Matthew Botos

Asking Why Does DVD Cover Art Suck So Much? turns up some pretty cool movie posters and comparatively lackluster DVD covers. To throw in my own two cents, I think the two serve two different purposes.

Posters, like teaser trailers, can be minimal and artsy to draw you in and create buzz when you see a handful walking into the theater. DVDs, on the other hand, are on an endless shelf with hundreds of others, long after the buzz has died and people have forgotten who was even in the movie. Throw a few big pictures of the stars on it and hint at the plot with the background in a very basic design, and maybe you’ll grab that nanosecond of someone’s attention it takes to spur the purchase of your movie over all the others.

Tivo sent me an email touting their new pairing with Amazon’s Unbox service, and even managed to take a swipe at Netflix in the process:

With Amazon Unbox on TiVo, you’ll be able to purchase or rent movies and TV shows to be delivered through broadband directly to your TiVo Now Playing List, so you can watch them on your big-screen TV. (C’mon people, it’s 2007: Renting movies through the mail is so pass�!)

Renting movies through the mail may be passe, but at one point, Netflix was moving more data per day than the Internet, and certainly more movies than all the online offerings combined. So why aren’t we just downloading our movies in the modern world?

• A monopoly or duopoly for high-speed Internet to the home exists in most areas, and without more competition or innovation, cable and phone companies will be slow to roll it out. That goes double for cable companies, which already have an established and (for the time being) still profitable pipeline for movies.
• The movie studios spend much more money on vicious lawyers and congressional “contributions” than they do on visionary engineers or marketers to take movies online legally and profitably.

When Amazon and Tivo conquer those two problems, then maybe I’ll consider giving up my Netflix subscription. Though maybe not; Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has long hinted at downloadable movies, noting the company is called Netflix, not Mailflix.

I finally got a chance to sit down and watch a movie on the new DVD player and HDTV Sunday night. It was a much better test that watching isolated clips or freeze frames. Some scenes aren’t as clear or detailed as others, and watching a whole film gives you a better balance.

The result was pleasing; the upconverting on the DVD player did a good job of filling in higher resolution and large size of the TV. Keeping up with action sequences was no problem, and the text in the menus looked clearer. It should be good enough to keep me from thinking about HD DVD and Bluray for a while…

Ever buy a DVD, put in the player you paid for, and have it tell you that you can’t do what you want? A wonderful “feature” called User Operation Prohibition (UOP) lets the disc enforce restrictions such as not skipping the FBI warning, or more sinisterly, the movie company’s previews. While it’s easy enough to find software players that ignore these artificial restrictions, doing it in a hardware player is a bit tougher.

Fortunately, dedicated hackers are on the job; Tom’s Panasonic firmware site offers firmware updates for several Panasonic players that disable this annoyance as well as free you to watch DVDs from other regions of the world. It works like a charm; I bought an S52S player this afternoon, burned a CD, and now have total control of my DVDs!

The documentary Why We Fight looks at the history of our country’s military-industrial complex and how it has shaped our current situation. It’s well done, not only because it covers many facets of the subject, but because it leaves you thinking at the end.

As a regular employee at a contractor in the military-industrial complex, I have mixed feelings. As an individual, my actions are far too regulated by rules, process, and policies to do anything nefarious. Yet at higher levels, the revolving door between government and industry is constantly turning. With the influence, contacts, and stock holdings some of these people have, it’s difficult to imagine they’re truly free from conflicts of interest.

An even more disturbing concern raised is that foriegn policy is increasingly influenced by think tanks and carried out with greater corporate involvement (such as outsourcing military food service to private contractors). Neither of these entities were elected or will be held accountable by the people, but will instead pursue their own interests.

History has already shown our natural tendency to engage in a major military conflict every decade without undue influence. Eisenhower saw the danger long ago; hopefully some of today’s elected officials are equally vigilant.