Following on from my blog about Universal's new download service, I want to now talk about how film studios treat their DVD buying customers.

When I pay £15 or so for a new DVD, I expect to play the movie (or whatever features come with it) pretty much immediately. I've paid for my copy, and I expect to do as I see fit other than to make copies and distribute them to my friends, family, customers(!), etc.

It seems that film studios so mistrust their customers that they now put:

a) Anti-piracy "infomercials" right at the start of the disc. In the UK, there is an organisation called FACT - the Federation Against Copyright Theft, an organisation I very much respect for the work that they do, and I have even reported several instances why I've found piracy rampent. One such issue was with a movie I was personally involved with and in which somebody sold me a copy which was quite clearly a copy (and a bad one at that - hilarious typos and grammatical errors could have landed this copy in an issue of Private Eye!).

The region 2 DVDs I have feature a ~1 minute film that states, "You wouldn't steal a handbag, you wouldn't steal a car, you wouldn't steal a movie - piracy is wrong!" and features a school girl seemingly downloading a movie to her home computer right at the end. All of this presented in a most annoying MTV manner.

Most film studios, except Universal, allow you to skip this and head on to the main menu. Universal force you to use the fast forward button to go through this.

b) Movie trailers. It's always nice to see forthcoming movies, but then again I've got the Internet and I can always find out what's forthcoming there. Some film companies stick these right at the beginning of the disc and make you either watch them, fast forward, or if the studio is feeling particularly generous, skip the whole lot and go to the main menu.

c) At the end of some episodic titles, you get the copyright warnings for each and every country that the DVD could possible be sold in. You can't skip these, you can't fast forward. You can either stop the disc and play it right from the beginning again (a pain in the backside) or just wait until they go away (a pain in the backside).

User prohibitions on DVDs are a right pain in the neck for consumers. The anti-piracy stuff is particularly insulting. I know as well as everybody else that you can't copy the movie. So why are movie studios treating their customers like idiots?

So do movie companies trust their customers? Quite clearly, no. They want to DRM everything and have an absolutely say in what you can and can't do. They make you watch silly infomercials. They charge exhauberent prices knowing full well that people will pay them and then blame the high cost due to piracy.

All I can say is that something had better happen soon to protect the rights of the consumer against these organisations, otherwise it's going to all end in tears for both sides..

M.