Another example of corporate disrespect

Yesterday morning, I thought I would let my daughter (2) watch “Shrek 2” Why is that DVD makers make it so time-consuming to play the blasted film? You can’t just slap in the DVD, press play and walk away. You have to wait while it plays some stupid THX introduction, and a few corporate logos, then an obscenely long trailer for a different film, several seconds of animation to display a menu so you can finally select Play. By this time I am bored with waiting, let alone my daughter who now wants to watch Beebies.

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.

Possibly related:

• DVDs
• My first proper digital camera
• Now I understand.