Coffs Ex-Services Computer Club

As Paul mentioned at our last meeting, the ABC has followed the BBC in crippling their programs with Digital Restrictions Management. The ABC, which has until recently been pretty good at digital distribution, is now selling us copies of programs we already paid for in a form which restricts how we can use these recordings.

Purchasing and viewing these videos requires the "integrated ABC Shop Media Player and its Downloads Manager", which only works on Windows and Internet Explorer. The videos cannot be played on any other software or device. The software is proprietary, so you have no way of knowing what it is actually doing, but among the features the manufacturer boasts of are:

• "Peer assisted content delivery technology". That is, P2P file-sharing technology like BitTorrent, only in this case the sharing is not under your control, and you can't opt out. The ABC Shop's customers are paying to receive this data, but they are not necessarily receiving the data from the ABC Shop; more likely from other ABC Shop customers. You are paying the ABC Shop for a service, even though you are just as much the provider of that service as they are.
• "PDF and Windows Media file control features." You don't have control over the files you pay for, the ABC Shop does. You may have paid for it, but they still own it.
• "A rich reporting and analytics tool that shows downloads as well as advanced metrics such as who has viewed which content, when, and for how long." Big Brother is watching you watching your videos.
  

DefectiveByDesign.org has the full story, and advice on what you can do about it.

I don't get "streaming".  Why anybody would prefer to watch low resolution video with poor sound quality, intermittently stopping mid-syllable for "buffering" or "network congestion", rather than just downloading a file and watching it at their leisure is beyond me.  If you feel likewise, but still want to watch a video from one of the massive streaming video collections on the net, KeepVid may be for you.  KeepVid acts as a proxy for a number of streaming video sites, delivering the complete video file that you can save to your hard disk, rather than struggling with streaming.