Must Talk More Tennis!

You know, I think the last time I mentioned Tennis on here was way back before the final in Montreal, which was? August? Something like that (I could find out in like 3 seconds but I’m not going to). So Murray won that, which was cool. The very next week he had to defend his Masters title in Cincinnati, unfortunately losing in the SF to Federer, which basically resulted in no net gain of points over last year since he just swapped his results for the two competitions.

Next up was the US Open, big hopes for Murray there, runner up there last year, expect him to reach the final… Crashes out in the 4th round to Marin Cilic. Pretty disappointing result there, though it did turn out that he had developed a wrist injury which has caused him to pull out of the Asian tournaments he was due to play this week and next – so I suppose we can forgive him.

The big shock at the US Open was of course the defeat of Roger Federer in his attempt for a 6th straight US Open title by new boy Juan Martin Del Potro. Excellent result for Del Potro, and interestingly his first and only title higher than the ATP 500 series. So good for him, 5 set matches against the greatest player of all time have got to be gruelling,  and Del Potro really pulled out some fantastic Tennis after a shaky start.

So, following the US Open we come to the Asian season, unfortunately Federer pulled out of the whole season with exhaustion, hopefully he’ll be fit for the Tour Finals in London next month. Similarly Andy Murray ended up pulling out of both the tournaments he was scheduled to play in Asia, including the Shanghai Masters which starts next week and is worth a cool 1000 ranking points to the winner – points Murray could really use after losing a rather large whack of points at the US Open by failing to meet or exceed last years result.

The Davis Cup… Britain has won The Davis Cup 9 times. Last time? 1936. The Davis Cup is split into tiers, Britain has been competing in the 2nd tier for the last year – poorly. So poorly in fact that we had to face and beat Poland to avoid relegation to the 3rd tier. We did not beat Poland. Davis Cup ties are a best of 5 affair, 4 singles matches and a doubles. As our only Top 10, Top 20, Top 100, or even Top 190 men's player Andy Murray was of course asked to play, which he did, injured wrist and all. Murray competed in two singles rubbers and the doubles, winning both the singles and losing the doubles (with Ross Hutchins). Unfortunately Dan Evans was unable to muster the single win required to keep us afloat in the 2nd tier and down to the 3rd we go. Britain can’t keep riding Andy Murray to keep the Davis Cup team afloat, hopefully the next year in the 3rd tier will give the other British players on the team the experience necessary to compete at that level, while Murray gets on with his singles career.

It’s not all doom and gloom for British Tennis though, Elena Baltacha finally broke the women's top 100, as did Katie O’Brien, and one of our men's doubles teams picked up their first ATP title which saw them break into the top 100 doubles rankings – unfortunately their names escape me for the moment :s

Nadal is back in action in Asia, looks like the abdominal injuries he was suffering from in the run-up to and during the US Open series are healed up, he has been ploughing through in Beijing, an ATP 500 event, and as the top player left in the draw looks poised to take the Beijing title and become hot favourite at Shanghai – Nadal in fact has an unbeaten streak for events in Shanghai (including his Olympic Gold last year).

Del Potro suffered a slightly embarrassing first round loss at the ATP 500 in Tokyo, not a good return to the game after your first Grand Slam win, hopefully he’ll be back on form for Shanghai, give Nadal someone to be afraid of – after all Del Potro eliminated Nadal at both Montreal and the US Open this year – albeit an injured Nadal.

Last of all for now there is the matter of the Tour finals, Federer, Nadal, Murray, Djokovic and Del Potro have all qualified, but there are still three more spots left in the draw. It rather looks like Andy Roddick will be taking the 6th spot due to his >1000 point cushion over the rest of the field below him in the rankings, but the guys sitting from 7 to around 12 in the rankings are packed pretty tightly together, and the 1500 points available in Tokyo/Beijing and Shanghai could be crucial to those guys.

Of course there may be additional spots available if either or both of Federer and Murray are unfit to play – Federer will probably be fine, he just needs rest, Murray on the other hand has a fucked up wrist which leaves a question mark hovering over whether it’ll be healed in time – fingers crossed. Murray had an impressive run at the finals last year winning all 3 of his round-robin matches (including against Federer) before being ousted in the Semis – hopefully this year he can make the final.

freedoms_stain, Tennis’d out, out.

Why Pirate? - Part 2, Video

Using our Pirate Bay standard as above we can see that there are quite a few categories encompassed by the larger heading of “Video”. I’m going to cut those down to three core areas – Movies (cinema), DVDs and TV and as before illustrate how pirates, although violating copyright, provide services legal channels are failing to.

Movies

Similar to the music industry the Movie industry has a long founded business model established long before the Internet age which consists of product promotion, usually in the form of previews, trailers and reviews followed by a full cinema release of a number of months, followed several months later with release to rental services and DVD. This is the cycle Pirates endeavour to break.

Movie producers participate in their own form of dishonest marketing similar to that of the music industry. In order to entice customers to the cinema and pay extortionate box office fees to see films the movie industry hits us with trailers and previews, short sections of the film edited together in exciting collages often with dramatic music all intended to pique curiosity and interest. Unfortunately due to the heavily edited nature of these “teasers” it’s really impossible to gauge how much you will enjoy a film. It’s quite easy to make a boring or rubbish film look good if you condense all the good bits down into 30-60 seconds of footage. It is therefore difficult to gauge what is worth your money, and what isn’t, and at £7 a pop bad choices are a costly affair and there is no refund if you genuinely don’t enjoy the film.

Piracy at least allows movie-goers to check out a low quality copy of the film before committing to the full ticket price.

It wouldn’t be difficult for the Movie industry to upload a low quality stream of the 1st ~20-30 minutes or so of their films to the Internet to allow people the opportunity to gauge whether or not they want to part with their cash to see the rest in a theatre. There are already a plethora of video streaming sites out there who’d be happy to host the content for free, and as I discussed in Part1, YouTube has a system in place to allow the monetisation of content via adsense. So why doesn’t it happen? Because if people get the chance to see how shit the first half hour is they won’t pay to see the rest, right? Sounds pretty fucking dishonest to me. If the industry is confident in the quality of its products, why isn’t it prepared to implement this system?

Of course not all pirated copies of movies are purely for “research purposes”, some people just don’t like the cinema or have difficulty getting there for whatever reason – they still want to see the films, but not on the industries terms, so fuck it, it’s up on torrents, I’m tired tonight, can’t be arsed going out, I’ll pirate. Why isn’t there a legal channel? Why isn’t there a way for me to stream new movies to my home over the Internet? The infrastructure is there, but the service is not, why? There is obviously a demand for such a service, but it isn’t there in a legal form. So shitty tele-sync cam footage will continue to appear on the internet. The industry could attempt to hack into that demand by providing some sort of reasonably priced pay-per-stream service for new cinema releases, but they haven’t even tried. They’ve had 5-10 years to try and get something together, but they’d rather spend millions extorting a pittance out of three Swedish dudes who had the misfortune to pick a snazzy title for their bittorrent index site and tracker that became popular.

Now, I’m not naive, I’m fully aware that a significant proportion of Pirates are just cunts who want shit for free, but the truth is absolutely nobody knows what proportion of Pirates straight up steal the material they pirate and what proportion go on to pay for it in some fashion – the point here is that the Industry has failed to pick up on obvious demand and use it to their advantage.

DVD

Sort of a misleading title, but snazzier than “movies post-theatrical run”. I’m not really talking about DVDs as such, but the consumption of video in any form. DVDs are typically released a number of months, possibly extending up to a year or more after the films initial cinema release. “DVD rips” are available to pirate as soon as the DVD hits the shelf somewhere – anywhere – in the world, and in fact, often long before that, sometimes months before. The quality of rips ranges from low/medium of ~700MB-1.4GB to full DVD ~4GB, and now even Blu-Ray rips are pretty commonly available. However it isn’t the higher quality stuff that is most popular, it’s the lower end stuff that’s overwhelmingly more downloaded. Now it’s hard to say if the reasons for this are purely speed or bandwidth related – higher quality stuff = bigger file size =  slower download. There’s obviously a demand for this content, but at the moment the availability is low, and in the UK it’s particularly pathetic with the only real retailer being Apples iTunes store at the moment with limited choice and inflated prices.

When there’s demand for a product the industry should be all over it, but they’re just plain not. All I can figure is that they’re trying to defend their profit margins by trying to force consumers down the restrictive avenues of their existing business models focussed around physical media while criminalising those avenues they have thus far failed to utilise.

TV

The issue here is the availability of content after its original air date, i.e. online streaming services. This is an area that has really boomed recently, all the major terrestrial TV networks in the UK now have some form of streaming service while Channel 4 and the BBC have been working hard at getting their archives online – Channel 4 have actually got a large whack of their archives available to stream right now (although their website and media player can only be described with the word Shite in my opinion). So that’s all good (apart from the Channel 4 setup which is Shite).

Where the problem lies is with the international stuff. Us Brits can’t watch the streaming services for US channels and the ‘Murcans can’t watch any of ours. Most of them probably don’t care much that they can’t watch our TV, but a lot of us rather do want to watch theirs, therefore there is rather a large amount of TV piracy going on, mostly of popular American shows. You see, there are often very long periods of time (we’re talking years in some cases) between the US air date and the air dates in various countries around the world, people want to know what’s happening in Lost or whatever, they can’t wait and they end up Pirating. Anybody trying to hammer out a deal that makes US TV shows available at the same time world wide?

Thought not. So, piracy again provides a service the industry does not.

That’s the end of this segment kiddies. I think I got a bit ranty and preachy in that one, but I’m leaving it all in exactly how it dribbled out my brain.

Next up, Games and e-comics, I don’t foresee either being particularly long so I reckon they’ll fit into a one-er. I may also fire out my proposal for a digital rights system that embraces file sharing.

freedoms_stain, quite tired actually, out.

Why Pirate? – Part 1, Music

The issue of digital Piracy has come under increasingly heavy legal fire of late. Peter Mandelson has been making noise, Lily Allen has been embarrassing herself, the entertainment industries in league with the Swedish legal system have concentrated all their firepower on bringing down thepiratebay.org, the French are determined to implement their “three strikes policy” and BT and other UK ISPs are fighting increasing pressure from many sectors to (essentially) police the web.

Piracy is perceived by the industries whose products are pirated as a massively bad thing. They operate under the assumption that every download represents a loss of sale, which is in itself debatable, but not the issue I intend to debate right now. As the title suggests I’m concerned with why people Pirate, is it just to get stuff for free is there more to it?

To gain an insight into the issue lets take a look at what people pirate, below is a picture of the Pirate Bays “Browse Torrents” page:

  

I don’t intend to cover every category listed, but I will cover most of the more “popular” piracy targets and attempt to demonstrate how Pirates provide services that the industries have either inadequately provide or completely failed to.

Music

• Dishonest Marketing – Choosing music to listen to is difficult. The music industry utilises an antiquated method of marketing in order to influence your choices primarily concerning the promotion of albums through the release and promotion of singles, music videos and press reviews. Prior to the Internet age this was basically as good as it got, but now the Internet is here it’s painfully inadequate. Singles are rarely a fair representative of an albums quality, generally the superior songs from the album are released as singles to promote their parent albums which may consist of pure crap with the exception of said singles – I call this dishonest marketing. Imagine you bought a car purely on how it looked from the outside, but upon attempting to drive it discovered it lacked an engine – that’s kinda how I look at marketing through singles, and yeah, you’d be a dumb fuck to buy a car without test driving it, guess what? You’re a dumb fuck if you buy music without hearing it first, and that’s how the industry treats us, like a big mass of dumb fucks. How about press reviews? Considering the uncertainty over what is genuine and what is bought and paid for can you trust any opinion that is not your own? I’m not suggesting that all music piracy is on a “try before you buy” basis, but it is a “service” provided by piracy that the industry has made little effort to provide itself.

• Music Discovery Tools - Credit where credit is due though, they do appear to be making somewhat of an effort through the streaming service Spotify. Spotify is a decent effort, but far from perfect, the truth is it doesn’t have nearly the library one can sample via “illegal” channels, a quick search on Spotify for my last three CD purchases (The Wildhearts – Chutzpah!, Pearl Jam – Backspacer, Idlewild – Post Electric Blues) nets me zero hits. I’d also point out that I had a pre-release pirated copy of Post Electric Blues and bought it yesterday, release day. The music industry, particularly in the UK has a long history of shooting itself in the foot with regards to various other streaming services. The industry demands a fee be paid for every song streamed by these services. This fee was deemed so unreasonably high the the Pandora project was forced to pull out of the UK while recently YouTube refused to service the UK with music video streams for an extended period due to the unreasonable fee demands. One should point out that these services (particularly Pandora) are excellent music discovery tools and the potential income from albums sold as a direct result of artist discovery via these services are potentially more valuable than the pittance earned from per-stream fees – but greed is often blind. During the YouTube furore I did think it particularly galling that the music industry expected payment from video streams of content they had uploaded themselves for free and using YouTube’s servers to stream said content at zero expense to themselves. YouTube is a service they choose to use, yet they want paid for it? Madness! YouTube/Google offer all YouTubers the opportunity to monetise their channels via adsense, if the music industry wants to monetise its voluntary uploads to YouTube then it should use the same methods as everyone else.

• Pre-release Piracy - Albums are typically recorded and completed months before their final release date, pirates typically view this as an unnecessary delay and endeavour to make available albums prior to their release date. The music industry could prevent pre-release piracy on its current scale by releasing completed albums as soon as they are finished. The technology is there, the demand is there, why isn’t the service there? Until such time as it is there, pre-release piracy is likely to continue.

• FLAC – FLAC is an acronym for Free Lossless Audio Codec, it is a form of audio compression which allows a CD to be compressed to a smaller file size without the loss of any data. In stark contrast the “industry standard” for audio compression is mp3, a lossy compression format – the file size is drastically reduced but at the expense of data loss. Additionally mp3 is encumbered by patents which drives up the cost of music released in the format. Most individuals won’t hear the difference between an mp3 encoded at ~192kbs or higher and a FLAC file, either because they lack the ability or because they lack the audio equipment necessary to distinguish between the two (poor speakers or ear/headphones will render the quality difference between the two negligible to all but the most “golden eared”), however there remains a subset of audiophile consumers to whom mp3 is of unacceptable quality. Very few artists, and almost no artists on commercial record labels have their work released legally for purchase in FLAC format. Furthermore, individuals who wish to use a lossy audio codec other than mp3 are not catered for by the industry at present either, and since mp3 cannot be converted to another lossy format without substantial degradation in audio quality choice is limited and some people choose to pirate to have their needs met as the pirate community is willing to provide FLAC files which can be transcoded to the codec of your desire.

As this is shaping up to be somewhat longer than expected I’m breaking it up, next part will cover Video at the least.

freedoms_stain, until next time, out.

Small Sample Polls And The News

I'm reading The Metro, a generally interesting free paper available on
a variety of public transport in the UK. I've got to page 4 and
already the paper has featured news stories based on polls, one of
which was the front page headline. Sample size? 1100 (for both which
suggests it was in fact the same poll).

How statistically significant or representative are the opinions of
1100 people out of a population of some 60 million? Not very. News
worthy? Fuck no.

What really pisses me off is that the writer and/or editor is passing
off the results of the poll as if it were representative of Britain as
a whole. 1100 opinions wouldn't even be representative of Glasgow.

These piddling pathetic polls shouldn't be used as news, certainly not
headline news. If you ARE going to pass comment on them then you
should stress that the small sample size is not large enough to
accurately represent a whole nation rather than mention it in passing
at the foot of the article.

It's bad reporting, or it's manipulative reporting designed to
influence opinion, which is worse than merely 'bad'.

It'll be interesting to see if other news outlets report on this and
how much significance they place on its findings.

What I would like to see (if it doesn't exist already) is a national
poll service one can subscribe to for both polling and viewing the
results, that would be much more interesting I tuink. I think I might
investigate that later.

freedoms_stain, losing respect for The Metro, out.

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It's A Short Man's World

When I buy a train ticket from a machine and pay by card I have to
stand back from the machine two paces AND bend over in order to see
what the screen on the card machine is asking me to do. Why? Because
the thing was either designed by idiots of for the exclusive use of
midgets.

I'm not that tall, roughly 6', that's not far off average for my
generation so I am quite confused as to why machines implemented
within the last 5 or so years were designed facing straight out and in
a recess which completely obscures view of the screen for a
significant proportion of the populace.

Reasonable solutions:

1) have the whole pad angled upwards and outwards at a height where
everyone can see and reach it.

2) Do away with the screen on the card reader and have instructions on
the main screen.

3) Do away with the separate card reader unit entirely and use the
touch screen for instructions and pin entry.

I think it's pretty indicative of the ineptitude of First Scotrail as
a whole. First Scotrail, a company who had their public rail contract
in Scotland extended without any debate at Holyrood or the gathering
of external bids (source coming on that one, that's from memory, not
entirely sure of its accuracy). A company who allows their electronic
arrival boards to claim a train has "Arrived" at it's due time up to 5
minutes before it actually arrives late. No doubt a policy that pads
out their trains on-time percentage.

This wasn't meant to be a train bitch-fest so I'll move on.

Cash machines are another device that seem custom made for those of
shorter stature, even those placed higher up on the wall result in
weird bent over stances with heads curled at unnatural angles. Funny
thing is when given the choice of higher or lower machines, the short
arses tend to go for the higher.

freedoms_stain, tall, out.

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