Brian the Education Geek writes an occasional blog with observations about life, geek stuff, politics, and just whatever strikes his fancy.
You haven't seen much of the EduGeek lately; I've undergone some personal crises lately that have precluded any thoughts of blogging or writing of any kind. I'll explain what those are soon, but for now lets just say I'd rather have someone ELSE blog for me. I'll get my muse back soon enough, I'm sure.
Every once in a while you run across a story that so completely speaks for itself, and so perfectly sums up your viewpoint on the story's topic, that it's as if the author was channelling YOU when they wrote it. Or experienced it. Such is the case with a story I ran across today on Google Plus.
I don't look at Google Plus much; like many people I need another social networking site like I need a hole in the head, no matter how "innovative" that site might be. At any rate, one of the people I follow on G+ is Tom Merritt, a long-time host of video podcast shows on www.twitlive.tv--shows like Tech News Today, FourCast, CurrentGeek and East Meets West.
Tom and his wife get their television--some of it anyway--through digital means rather than from a cable TV company or satellite provider. By digital means, I mean Apple TV, Hulu Plus, iTunes, etc. Following is an experience they had the other night when they attempted to watch one simple show using said digital media tools.
Tonight Eileen suggested we watch the movie Red Riding Hood (forget whether you think that's a good idea or not for the sake of the rest of this story).
Eileen had paid $2.99 to rent it from iTunes. We wanted to watch it on our TV so she went and launched iTunes on her Mac Pro and we turned on the first gen Apple TV to watch. Except Red Riding Hood was the one movie that did not show up on the list.
I tried making her account default for the Apple TV but it still wouldn't show up. The 'move' button in iTunes was greyed out. Turns out after a little searching that if you rent a movie from your iPad you can't watch it on the Apple TV.
She decided to just watch it on her Mac Pro in the Office and suggested I catch up on American Horror Story so we could start watching it together. I turned on the Roku and launched Hulu Plus. I had suspended my Hulu Plus account since I hadn't been using it, so I went online on the laptop and reactivated it.
Once I launched Hulu Plus on the Roku I searched for American Horror Story. It said Web only. So by paying for Hulu Plus I couldn't watch it. I immediately suspended my account again.
So then we started to talk about other options. We could hook up the media center, launch iTunes, move the rental to that computer and reauthorise. We could move Red Riding Hood on to my iPad (an iPad 2 that I could hook up to my TV) and change the authorization on that iPad temporarily. While all of this would work, none of it seemed worth it for this movie considering the time we had spent troubleshooting. So we gave up.
Eileen went to her Mac Pro in the Office and is watching the movie while I write this.
If we had built our entire system up around unauthorized torrents we could have downloaded the movie and had no rental period, and watched it on any device we anted at any time.
The industry is only making it hard for people to spend money on them. They are not 'fighting piracy'.
PS In the end I decided to play The Old Republic.
Classic, no? This is why I wish that the industry as a whole would stop trying to fight piracy by limiting the ability of their legitimate users to watch and listen to media how and when they want.
As I said, I should be blogging again--for myself I mean--soon enough. :)
--The EduGeek
