Technology and Companies

Lately I’ve been increasingly annoyed with technology. Not really technology so much as company’s artificial limitation of it. I feel like I felt a few years ago with music. There was a service I used to use in the late 90’s called i-drive. Probably no one remembers it now, but basically it was free web storage for anything. You could browse other people’s public areas also, and move things from their area to yours. This was called “side-loading” in their terminology. It was mostly used for illegal music sharing. It was fast, and because of the sequential download you could start a download and start playing the music immediately.

So you could immediately listen to any song you wanted. 9 years later, is the technology better? Not really. First broadband speeds are about the same as they were then, and the RIAA has made clearing rights for anyone operating in that area so difficult no one has a very good service. iTunes is the best I guess, but they are by no means very good. Many things aren’t available, and the ones that are are most likely DRMed. DRMed music is at best a future refund.

So, now I’m feeling the same thing but with video. I would like to get television shows and watch them ideally on my tv, but I’d actually be happy enough to watch them on my computer. I used to use bittorrent extensively, but I’ve started using iTunes for that also. I actually believe that people should be paid for making this product, call me old-fashioned. I want to pay people for this, that is the only reason I use iTunes. Bittorrent is easier, more automatable, better quality, better selection, no DRM yet I use iTunes. People like me do exist. (I should state I don’t care about DRM on tv shows because I don’t archive them, or have any intention of keeping them) Now NBC is pulling out of iTunes. This isn’t how it needs to work. Every content distributor can’t have their own distribution system. 30 years ago people bought a television it played every show. Sony tvs (did they have tvs then?) didn’t play some channels while Phillips played others.

So, I thought, how did the music area resolve itself? It doesn’t make me mad anymore really. Now, for music I usually buy CDs from amazon, rip them, and give the original CD away to someone I think might like it. From a technology point of view, this is a complete failure of the last, what, 20 years? That mode of buying music, which I and apparently Bill Gates think is the best solution rejects any technological advances that the music industry has had a hand in over the last 20 years! Think about that, that is ridiculous!

This is very sad to me. I had hoped that the video industry would learn something from what happened to music, but it seems like they can’t. Maybe their institutional inertia is such that they are unable to change. That would be unfortunate. While I like Diggnation, I also like Battlestar Galactica.