Many women find Daniel Craig rather tasty.

Mothers tend to be female.

So, Sony Pictures are releasing Casino Royale on Monday.

Clever.

The present and future of post production business and technology » When a good format “wins” for all the wrong reasons

Although I’m definitely in the group of people that sees Blu-ray as the undoubtedly superior technology of the two high density optical disc competitors, and should be happy that the tide seems to be turning toward Blu-ray ‘winning’ the war before a shot is fired or product released, it seems the reason Paramount and Warner Bros ‘defected’ to Blu-ray was because of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) supported in that format is much more restrictive than for HD DVD.

Both formats support Advanced Access Content System (AACS) as the primary DRM and Blu-ray has two additional DRM control agents included. However the point of difference, and the reason Bill Gates said Blu-ray was ‘anti consumer’ is because HD DVD mandates that all discs support Managed Copy, while Blu-ray leaves the option to activate Managed Copy to individual disc authors “

Why can I not just watch the bloody things I’ve paid for on whatever machine I want in whatever country I happen to be in at the time?

It’s my time, my DVD player and my DVD. I possess some DVDs where I can’t even fast forward through the junk and am expected to read copyright information in English (for the UK); Swedish; Bulgarian; English (for Australia); French (for France); English (for New Zealand); Estonian; French (for Switzerland)…

I can’t help wondering whether this sort of corporate disrespect for customers just encourages piracy. After all, if I were to make a copy of this DVD for someone then I would certainly not oblige them to watch anything. And if I knew anyone who could make copies of DVDs then I would be asking them to create user-friendly versions of some of mine.

Sadly, we never really watched as many of the films as we wanted since too many of the films began just as we were going to bed. There are only so many times that a person can watch The Quick and the Dead before beginning to question whether they are reaping the full benefit of their subscription.

Since the beginning of this year, we have been members of the LoveFilm online DVD rental service. We find this vastly better than both FilmFour, since we can watch a DVD pretty much whenever we want and don’t face the irritation of finding, as is typical with a certain national chain of video shops, that the film we want is not available, but we could rent as many as fifty copies of There’s Something About Mary.

LoveFilm’s range is truly immense— I’ve yet to find a DVD that has been released and is not in their range. I actually suspect that, were I to try to rent such a thing, they would send someone down to the shops to buy it for me. On average, the DVD arrives within two working days of us posting the previous disc. We have watched more good films this year than in our previous six as FilmFour subscribers (ten as members of Blockbuster). We are more willing to take a risk with a film this way: for instance, we recently watched the first part of Heimat: a tremendous German-language programme that we would never have been able to rent locally and wouldn’t consider buying just on the off-chance that all the reviews were right. Tonight, we shall be mostly watching the final episodes of Krzystof Kieslowski’s Dekalog.