William (Dthdealer) - Slashdot User

Comment The future is censored (Score 1) 1

by William (Dthdealer) on Tuesday December 22, 2009 @09:14PM (#30531618) Attached to: DVD & Blu-ray Rental Scam

The Movie Studios are claiming that they are not making enough profit...

The fact rental chains are taking this leads me to think they are at the movie studios every whim.

Perhaps one day movies on free to air will have baked-in ads from the original movie studio and the good bits replaced with a white screen saying 'you must purchase the movie to see this content'

Submission + - DVD & Blu-ray Rental Scam (audioholics.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 22, 2009 @07:09PM

An anonymous reader writes: In efforts to better line their pockets, movie studios are now offering rental chains like Blockbuster & Netflix a special "rental" copy of new DVD and Blu-ray releases. What consumers may not realize is that these versions are stripped of extras, menu navigation features and BD-live access. They have even gone so far as to eliminate special cuts of the movie like the "R" rated version of Terminator Salvation. "We can only speculate it to be a matter of time before rental copies also exclude the high resolution surround audio soundtracks and 1080p picture quality." says Gene DellaSala, President of Audioholics.com. If you wan't the full experience and features of the latest releases, you're gonna have to buy the retail disc versions.

Comment Re:How it SHOULD work... (Score 1) 2

by William (Dthdealer) on Sunday December 20, 2009 @04:20AM (#30502764) Attached to: Verizon Defends Doubling of Early Termination Fee

1.Verizon picks an amount for the value of the phone (this would be the value that the phone would be sold for outright), call this number X.
2.Verizon then picks an amount for the upfront cost of the phone (whatever Verizon thinks they need to sell it at), call this number Y.
3.Take the number of months in the contract, call it Z.
4.Take the number of months remaining in the contract, call it W.
5.The ETF is then calculated as ((X - Y) / Z) * W.

This would be a great idea, but it means more people would be exiting the contract early, as it gets to its end. This would probably all add up to less income for the big companies. And then there is also the fuzzy of when exactly the customer 'terminated' their use of the contract. Was it when they used the service last? Was it the date the termination request was sent or the second they decided in their head to do so?

People don't look at the termination fees when they buy a new phone/deal - they look at how much it costs to enter and how much it costs to use ( and sometimes not even that ).

*insert falling off cliff sound effect*

Contract or deal companies using scare tactics to stop customers leaving. Hmm... I swear that's a 'do be evil'. It's just as bad as advertising a product which (once you have paid for it) comes with free bonus products. Wow! I can get free things by paying for them!

Although Verizon has showed their enthusiasm to earn more ( being one of possibly millions of companies to do so ), the solution really is to educate those who agree to the contracts. The companies have a right to 'compensation' because the customer quit the contract early ( as the company didn't receive the projected income ), but it still boils down to caveat emptor

Hollywood Sets $10 Billion Box Office Record 276

Posted by kdawson on Sunday December 13, 2009 @08:35PM from the crying-to-the-bank dept.

kamikazearun sends in a TorrentFreak analysis that begins "Claims by the MPAA that illegal downloads are killing the industry and causing billions in losses are once again being shredded. In 2009, the leading Hollywood studios made more films and generated more revenue than ever before, and for the first time in history the domestic box office grosses will surpass $10 billion. ... [N]either the ever-increasing piracy rates nor the global recession could prevent Hollywood having its best year ever in 2009. With an estimated $10.6 billion in consumer spending at the US and Canadian box office, the movie industry will break the 2008 record by nearly a billion dollars."

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