-08-01 05:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 05:16 pm (UTC)Just keep in mind that the series gets steadily better for a fair while. Season 1 is hit-and-miss -- there are some really good episodes, but also some pretty bad ones, and the season is almost entirely setup for what will happen later. It doesn't start to really hit its stride until Season 2, and Season 3 is certainly the peak...
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Date: 2006-07-27 01:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-27 01:54 am (UTC)