Downloading music has changed the landscape of the music and film industry. The RIAA and various production and recording companies claim that billions in revenue have been lost. Partly this is due to the lower CD sales. They refuse to believe that maybe their products isn’t as popular as they hope. They insist that the blame is on the illegal downloaders. They may be partly right.
The beauty of downloading is that an artist’s music will never truly disappear. The artist may not achieve the level of fame they desire (they only have 3 houses, 6 cars, a yacht and some “bling-bling”) but thanks to the internet, their music will be available for a very long time long after they have stopped performing. Isn’t that the true dream of most artists – to become part of history; maybe become a legend?
The music and film industry don’t get it yet. People are wise enough to know that you only buy the products you want to collect, the items that are truly valuable. That means that people will always buy the CD’s and DVD’s as long as the music is great and the films are worth watching. They will willingly pay to download a film or track or album legally in order to have a great copy of it. What the industry giants need to do is make the costs reasonable so that there is no point in pirating anymore.
At least Apple got it off to a good start when they made tracks downloadable at $0.99. Now if only Microsoft and any other players who will come in will just help to make the price even more reasonable, we just might be done with piracy altogether.
Tags: download, film, legal download, Music, Piracy, Video
Categories: Downloading Legally, Music, Videos
In an unprecedented bummer (yesterday, today and tomorrow for sure) the software giant has released a statement that current users of their music and video entertainment service would have to purchase new registration keys for their downloaded music which was laden with DRM software. This same software tells de-activation servers if the computer and media that is being used is together as the download says it was or otherwise get turned-off preventing the darned stuff from playing at all. Like many users worldwide, people have a need for several copies of their video and audio where-ever they may be, Maybe due to lessons of the past when their hard drive crashed and took all of them with the disk (out the trash) or maybe because they just plain love the damned thing and want it to be available everywhere.
The Microsoft Corp has time and again gone through ups and downs and this would be hailed as one of the dumbest downer they have ever done. At first they delay the availability of XP SP3 by saying it’s still in the beta phase (though its been circulating in the P2P world as a download for quite sometime now) and that they are still monitoring for requests from their customers saying, “We are currently monitoring the need for the update from our users and as of now, we don’t see a need for it. If we do begin to see interest in the said update we will release it accordingly!” Many XP users were pissed at the thought, that the promised update for their XP’s which was promised last year took half a year for release then when the news people say it was ready they didn’t want to share it?! The update then mysteriously appears on the TechNet and other download sites for no apparent reason (Guess a good yelling for that employee or PR guy was ENOUGH REASON) maybe due top the tons of negative email they got when they said that.
Now they do it again by rewarding those who have been loyal to them by actually using the video and audio service by telling them we’re all of a suddenly puckering up our lips and saying no to multiple copies of your downloaded media and you have to pay for another activation key for all copies (they allowed the download of separate activation keys for all users who do get their songs from the site legally) costing them more money! Nice going guys, for during a time when everybody is way out on a limb with what little cash they had you’re asking for more? For me, I’ve never ever heard of the darned service, I know about Apple’s iTunes store (they’ve sold more than 4 billion tracks of music at less than a dollar)but never heard of their multimedia service. This may be nice for them so they add points to the, “Why you should hate Microsoft List”, which amounts to A LOT recently. I thought you guys had the best PR and Customer relations guys in the world money can buy? Guess brains were not part of the tons of money you pay PR people.
Tags: Bummer, Digital Music, Download service, Entertainment, Microsoft, Video
Categories: Downloading Legally, Music, Podcasts, Providers, Resources, Videos
Stage six is a site with tons upon tons of free videos and other free stuff available for download. Stage6 is a division of DivX the well established pioneer of the DivX Video technology as a site to showcase the stuff the stuff is made of. Thought the site is maintained as a blog, it has a lot of video from the site and its staff as well as those uploaded by members of the group who regularly share stuff (video) for those who love video. The site is a high performance platform by which members of the Stage6 community using the latest video sharing and streaming technology allowing best performance at any level. It is an open forum for all to join and they do encourage people to join the community whereby they get to access the full array of video in many categories.
Being a social network, people are encouraged to voice out opinion and concerns to contribute to the community as a whole. In order to use the site, one must download; the DivX software and support systems form the DivX site. DivX by the way is a video format similar to MP3’s for audio. The software has the base system, a video converter which converts other video formats to DivX, a desktop player, a codec or coder decoder for the various video formats, and a web player. All the above software are downloaded separately and come in free versions as well as Pro versions which are in the paid area of the site.
Tags: DivX, Stage6, Video, Video-Downloads
Categories: Applications, Downloading Legally, Freeware, ipods, Mobile Phones, Podcasts, Resources, Videos
We’ve all heard of the horrible incidents regarding private stuff that people have posted on their personal web pages going public and causing a lot of problems. Celebrities are on top of the list for their innocence becomes prime breeding ground for those who seek an easy buck in exchange for stuff regarding them(personal pictures and videos and other stuff). Truth of the matter is that there is no privacy on the internet or on any computer that is connected to it.
Yes, this is true for the internet is just a network of computers that are connected in to one big computer network. May it be a Corporate server, a personal computer or the personal digital assistant and many others, all of them are susceptible to attack and therefore vulnerable. This has become so much a problem that companies have developed specialized software programs called firewalls that prevent unauthorized users from accessing the information contained within a computer system. But these systems have failed in the past quite disastrously like the incident only a few years back with internet search engines suffering from huge glitches due to malware being able to overload their systems causing them to slow down or even crash in some instances.
So how do we really protect pictures and other relevant or sensitive information from prying eyes and ears? For personal stuff, keep it off the web by storing it somewhere safe say a portable digital storage device like a pen drive, CD, dvd or some other media you can take out of your computer when you don’t use it. Use the encryption systems that are most likely to be included on your computer’s operating system. And lastly, learn about how firewalls work and configure them properly(too many users leave their systems vulnerable due to using the default settings on their OS’s).
Tags: Music, photos, Video
Categories: Applications, Downloading Legally, Graphics, Music, Photo Images
