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Comments
In terms of the producers' profits, there's no difference between digital piracy and just not buying a product. Might as well do the one that benefits you, the consumer, more.
Actually, nevermind. There is a difference. If you've already decided that you aren't going to spend money on a product, then pirating it could potentially make you change your mind, whereas just forgetting about it is unlikely to ever do so. Not that I'm suggesting piracy is really a good thing for the publishers/distributors/creators/etc., but just that you aren't really doing any more harm through digital piracy than you would be by just not buying the product.
I think digital distribution -is- great advertising though, and people like funimation seem to agree to me.
Again, my problem is with the rationalization of 'too expensive'. That it's suddenly okay because you don't like the price of something you don't need for physical or mental health.
"In terms of the producers' profits, there's no difference between digital piracy and just not buying a product. Might as well do the one that benefits you, the consumer, more."
And now I take my leave.
Hmm, I wonder if the economy being in a slump has anything to do with this.
@DYRE > Eh. There is a difference, but it's not like it's enough to make one of them better/worse than the other. Anyone who pays money for an anime series (or even any non-anime movie or series) that they haven't at least watched some of first is just wasting their money.
Well, you could have seen a few episodes on TV, or from a friend, or read the manga, or discovered it through recommendations, or something else. Or maybe it was made by the same studio that made another series you like.
Or maybe you could look at the box art and think it looks cool.
@Abyss_Worm > I suppose cartoons on TV get their money through advertising revenue, so I wonder how that would extrapolate to the Net.
Though the one thing I've never been quite sure about is, what if you never buy any of their stuff anyway? What if you mute the commercials? What if you Tivo the show?
@DYRE > TV is inconvenient to watch, what with having to be there at a certain time and all. Anyway, yeah, if a TV show wants to make money on the internet, they'll do it with internet ads of course.
I don't think the difference is so much that it's ad-supported as that content publishers feel that if you want their programming on-demand, then you ought to be paying them for the convenience, or else you try to catch it on TV when it comes on. (I know some of them also don't really like Tivo much.)
And who the hell ever clicks on internet ads anyway?
@DYRE > I do kinda care about packaging though, since it's something I'm going to look at a lot, whereas the actual contents don't really matter so much since I already have fansubs anyway so I don't particularly need a DVD/BD release anyway.
This is more like me since I like to have the packaging and the extras that go along with an official hard copy, while I might as well just torrent even the shows whose copies I officially own so that I have convenient .avi files to play whenever I want on my laptop.
@Malkavian > wait... wut? You want the actual product.... to what... basically sit on your shelf and look pretty?
Well, there's that, plus the fact that it often comes with things other than just the video data. For example, movie DVDs often come with "making of" segments, games almost always come with protective cases and manuals, and animé DVDs often contain concept art and even sometimes collectibles. Not to mention that a hard copy is always nice to have.
@Malkavian > I think digital distribution -is- great advertising though, and people like funimation seem to agree to me.
The effectiveness of illicit digital distribution of media is directly related to how saturated your potential customer base is. If few people know about your work, then it's a great way to raise its name-rec. If everyone already does, though, a lot more of those downloads are going to be price-dodgers.
I dunno. Even having actually watched a portion of a show isn't really enough to know if the whole thing is worth money or not, and certainly just a recommendation isn't.
.mkv supports a lot of nice features that .avi doesn't, that make them considerably more desirable. Most notably, styled subtitles, which means they're more likely to be softsubbed rather than hardsubbed (and hardsubbing is completely terrible and there's really no excuse for fansubbers still doing it, even though it's still common), but also some other nice things like ordered chapters. Only real downside is that .mkv isn't supported by a lot hardware, though it shouldn't be a problem on your computer unless you're using VLC (which you shouldn't be using anyway).
I didn't want to mention that format out loud, but yes.
^^ Ordered chapters save a ton of disc space/bandwidth, and have a few other less obvious uses. They are supported fine in any media player that doesn't suck. There's really no reason to object to them.
^ Why not? What's wrong with mentioning it?
On Windows, maybe.
While it certainly is simpler on Windows, it's apparently possible to compile a version of mplayer that supports ordered chapters, so you should be able to get that working on Linux or OSX.