Be Excellent To Each Other

Why in the name of my merry dancing balls can't we just buy films online? I mean proper, unprotected DVDs to download at a decent price, burn out to disc, and then watch at our leisure. The music and games industry have (mostly) got there, what the fuck is wrong with the goons in charge of the film industry?

I ordered four DVDs from hmv.com last Sunday and they still haven't turned up (adverse weather I guess), so there go my plans for a Scary French Horror film per evening over the Easter weekend.

I was going to go down to my local (real) HMV after work to buy Harry Brown (which I really fancy) and two or three random others instead (after Mrs AE informed me that my DVDs hadn't come in the post), but got caught up on a job and didn't get out until 18:30, hence everywhere was closed.

I still really fancy watching Harry Brown this evening, so fuck it, I'm downloading it - having no other options open to me if I want to watch it tonight.

Easynews + GetRight + 1.3MB/s on 16meg ASDL, whole DVD rip down in about 75 minutes. One quick PAR, unRAR and Nero-to-disc later, and I'll have gone from having nothing to watch to having a perfect DVD ready to go in under two hours.

And the stupid thing is, I'd happily hand over money for it if any organisation out there could come within a million miles of offering the same convenience as illegal sources do.

I used to pirate PC games and then buy them afterwards on an honesty basis if they were any good, but ever since the advent of Steam there's been no need - why can't the fucking film idiots catch on?

Craziest of all is that the TERRORIST PAEDOPHILE OMFG-YOU-STOLE-A-HANDBAG DVDs you download are fucking BETTER than what you pay good money for in the shops 'cause the guy who ripped it kindly stripped out all the fucking unskippable copyright shite and fifty fucking trailers for films you never want to watch in your life whilst he was at it.

My pirate copy of I Am Legend - (mainstream 'we fucked up the book' Hollywood garbage I'd never actually buy) - gets to the main menu within about 6 seconds of me putting the disc into the drive, my legitimate shop-bought copy of The Complete Royle Family (every fucking disc in the boxset) chooses to patronise me FOR SEVERAL UNSKIPPABLE MINUTES with some funky music and shit about how if if I was a teenage girl I wouldn't steal a car and would instead flounce out of the house to get shagged over the bins outside the local nightclub (presumably that's what she's up to, like all feral youths these days).

I apply my honesty policy to DVDs as well, so I will buy the Harry Brown DVD when I next order some stuff from hmv.com (although I suspect I'll wait until it's in a sale), but if the film industry thinks that the way to get the consumer onside is to make their product demonstrably inferior to the pirated product by bloating it with patronising crap and advertising, and to denounce us as terrorist-shagging wankers at every opportunity, they're very badly mistaken.

Do what Steam has done with games. Make your products easily available, at a reasonable price, and give us fair usage policies - how hard can it be?

Good post.
I too hate the unskippable jizz at the start of DVDs, and the trailers, the last DVD I bought, had 5 trailers.
Even to fast forward through this was tedious and annoying, let alone watching them, which would have been like 20 mins in the cinema.

I got Hellboy II for €3 last week. Complete with trailer for Blu-ray, The Mummy III and two other films that I've already forgotten about.

My DVD player takes me right to the menu screen.

I rarely see those anti-piracy ads (apologies; that wasn't rendered in sufficiently sarcastic, not at all played-out all-caps netspeak) and am happy.

Doesn't iTunes sell films? Haven't bought one, mind.

Edit: or do they have DRM, unlike their music?

Usually these online film services are vastly more expensive than the physical product.

OP +1
I "rent" the occasional film through the xbox 360 games console. It's convenient, good quality on my telly using a real remote control, no unskippable adverts or piracy shite. Worth paying for.

Unfortunately the selection of films they have is very poor.

So in general I make do with either watching films at the cinema or when they pop up affordably elsewhere.

Watched 'Cloverfield' yesterday - £2 new from a bargain bin. I can put up the DVD bollocks for that price. Good film!

I'm not quite brave enough to download full, new movies that are still on the blockbuster shelves though.

Yeah, it's definitely a step in the right direction though, it's a really nice service.

Harry Brown = goodness.

A very very good film.

Yeah, I liked it.

Good performance by Michael Caine, tense and filled with suspense. Lots of menacing set pieces.

Still though, I can't help but think there is something wrong with it. Like... I dunno, it's maybe dangerous.

See, the antagonists in the film do deserve to get their shit fucked up. But I certainly think there is something almost scaremongering about it. Like, it either fuels, or is fuelled by irrational hatred and fear of "hoodies".

I wouldn't say it's hoodies, more London council estate scum.

It is a bit O.T.T but then so was Death Wish. Makes for great viewing

The only dissapointing bit for me was

I thought it went a bit too Death Wish, personally.

Well it was sorta kinda emulating Death Wish I suppose.

Agreed, I'd happily use the service a lot more if the selection wasn't so shocking. When I have used it, I was very impressed, just the kind of thing I'd happily spend a few quid on of an evening.

As usual, the porn industry is leading the way with services like this. Take videobox, where you can stream or download completely drm-free from a selection of thousands of titles, for a flat rate of something like $15 a month. You can even edit clips through an online interface and just download those. Leagues ahead of anything the film industry's offering, and a good idea of what they should, ideally, be doing.

I've never watched anything on my 360 - it's just too noisy, even when the DVD drive's not in use.

Edit: I tell a lie, I think I've watched two HD-DVDs. That wasn't a complete waste of money then.

If you're lucky enough to have access to the Sky player on the Xbox, with the movies on demand section... It's great!

The films aren't exactly brand new on there but it's excellent to stream movies through it.. I use it quite a lot.

Win7's media center has Sky player.

LOVEFiLM is fine for me.

I used to use Lovefilm. Got fed up with it. Got even more fed up with it when I tried to leave.

Good post AE, you make some excellent points. The issues with downloading films (or not in most cases) reminds me of the Napster days when the music industry madly tried to play catch-up. Now they have and we can easily (and legally) download music.

Now Hollywood, etc needs to catch up and allow people to easily (and legally) download their output, preferably without unskippable trailers, copyright warnings and the like. Now I know that you can do this already, but it's very, very limited.

I'll always prefer to have a physical DVD in my grubby little mitts, BUT would welcome a cheap rental download (perhaps a couple of quid max) that would allow me to view a film for a limited period of time and, if I like it, I can then buy it on DVD (or Blu-ray).

Not sure what's stopping Hollywood from doing this - they don't like losing control and are no doubt worried about piracy but the piracy aspect is already rampant.

How come you got fed up with it, if you don't mind my asking? I'm seeing so many films now, and the DVD turnover is well quick.

I'm not sure, it's just that the films it was sending me got increasingly random and from way down the list. Even if I maximum prioritised the ones I wanted.

So I'd have films showing up that I couldn't really be bothered to watch, then would send them back and wait an age for the next one.

It probably just wasn't for me. The Skyplayer and the Zune thing on xbox suit me better - see what takes your fancy, click, get it there and then.

Or at least it would be if my broadband was up to streaming it


I did see some properly odd films that I wouldn't have otherwise though - Jaques Tati ones and all sorts. I don't have access to anything like that now.

Well I watched Harry Brown last night and it was excellent, if not amazing, without the strength of Caine's performance I don't think it would have worked half as well. (That said the supporting cast were very good too.)

It didn't quite seem to know what it was, the build-up was well handled and the protagonist's transformation to Death Wish Mode was largely believable, but it looked like it was going to get really interesting with exploring the 'baddies' and how they came to be, before deciding it couldn't be bothered, and I'm not entirely sure it delivered a coherent message in the end either (and what it did have was a shade Daily Mail for my taste).

Some of the scenes were particularly good, very compelling and moving, with extremely strong performances, whilst chunks of it didn't work quite so well.

Overall however a fine British film, and at least six billion times better than 'Wanted' and 'The Dark Knight' put together.

In other news, my 'Inside' (À l'intérieur) DVD arrived today (but not the other three, for some reason), so that's this evening's viewing sorted. I'm hoping the French are as good at horror as everyone's been saying they are

Back to the original point, Harry Brown will go into my basket next time I order from hmv.com, but it's really, really daft that there's no legitimate means to purchase a DVD-quality film (or even proper-HD come to think of it, what's all this broadband for anyway?) from a reputable source to watch/burn to disc as the viewer wishes, just about every PC and laptop out there now can burn DVDs, why is pretty much the only use for all those DVD-burners to create pirate discs?

I've been with LoveFilm for a few years now and can't really fault them. I don't tend to bother getting new releases since you can't really guarantee they will turn up that quickly, and it's just as easy to nip to the local Blockbuster if I want to watch something new in the first week or so.

I just use LF for old classic films and TV boxsets and that type of thing, and they've always been ace for me.

Maybe I'm just an awesome customer (har), but I add something to my list (whether Che or Paranormal Activity), and I get it sharpish. In fact, they sent me Che part 1 in one batch, and Che part 2 in the next. They were good with the first three Saw films, too.

Saw IV is taking a while; maybe they love me so much they want to protect me from it...

In fairness to them, it's been quite a while since I added any new releases to my list, but as to all the others I have on there, they certainly turn up nice and quickly. I wouldn't be without them for sourcing hard-to-get stuff.