Today I swiped the office’s spare monitor, grabbed a cheap PCI video card, and am now seated at a desk with something just shy of five million pixels of doom (1600×1200 + 1600×1050 + 1280×1024). It’s a lot of space, and after having used it for about an hour now, I’m wondering if it really IS a bit excessive. Oh well, I’ll see how I like it a few weeks from now.
As part of testing out my new monitor layout, I decided that my 3rd screen currently gets to hold my email as I work like normal on the remaining two. The only new message in my inbox intrigued me (kind of) – it was a survey from ADV, an fine company who’s done a lot to bring some of the better anime out there (and some of the worst 
) to this country. I figured that the survey couldn’t hurt, and they promised it wouldn’t take more than five minutes.
Well, they lied. Most of the questions were innocuous inough. Which demographic categories can we file you under? Which genres do you like? Do you read Newtype? etc… But one question…
Q: Would you buy anime for download?
A: After looking at their selection of initial offerings, and at their FAQ page, I clicked No.
They then offered a box for me to explain my answer. I don’t know if their database will have been configureded to deal with a response of the length I provided. 
Crippled files with DRM are an abomination. They break digital standards and mandate my choice of player software and even operating system if I want to watch them. At least with a physical DVD purchase, I can watch it on any computer I want AND on my dvd player/playstation/father-in-law’s 50″ tv/whatever… At $5/episode, it’s just not worth the inconvenience.
Especially since you’re using inferior WMV files that lack such 5-year-old features as multiple audio tracks and optional subtitles. Are all of your files dubbed? Yuck. If I’m gonna be cheap about my shows, I’ll just wait until they’re in the discount bin or buy them used or support my local comic shop and rent them or something.
Besides, DRM doesn’t work. People are ALWAYS going to find ways around copy protection on digital media. There are countless pirates out there with nothing better to do with their time than bypass the latest audio/video/whatever protection scheme.
I’d wanted to go on, but as it is, they’re probably not gonna get the whole rant, much less read any of it. Oh well. Maybe one day they’ll realize that they can make money by selling whole files, not broken ones.
If it was $5 for dual-audio ogg or mkv files that I could play in VLC or if they offered PDA-sized AVI’s that I could carry with me and that wouldn’t necessitate that I use Windows Media Player? I’d have bought a few episodes on the spot. In stead, I have little confidence in this part of the industry getting any better for a very long time.
i saw your site when looking up some info about mage builds
anywho, this is an old post- but you might be interested in http://www.narutofan.com
a friend of mine adores it- he gets v fast downloads of anime. and you can save, burn, move and extend the use of the files you download.
Wow. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a site like that. They charge a subscription fee for the explicit purpose of facilitating illegal downloads. I love it.
Their legal disclaimer really is some humorous reading, but the thing that really shocked me was that they’ve apparently been around for over a year. I’d expect them to have been shut down long ago, but perhaps their vaguely Canadian status is what has helped them dodge lawyers for this long.
[...] I’d bought from across the street back when I was flirting with 3-head (mentioned briefly here). Being reduced to one monitor is not cool. I’m gonna fix this… soon, I [...]