I feel strongly that we need some kind of micro-payment system. The main hurdle right now is that everything is just too darn expensive, particularly in the case of movies when you don't even know if you'll like the thing before you see it. I personally would love it if somehow I could automatically pay like... I dunno, 10 cents or something, every time I watch a particular movie. Same with music, but a lot cheaper. Trouble is nobody has figured out any kind of realistic (or non-intrusive, non-freakout) method of handling this.
I work in a video rental store-- and the money paid for the movies does NOT reflect the actual popularity of the films themselves. We buy DVDs based mainly on which films are predicted to be most in demand, and after that... nothing, until something breaks and is or isn't replaced. We have many obscure titles that have been in the store for YEARS and get rented like CRAZY-- but as far as the movie people are concerned, all this is happening in a vacuum, none of that cult popularity actually comes back to the source in a tangible way. DVD replacements due to wear and tear is... frankly a pretty shitty business model if you ask me.
Oh, and going to the theater IS WAY TOO GODDAMN EXPENSIVE. They are shooting themselves in the leg repeatedly with that one. It doesn't make sense to push your audience TOWARDS piracy. Between the ticket costs and subjecting everybody to 30min of fucking commercials... you have to be a real trooper to bother subjecting yourself to the cinema at all these days.
And then... they make everybody who DIDN'T pirate the DVD sit through obnoxious un-skippable crap about how you shouldn't pirate stuff. And they make you bend over backwards and sacrifice small animals under the light of the full moon on the fifth wednesday with mercury in retrograde, to get a Blu-Ray movie to actually play correctly, and... well basically they just do everything they can to punish their legitimate, legal customers. The more they tighten their grip, the more star systems customers will slip through their fingers.
And it really SUCKS, because if they had just grabbed this bull by the horns when the issue first rose on the horizon, and said HEY LOOK HERE COMES THE INTERNET, HERE'S OUR NEW BUSINESS MODEL, CHEAPER AND EASIER FOR ALL YAYYYYYY, everybody would have jumped on board. But now? After all this bullshit? After years of forcing customers away, and bringing up a generation of people fully trained in efficient mass piracy, fostering an entire ecosystem of pirated content... even if they DO come out with a reasonable business model at this point-- now that everybody's used to getting shit for free, and now that nobody damn well trusts them and we've given up on this whole idea of paying for shit-- it would take a miracle to make it fly.
And I am PISSED as hell cause I'm an animation student and all this is my future income and career circling the drain thanks to their stupidity.
