I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did
- Reference: 1659090792
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/07/29/something_for_the_weekend_/
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"Try to remember where you last saw it," suggests Mme D helpfully. I think hard and it comes back to me: the last time I saw the ancient islands of [1]my Celtic ancestry was a week ago, on Replay. I had found [2]Britannia – the ludicrous unhistorical fantasy TV drama about the second Roman invasion in 43 AD – available for free on-demand via my streaming TV services.
I'd already seen the series when it first came out but thought it would be funny to watch it again dubbed badly (is there any other way?) into French. Halting playback halfway through Episode 2 in order to make a cup of tea, I forgot about it until a week later whereupon I thought I'd pick up from where I left off.
[3]
Except this time Britannia was nowhere to be seen. Had it sunk into the North Sea?
[4]
[5]
Actually, it had merely sailed away. It was no longer bobbing among the free titles in Replay, but had headed off onto the high seas of streaming profitability, taken a tack around pay-per-view, and was now moored in the marina of subscription-only content.
The system remembered the precise second at which I had paused Episode 2. Infuriatingly, it refused to play the remainder unless I subscribed to one of those 15 trillion little channels with forgettable brand names such as "Bevel" or "Wigeon" that incessantly start up and close down with a half-life shorter than that of Hydrogen-5.
[6]
Pay-per-view doesn't bother me. You pay, you watch, that's it – just like going to the cinema, except without the crying babies, incessant chatter or the risk of getting shanked after asking a group of children next to you to put down their smartphones for two fucking seconds.
Subscriptions, on the other hand, fool you into thinking you can just go back and play the content as often as you like, as long as you stay subscribed. But this isn't the case. For example, when I began watching Britannia Episode 2, it was included within my streaming TV subscription; a week later, it was not. And who's to say the subscription channel that's now hosting the series will still be operating next week?
Ah, I notice there is another option shown on-screen: "Purchase."
[7]
This is the worst of all options. "What's the problem," you ask? "If you buy the series, it's yours to watch forever."
Ha ha ha. You are kidding, right? If not, I suggest you try to claim on one of those "lifetime guarantees" that you see plastered across the packaging for a tech product that goes kaput a year later. You will soon discover that "lifetime" doesn't mean a human lifetime nor even the lifetime of whatever other kit you plug it into but "the lifetime of interest in which the manufacturer could give a fuck."
For guidance on measuring the last-mentioned period, I refer you back to Hydrogen-5, above.
Longtime PlayStation Store customers in Germany and Austria had a nasty shock earlier this month when they read that movies they had previously purchased risked being stolen away. Unless PlayStation Store comes back to confirm otherwise over the next few weeks, [8]Studiocanal content is to be removed from customers' digital libraries from the end of August, even if those customers had paid for them outright, with no mention as yet of any refunds.
And so another generation learns that you never own software; even less so if it's uniquely supported by and stored on a streaming server owned by the company you bought it from.
The first time I was burned this way was when French [9]digital comics platform AVE gave up the ghost 10 years ago. They gave me fair warning but I never quite got around to downloading all the comics I had purchased. That is, I downloaded a couple of my paid-for albums only to find they were just flat PDFs, not the progressive-reading and auto-zooming digital comics I had chosen to spend my money on. In the time it took me to work out that downloading the content in its interactive but proprietary AVE file format would render them incompatible with everything (I am a slow thinker), it was too late and the site became unreachable for good.
When Comixology announced it was finally allowing itself to be [10]absorbed into the Kindle blob , I downloaded absolutely everything that same afternoon.
Adobe provoked a great deal of badwill around the same time when it repeatedly restructured the pricing for its early InDesign-centred app production platform known as Digital Publishing Suite. To be fair, the landscape of digital content provision was fast-changing at the time and I think Adobe was one of the first big names to own up that offering unlimited indefinite content storage in the cloud made no financial sense.
App users would not think twice about deleting content from their devices to clear up space. Later, they might download it again. It's one thing to host a website; quite another to host thousands of terabytes of hi-res multimedia and have customers download the same content again and again whenever they felt like it. The customer paid once but Adobe had to ensure all these bloody servers were working away all day and all night to serve up that content forevermore. That's never going to work out, even as a loss leader.
Nor is it just about content; nor just about software. Hardware is increasingly affected by the same issues, especially since so much of it these days relies on cloud-based support and updates.
As IT pros, this comes as no great surprise. Much of the job involves constant maintenance and regular updating. We know that nothing digital is persistent. Even looking after archives demands that you monitor the IT market to ensure that the formats and platforms you're currently using won't be obsolete and the systems required to read the archives irreplaceable by this time next year. You have to keep shifting the data to keep it accessible.
The consumer doesn't see it that way at all. They're still in a state of "I bought all these Betamax titles and now I'm stuffed" shock and refuse to accept that this is just the way of technology.
Except… younger buyers are finally waking up to all-too-brief useful lifetime of IT products and this could be a problem for parts of the consumer IT industry. Take smart video baby monitors, for example. They're a great idea, for sure, but what are you going to do with all that kit once little Algernon is in training pants? It's a lot of money for a convenience that'll last barely a year, and, you know, there's a recession looming.
Hubble Connected – a manufacturer of such [11]video baby monitor solutions – would like to persuade you that the device can serve a longer life beyond the nursery, as home security cameras for example.
Well, perhaps, but only if Hubble itself keeps supporting the kit. Plenty of paranoid householders got burnt by [12]Hive's recent announcement that it was going to ditch its own home security products, effectively bricking Hive hardware progressively from September 2023 to August 2025. It's bad enough that nobody owns software they paid for; apparently you have not much more ‘ownership' of what happens to that hardware you bought either.
[13]My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?
[14]The next time your program is 'not responding,' (do not) try these steps
[15]No more fossil fuel or nukes? In the future we will generate power with magic dust
[16]Confirmation dialog Groundhog Day: I click OK and it keeps coming back
And what about Sonos [17]dropping support for older product lines? These are not companies going bust – we are all subject to this happening, of course. Rather, these are companies that have changed their minds, or got bored, or had a difficult meeting with a new CFO who wants to know whose stupid idea it was to accept the ever-diminishing returns of supporting hardware that customers naively think they own as a result of having paid for them… once.
Just once! Think of it!
There's no room in the subscription model for one-off purchases. Whatever you think you have bought, you haven't, not really. Software or hardware alike, none of it is yours and it never was.
But that's only natural. I mean it literally: subscription is the natural order of things. Existentially speaking, we are all, each and every one of us, subscription-based.
Just keep paying the subs and let's hope support isn't withdrawn any time soon, eh?
[18]Youtube Video
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling tech journalism, training and digital publishing. He subsequently found a three-series complete box set of Britannia on DVD (good lord) in an HMV (oh good lord again) in Cardiff. More [19]SFTW here . Other stuff at [20]Autosave is for Wimps and [21]@alidabbs .
Get our [22]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/something_for_the_weekend/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britannia_(TV_series)
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/bootnotes&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YuQENYTy7asVCWkYmJ6LXgAAAE8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/bootnotes&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YuQENYTy7asVCWkYmJ6LXgAAAE8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/bootnotes&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YuQENYTy7asVCWkYmJ6LXgAAAE8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/bootnotes&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YuQENYTy7asVCWkYmJ6LXgAAAE8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/bootnotes&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YuQENYTy7asVCWkYmJ6LXgAAAE8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/playstation-ps-store-movies-removed/
[9] https://web.archive.org/web/20180428024251/http://www.avecomics.com/en
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/14/comixology_kindle/
[11] https://hubbleconnected.com/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/12/hive_camera_support_end/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/22/something_for_the_weekend/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/03/something_for_the_weekend/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/10/something_for_the_weekend_/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/13/something_for_the_weekend/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2020/01/21/sonos_bricking_laudio_gear/
[18] https://youtu.be/M8gulG-SizA
[19] https://www.theregister.com/Author/Alistair-Dabbs
[20] https://autosaveisforwimps.substack.com
[21] https://twitter.com/alidabbs
[22] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
You know you're old when...
...you see the phrase "Goblin Ownership" and think of the Goblin Teasmade. Whatever happened to Teasmades? Lovely idea. You could wake up to a nice cuppa to start the day. It'd all be cloud-controlled and subscription-based these days of course. Probably with pods...
Re: You know you're old when...
There's probably a dozen "maker" projects to build your own with an Arduino of some sorts, but to be quite honest, I'd never give anything that has been touched by my soldering iron control over more than 5W or so, and USB cup warmers notwithstanding, that won't brew you tea.
Re: You know you're old when...
If you look at the wiring on some of those old Teasmaids, you will inevitably find yourself wondering how many people they have killed in their beds, before they came to be in front of you.
Re: You know you're old when...
Who wouldn't want to be awoken by a goblin teasmaid?
Re: You know you're old when...
The resort charge on those is outrageous though.
Re: You know you're old when...
If you have never had a gobble off the maid in the morning you haven't really lived....
Oooh, kinky !
Sinderella - Pissed
Are you a goblin?
Well I was last night, but what I do in my own time is my business.
*Ex Mrs Oncoming Scorn was related to the diminutive one in the NSFW video.
Re: You know you're old when...
Personally I never really got past the concept of wanting stale 12-hour old water boiling (and spitting, steaming and generally making a racket if I remember the one my parents briefly owned) in close proximity to your sleeping head every morning...
Re: You know you're old when...
stale 12-hour old water
I've got bad news for you. That water was probably delivered to Earth by a comet millions of years ago. It was probably zooming around on the comet for a while before that. I don't think an extra eight hours by your bed will make it much staler.
Re: You know you're old when...
"If you look at the wiring on some of those old Teasmaids, .."
Yup, a friend of mine had one decades ago. One morning, half-asleep he reached for the teapot (metal) and the 240 V through his fingers woke him up very quickly. Luckily no permanent harm done.
Re: You know you're old when...
....to the teasmaid?
Re: You know you're old when...
I've never heard of that expression, but a quick google search seems to imply that it's Harry Potter related. Didn't bother looking further
Re: You know you're old when...
I'm not a Harry Potter either, we had a manager that insisted on using Harry Potter references in emails and emails. Not exactly what you call clear communications!
Re: You know you're old when...
Yeah, a nice cup of tea made with milk that had been standing on your bedside table overnight. Wonderful.
Re: You know you're old when...
I have 2 in the attic, don't know if they still work but should do.
Very simple actually; alarm closes circuit to element in kettle, when water boils it starts to siphon out of kettle into teapot, when kettle is below a certain weight it tilts opening circuit to element, then wait for tea to brew (ideal time to nip downstairs to kitchen for milk to put in tea.....)
Not usable in US due to not enough voltage from normal wall socker to boil water, (would need an appliance circuit run)
Re: You know you're old when...
"Not usable in US due to not enough voltage from normal wall socker to boil water, (would need an appliance circuit run)"
We have plug-in kettles in the US, they just take twice as long as they would on UK mains. Wouldn't be a big deal for a Teasmade, the element could just come on five minutes sooner.
A Teasmade wouldn't have been popular in the US because hardly anyone drinks tea in the morning.
Re: You know you're old when...
The Goblin "Teasmade", was really a terrible product. There was so much mass and losses in the system, that the end result was a lukewarm, weak, cuppa with little strength, due to the lack of sufficient heat in the system. In addition to that, it did not need a 'wake up' alarm, since the thuds, hisses and various noises of pre-boiling water, woke you well before the alarm time. In addition to that the various sounds of the machine hawking up the last dregs of the hot water, would wake up all save the long dead. I still have mine, tucked away somewhere, not having found a use for it past the few weeks of it's use.
Re: You know you're old when...
All you need is the person sleeping next to you have to leave for work an hour earlier. Have them get up quietly, and make a cup of tea in a travel mug so it stays hot, and put it next to your side of the bed.
This is the morning service my wife receives.
Quite why she needs it to be Sven who sleeps with her and makes her tea isn't clear, perhaps he's better at putting the milk in.
Dubbed Content
At least most platforms these days give you the option to choose which language and/or subtitles you want.
Even broadcast TV in France was doing this for many UK/US shows after the digital switchover.
.
Mr Dabbs> It's bad enough that nobody owns software they paid for;
They're going to befoul themselves when they see what the car industry has in store.
Re: Dubbed Content
Dubbing has certainly improved in recent years.
In the bad old days, as well as the lip-sync and clumsy translation issues, hardly anyone ever spoke "normally". The voice acting seemed to be done by the same people who did kids' cartoons.
Re: Dubbed Content
"The Flashing Blade" comes to mind every time "dubbing" comes up as a topic.
Re: Dubbed Content
Don't... please... I bought the DVDs.
Re: Dubbed Content
I was thinking The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe actually (& not that much dubbing really required, except for the flashback scenes). I can hear the music now.
Robert Hoffman sadly passed 2 days ago.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2022/07/27/robert-hoffmann-actor-who-starred-classic-tv-series-adventures/
Re: Dubbed Content
My wife is heard of hearing, so we have subtitles on most of the time.*
Looking through Netflix, saw the trailer for Squid Games that was dubbed - but it didn't match what was being said with the subtitles! Admittingly, it was just odd words here and there, but it was a tad annoying.
* Apart from live TV, the delay with what they were saying and the text appearing is rather disconcerting
Re: Dubbed Content
They're going to befoul themselves when they see what the car industry has in store.
Who wouldn't want to pay $18 a month to enable the "heated seats" button?
re: streaming services and content
Do what I do. When a movie that I want to watch becomes available to me (you figure out what that means,) I'll watch it every evening* until its gone from the platform, then I'll find another movie and repeat the process. My partner hates my viewing choices, but to be fair, I feel the same way about theirs.
* - and if I'm lucky, will actually watch it from opening to closing credits before it leaves the platform.
Re: re: streaming services and content
What happens if there are 2 or more you want to watch?
Are there enough hours in the evening to be watching them each every evening ?!?
Re: re: streaming services and content
I'll never complain about paying a reasonable price to view something. My problem is that the great, vast majority of movies, TV, and other content is simply not available on the big streaming services.
I can still remember our local video store, with thousands upon thousands of movies, many of them incredibly niche or obscure. Searching the shelves was a joy and an adventure, and none of the choices was being made by algorithms or advertising bots.
I find these days when I want to watch something specific that's more than a few years old I generally wind up back at the Pirate Bay.
I will though say one positive thing about the likes of Amazon, NetFlix and the other outfits: Those of us who live in "foreign" countries no longer have to look at idiotic FBI anti-piracy warnings....
Re: re: streaming services and content
No idea where you are, but while prerecorded videotapes or DVDs sold on the UK market definitely featured similar copyright warnings, those were localised (or IIRC didn't include anything that would obviously reference the US) and I've never seen one that mentioned the FBI.
Re: re: streaming services and content
NTSC VHS and Region-1 DVD & BluRays definitely feature the, "The FBI are coming for you !!!!!" opening splash screens.
Re: re: streaming services and content
Haha ..my dear mum won a big prize and i was given my first blue ray player(great big sony it was ) ... but there was a few live music dvd's that i had that would not play on it ..
After taking it in and complaning ... i was informed that i could not play disks from the us ...
And they proved it by going into the firmware and changing the region setting (first id heard of it) and the disk played ...they also wrote down the code sequince and timings, so i could play my disks when i wanted to.
Haven 't thought about in decades ... so icon cheers for the memory brought a smile to my chops
Re: re: streaming services and content
Canada, needless to say.
Physical media is still the best
LPs, CDs, cassettes, whatever. Personally I prefer files on an SSD backed up to spinning rust but it's all the same thing really. I avoid streaming and subscriptions except... EMAIL. That most basic of digital services. Perhaps I should download everything in Hotmail before Microsoft decide I didn't really want it anyway.
Glad to hear you found a real copy of Britannia, Ali.
Re: Physical media is still the best
I have Thunderbird on my home PC, set to download my web mail (when I want to read it via the browser, I read it from the deleted folder). I should probably back up the last 20 years worth of email at some point, but if it suddenly all disappears with no way of getting it back, at least I know it's my fault.
Re: Physical media is still the best
Couldn't get on with Thunderbird - emClient for me!
Re: Physical media is still the best
There's a Thunderbird setting to leave downloaded messages on the server.
Re: Physical media is still the best
"except... EMAIL. That most basic of digital services."
Your ISP is even more basic of course.
But I download all email. I might then delete it (the deleted folder is set up to really delete stuff after 6 months) but otherwise it's cheaper than having extensive storage on the paid for service and safer than a free service.
Re: Physical media is still the best
"Physical media is still the best " ( I guess the "that is in my personal possession and control" is implied )
Yes it is. The trick is keeping track of what is actually important to me that I want to download, secure and back up, and all the other digital gunk that just happens to be there.
Re: Physical media is still the best
Spinning rust with ZFS to prevent bitrot...and in read only mode until you want to SFTP up your latest and greatest acquisitions for backup to reduce the attack surface slightly.
Oh and at least 2 offline backups stored at the inlaws place.
I'm not paranoid. I'm experienced.
All the original media is in boxes in the storage space decaying at its own pace...other than the vinyl, but that's another story.
Tune in, turn on, then say goodbye
I hate this "no longer supported so we are going to stop it working" malarkey.
If purchasers were allowed to grab a jerry can of petrol, a box of matches, return the favour to any company who has done that, they might stop doing it.
Re: Tune in, turn on, then say goodbye
I'm not sure you can say this without freaking out the moderators.
Re: Tune in, turn on, then say goodbye
Doubt it, it's probable the moderators will, at some point, also have been burned by Hive or Nest or Sonos or TomTom or any other 'smart' devices support ending without recourse.
I uphold the user's right to march wielding stakes and torches. All hail the uprising of the users!
Re: Tune in, turn on, then say goodbye
Pitchforks! Don't forget pitchforks. Ans tar and feathers.
Re: Tune in, turn on, then say goodbye
And stakes & honey for the ant-hill
freestanding!
Well, perhaps, but only if Hubble itself keeps supporting the kit.
Why does everything have to be "supported" in the digital world? Before computers we used to make stuff that worked until its bearings or capacitors wore out.
Would it be that crazy to make something that didnt drop dead if it couldnt say hello to its creator daily?
like a baby monitor??
I still have the corpse of a Nazbagtag in the meter cupboard ...
Re: freestanding!
It would be crazy to the bean counters. Once they've sold their product to nearly everybody (see MS Windows and Office) how are they to get more money from you? Even upgrade fees are a problem when you've added all the new features you can imagine and the mugs customers have realised that they are hardly using any of them.
Let's be honest though. If you could find a device that kept its brain at home few of us would pay the premium for it.
Re: Before computers we used to make stuff that worked
This comment is quite funny if you grew up in 1970s Britain.
From cars whose engines overheated when the sun came out, to regular visits from a man who used to have to do strange repairs to the telly with just a soldering iron (never with any new parts, or seemingly any solder, just applying the iron and making fizzing noises and making bits of smoke emerge from the circuitry).
There was quite a popular subscription model for hardware too, called "Radio Rentals". But that was weekly or monthly, definitely not "lifetime", although they could have got away with that, as the lifetime of the electrical goods was often able to be measured in weeks or months.
Re: Before computers we used to make stuff that worked
Ah yes, dear old hire-purchase (aka "the tick" or "the never-never"), where you rented it long enough that you then owned it after the given period of time.
Said period of time of course being slightly less (by a matter of nanoseconds) than it took for it was either become redundant, broken or in such a general state of repair that the vendor wouldn't want it back anyway.
This is called "Goblin Ownership" the original maker (goblin) is the owner and anyone purchasing is only ever borrowing it.
Streaming services are the worst though, You have to suffer because mum and dad are having a licensing argument again as part of their on going abusive relationship which you have to pay for the privilege of being part of, down with the streaming services and the douche bags whom run them. It pleasing that as money becomes a problem for most people these subscriptions are the first for the chopping block.