This I’ve got to see.

A frightening Cringely editorial:

As Bill Gates has proved over and over, the secret to making money is owning a de facto standard, and Microsoft is determined to do this in digital media.

It is a brilliant strategy. Microsoft claims to have 450 million free copies of Windows Media Player in circulation. They have offered Windows Media as an industry standard, which doesn’t mean they don’t make money from it. Becoming a SMPTE standard means that all the other manufacturers will have to come into compliance with Windows Media, and will have to pay Microsoft a royalty if they want to interoperate — just as they have to pay Sony and Philips for every CD player. And in the Microsoft Windows Media Protocol License, it says that any Windows Media files have to start their journey to your TV or PC from a Windows origin server, thus building Windows into the very heart of the future of media delivery.

I hope (pray) it doen’t play out this way. And I don’t think it will, because Microsoft will make the fatal mistake of trying to push DRM on consumers. By the time they figure out that consumers won’t accept it, another de facto, DRM-free (and probably open) standard will have established itself. Besides, who gives a f**k about streaming media when we have Bit Torrent?

Mary Hodder on sharing movies via Bit Torrent:

In fact, I think that low quality video files are considered to be of just-okay quality for people wanting a quick glance at content, and so they may download something on one of these networks, but that people really want the big rich high quality screen experience, hence video’s inability to kill the experience or desire by people to go out to see a big screen movie, and people also love watching DVD’s on plasma, because of the rich experience… downloaded files on little screens are just not nice in that way. Imagine watching Lord of the Rings on a five inch screen. But as bandwidth grows, it will become more of an issue, but what if these little files are loss leaders to entice people into the theaters, to buy DVD’s or high quality downloads with interesting value added stuff?

Two points: most of the movie torrents available on Suprnova are high quality DVD rips. And PCs are increasingly connected to media centers. An HDTV PVR running a Bit Torrent client would provide a very high quality experience, and the technology exists to build easy-to-use systems like that now. (See Bit Torrent & RSS Video Feeds.) So the key to getting people to pay isn’t going to be higher-quality content. Instead it will be 1) “event” content like live concerts/sports/drama, preferably with audience interaction 2) excellent (social?) software for finding stuff you actually want to watch, and possibly 3) lushly packaged physical products, like the limited edition of Radiohead’s Amnesiac, which came packaged in a weathered library book, complete with an old-fashioned checkout card tucked in a pocket in the back, covered in stamps.