I remember very clearly back in 2001, as a DJ who liked to
make mixes for myself, spending a
sizable sum of money on a CD burning component. It was made by Philips, and of course it died right around
the time the warranty expired. Of
course, I remember thinking it was amazing whenever it worked properly.
Back in the day when you wanted to make
a cassette dub of a CD you bought, you’d of course lose sound quality, but with
this technology no quality seemed to be lost. “How could this be available to the public at my local
electronic store?” I pondered this with great seriousness.
In the wrong hands this could be
detrimental to the music industry.
Of course this was just at the dawning of the age of declining CD
sales. Little did I know that the
future would hold the age of iTunes when any hapless sap with access to a
computer could download a sizable bit of his or her collection onto a DVD and pass
it along to his or her friends with no loss in quality. Little did I know that the CD itself
would be replaced by a sonically weaker medium, (the mp3) and that there would
be a day when people wouldn’t want to read the liner notes of every album they
purchased. Music, itself was sadly
growing disposable in the era of instant gratification.
Our need to keep our media omnipresent and at our fingertips
at all times is a double-edged sword.
Yes, the convenience such technology affords us is invaluable, but yet
at the same time it makes it too easy for the consumer to manipulate and remove
it from its original context. What
was once static a generation ago is now malleable. It’s no longer a solid object. It now lives somewhere within the confines of the cyber
ether.
It is stranger still that nowadays we often find ourselves
with the same product in a variety of formats. When vinyl returned and began to see a small boom a few
years back, you started seeing records not only with bonus CDs bundled inside
their packaging, but also with cards for “free” digital downloads. If you are exclusively a vinyl
listener, you aren’t going to want the CD. If you have the CD (or a record player with a USB drive
slot, chances are you don’t need the download code. But yet the industry still gives us these perks to try to
win us over. Whatever way suits us
best, they want us just to keep listening.
Even more curious is the movie studios’ similar response for
the rapidly changing media-conscious environment. When the Blu-ray disc was introduced, one of the main perks
was that it was an interchangeable format that understood the previous
technological generation. The vast
majority of all Blu-ray players also play DVDs. Thus, the development of the Blu-ray/DVD combo-pack is for
the most part probably a wasted innovation. Unless you are a DVD watcher with the foresight to buy the
combo pack in preparation for a technological upgrade, you’ll most likely find
one of those discs useless.
Perhaps the thought process is that you’ll have the Blu-ray and will be able
to take the other disc over to your DVD-watching friend’s house for a social
movie night. Although, I’m sure
the movie studios would not like such sharing. They would probably want everyone to buy his/her own copy or
stream it from Netflix.
Then there’s the whole issue of the free, complimentary
digital copy. This doesn’t come
with every DVD or Blu-ray. It should be standardized. It should be a given.
It isn’t.
Even worse, when you used to be guaranteed an iTunes
download of your movie so you could use it on your portable device, now even
that isn’t a given, either.
So-called “Ultra-violet” downloads give you a version of the movie you
have to stream on a website, and thus have to set up a password and a special
account. This means you can really
only watch your movie if you are watching it on a portable device with wifi or
web-access, essentially cutting ipod viewing out of the equation. Yes, the ipod screen is small and not
ideal for movie viewing, but if you are sitting on an airplane, in your seat,
or riding a subway, your eyes will adjust and you will deal. An iTunes movie download is preferable,
but I sense the ultra-violet technology was developed in an attempt to knock
Apple down a peg. For the most
part, when I get a movie and only comes with an ultra-violet download without
an iTunes option, I consider it useless.
Imagine how many discs are packaged that will never be
used. Imagine how many download
codes will never be redeemed. In
an age of attempted universal satisfaction, we have created an environment
filled with wasted mediums in an unpredictable marketplace. This is simultaneously both useful and
wasteful.
Until the industry is standardized and say every movie comes
in a Blu-ray/DVD/Digital Copy combo-pack, or every record comes packaged the
same way, a certain percentage of the public will be let down. Let downs are a part of life, but not
optimal in an age of ever-portable, omnipresent media saturation.
