During my Hiatus from this blog I wasn’t just sitting around doing nothing, mostly I was but not only sitting around doing nothing. In fact I was sitting around tinkering with stuff like Raspberry Pi and the fantastic Retropie emulation system along with learning a little more about Kodi, the media player with some dodgy 3rd party addons.
Lets start with RetroPie, which for those not in the know is a complete emulation system for the Raspberry Pi computer, it includes a front end and the emulators all configured to run on the Pi, and once installed and started just needs a controller configuring to start playing all those retro gaming goodies on your TV. That is if you have the roms to play anyway, due to the copyright issues the RetroPie image comes with no roms loaded, so you just add your own. It’s sweet and as time goes on more and more goodies are being added like the beautiful Attract Mode and more and more themes for the original Emulation Station front end.
Whilst playing with RetroPie, I was reminded of the Kodi media player (previously XBMC which I had used on a modded original Xbox many moons ago). Once I started looking into it, I discovered the myriad of plugins (or addons) and complete builds available for Kodi, and experimented to see what could be found. What can be found on Kodi is just about everything ever released on TV, Cinema or any music media you care to mention. I found out a lot of people are using it to replace all the costly TV services such as Sky, NowTV, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video etc. And this is where I became torn.
Whilst it would be great to have free TV channels, free movies etc. on demand any time, the problem as I see it is that somehow all that content has to be paid for to be made. If everybody is watching it all for free where is the money coming from for great new content to be made?
This to me is why it is wrong to rely on all those 3rd party addons to watch everything for free, actors, producers, key grips, writers and all the other people involved in making tv or films need to be paid or the entertainment stops.
BUT, it is a big but as you can see I typed in capitals so it must be right?
Why do so many people want to stop paying for the tv and movies they love? Is it because they are freeloading criminals as the lawyers for the big tv and movie companies would have us believe or is it because of corporate greed?
I go with corporate greed, if we look at the history of the internet we see the same thing happening now bandwidth is available which can stream movies in high resolutions as we did when MP3 made its appearance and all the music industry were trying to shut down sites like Napster etc. It is because they don’t move forward to meet their consumers, and still try to charge the same for a movie download as they do for a DVD, when everyone knows that it costs next to nothing to host a movie online for streaming or downloading (if it was expensive then the illegal websites wouldn’t be able to offer them for free).
My opinion is that the corporations trying to make their consumers look like outlaws for illegally downloading movies should maybe look at making them more easily available at a reasonable price. I know they will argue they have bills to pay, but surely it would make sense to get more people paying than spending the money you do get chasing everyone who doesn’t through courts. You will never stop the hard core of people who are freeloaders, but most people are willing to pay but they also have bills to pay and look for a cheaper alternative.
For anyone still reading, yes I do pay for movies, I pay a Sky subscription for TV, Netflix monthly, Amazon Prime for free deliveries as well as the Grand Tour and I use NowTV for movies and some of the TV channels rather than pay the extra for Sky. I feel it is only right to support an industry which brings us our entertainment.
