Physical = Digital?
Before I joined the team here at Sitening, I was tapped for a freelance project running the social network for the production company behind the new X Files movie, which proved to be a big hit amongst the fan community. Somewhere down along the way I was asked for ideas in naming the box set version of the DVD, which was a big thrill for me as a fan when the studio decided to go with one of the suggestions that came out of a brainstorming session I had with another person on the project. With the street date of the DVD being today, I went out at lunch to procure a copy and came across what 20th Century Fox is calling “digital copy”, or a disc in the box set that includes a version of the movie for your portable players, both PC and Mac based. Nice of them eh?
Anxious to see how it works (I’d be betraying my nerd heritage if I didn’t dive straight into the digital copy) I popped the third disc of the set into my MacBook Pro and let it load up. It immediately prompts you to “click here!” and it takes you to the iTunes Music Store where you are prompted to enter a VERY long string of numbers provided to you in the DVD insert as a purchase code. But here’s where the fun begins….instead of copying the movie from the disc provided in the set, it appears to be pulling it off of the iTunes server, all 1.17 gigs of it in it’s 853×354 copyright protected glory. After doing a little research, the movie is in fact downloading itself off the disc, but is that even necessary if the file already exists in the digital realm?
So my question is, why even bother including a “digital copy” disc if all that disc does replicate something that could be done in a truly digital form? Why not just include instructions on the sheet that the code included entitles you to one download of the film from iTunes or another PC based digital content source, such as Amazon? Do major studios think that people must have physical things in their hands to use them? I just can’t fathom why the studio would go through the expense of printing an extra disc with something that already exists in the realm of the digital world. Let’s keep the physical physical and the digital digital, shall we?
Filed under: Commentary
I agree re: ‘why bother’ with a physical ‘real world’ representation of something that could more easily be transmitted via the tubes. I mean that’s the point isn’t it?
I just received in the post today the ‘Digital Press Pack’ for the new film ‘Nothing Like the Holidays’. After inserting the DVD into my laptop an application groaned into life, taking forever it seems, blew into ‘full screen’ with a list of ‘downloads’ and ‘link’s’ – these consisted of some jpgs and links to the ‘Nothing Like the Holidays’ website. For the love of God why not just send the press a link – and if you must, a password to the press site.
Bizarre.
But we’re still in this transitional age. We’ve only just now got political representation on the Federal level that seem to ‘get’ the internet…
I’m thinking it’s still way faster to copy the file from disc than to download 1.17GB, especially if you’re stuck in dial-up land. I’m sure Comcast doesn’t mind. Perhaps a better question is what happens when you sell your boxed set to someone else (gasp! i know you’d never do this with this particular boxed set). I’m pretty sure that third disc is useless to them.
@fishwreck has it. I would be pretty upset if i had a copy of the movie in my hand, but had to go wait hours to download it if i wanted to watch it on my PC. The whole point here is to let it be available anywhere.
Also, as Wal-Mart and a few other services have proven: digital services that rely on talking back to the mothership for authorization suck hard when the company decides they want out of the business and the servers are turned off. So which service would you offer the downloads from? On the Mac/monopoly side the choice is easy. As long as Mac is around iTunes will be. But on the much more open PC/Linux side, the decision isn’t as clear. For it to be truly a value and effective, it needs to be permanent and not reliant on an outside source.
At first glance it seems odd to provide a digital copy on disc, however right now the idea that one would need to rely on a link to some server to always be there isn’t a very comfortable feeling. At least with the disc, you know you have access to this digital form if you need it again.
That being said…I do enjoy being able to load IWTB onto my Mac & iPod to take with me.