huh? free stuff is bad for sl?

Excellent!

i don't think most people agree with the premise in the first place, so they don't is ok or not ok.

maybe free defines the low-end market.

It's a fair cop, Stoneself. I omitted another whole alternative, didn't I ? Can I plead stupidity, not malice ?

Two words, in summary: Copyright, Bandwidth.




I learned to script while writing a video player. After I did that, I read the forums and found CSF's player. Rather than get discouraged, I thought "okay, this is what's available free. So how can I make mine better?" I'll agree with you on the content problem.


Ah, my favourite "animated-texture porno player"

I don't see pay-per-view content being offered anytime in the near future. While home-user broadband is affordable, picking up enough bandwidth to host a number of 256kbps dedicated SL streams doesn't appear to be a viable business model (yet).

Google Video may change that, but it's still in perpetual beta.



At L$999, my players have sold well with plenty of happy customers. The CSF player is a basic player. A good scripter can write an identical one in under an hour; it's just a frontend to the llParcelMediaCommandList functions, which aren't that hard to use.

So the bar's been set with the freebie. If you're going to make something better, that's your basic template. I added auto-syncing to my players, which solved the problem of others wanting to watch a movie after it's already started, or if someone crashes and wants to relog and watch a video that's already playing. That was my first improvement.

The second was content. I bundled close to 350 streaming public domain movies from archive.org. 350 jumped to 3000 streams. Alas, I got a low-blow attack from a competing business for "stealing archive.org's bandwidth" () and took the players off the market. I'm still waiting for a response. Until then, no Captain TVs are for sale.

So at the heart of the video market:
a) scripting TVs is simple -- really.
b) the video market is all about content.
c) hosting movies will be expensive, growing as you sell more TVs.
d) "pay-per-view" is likely to cost more than one will make.

Since I won't touch the copyright infringement or pr0n video areas, I'm sticking to public domain content. I'm just waiting for bandwidth to become more affordable or an "okay" from archive.org. Until then, you won't see my players on the market.

Freebies raise the bar a notch. If I released my player for free, it'd hike the bar up another notch. Likewise, if I release my stream list for free (which is probably going to happen), it raises the content bar another notch. TV producers just have to keep innovating.

It's just business.

Yes of course. But all the notecard handling, dialog, checking stuff etc is a complicated drag for those who haven't got the modules ready, because they've haven't done them before. Yes, if you've done similar stuff before it might be a quick and easy assembly job.

I guess some sales success is possible, to residents who are sufficiently ill informed that they don't know that the free one exists. But if you had a free one in your shop, and they saw it too, which would they choose?

The free content is a figment. Anyone (sadly) can take yours, Captain, with simple cut-and-paste, provided they buy one copy from you first. Then paste it into the freebie. Then generously give the enhanced notecard free to others. Or just go to archive.org themselves. Though how you choose which you want from 3000, or even 300, I just don't know.

And the free stuff is 90% crap anyway, isn't it? I did exactly what I just described, for my own use, because the free script was better than yours. But I don't now watch it because almost ALL the free content is useless, and anyway (as I just said) there is no way of choosing what you want. Just a sequential list to go through in order. With more than 300 ???

We need committed people, making money from the systems, and motivated to drive on to a solution for the content problem. Where are they? Didn't someone actually buy the bandwidth to start, then fizzle out ? The guy who volunteered to host Chip's new clothing templates ? Where did that plan go ?

Where are the people making in-world video magazines? Tours of best waterfalls? Exposure of worst griefing towers? How-to building videos ? Interviews with those involved in newsworthy in-world events?

None of this will come about until a good pay-as-you-go or subscription TV is out there.

I could say more about what is needed, but who knows, I might get involved in doing it yet, in which case shhhh....

Learn-as-you go is what I did. Then again, I find scripting fun, so it wasn't a big deal.


Indeed, one can. Except the notecard is no-mod/no-copy, which doesn't show anything when you open it up. Of course, you *could* write a quick script to run through every line in the notecard and llSay it, then copy the log, and paste it into a notecard. If you do that, you earn a cookie and can probably write a decent video script to boot.

In many cases, CSF's free media script works just fine for most folks. It fills a need for a basic media player. In a related note, I use the basic free clothes for my avatar. I'd never think of buying a L$150 pair of pants or a jacket, but others will. Free things can be good, for sure. Personally, I think 90% of new films are crap, and I tend to prefer the old PD ones, but that's my opinion. We all have different tastes in art.

I have the same issue with cable TV. There's still no way to choose what I want to watch, just a list of 500 channels. TiVo came along and changed all that.

However, with the tools that we have right now for input/output in-world, there's not much that I can work with. Sadly, SL is not a medium suitable for searching and exploring a large set of data. Databases are.

I'm sure someone can whip up a nifty XML-RPC/Email based media player that uses a web interface to search and browse streams, and will begin playing on your TV in-world when you click the play button on the web.

There's an idea. Run with it

so like, yah.

Where is the "This poll makes NO sense." selection?

Some people make things for the fun of doing them. The operating system that Second Life runs on wouldn't exist if that wasn't true.

* Pie.

eeeeew old Prokofy-bait threads, bad Kris!

Did the in-world video thing fall flat because people couldn't sell TVs, or because people couldn't sell videos on the free TV?

If it's the former situation, it was doomed anyway.

If it's the latter situation, create a high quality TV that can play commercial videos when you drop Lindens in it, or free videos when you don't, and give it away.

It works for Microsoft and Apple. That's what Windows Media Player and iTunes basically are, for music. It used to be that the free payers were better than WMP 2.0, but I don't think that's true for WMP 10.0... and most people still need these players even if they are using open source players when they want to play commercial music.

That's why the GPL is better than the old "no commercial use" licenses, and there's open source licenses even more open than that.

I'd have done a shitload more, but it was about the only one that didn't get locked.

I don't have a store, I don't charge for my scripts, I just give them to people and let them pass them on. I get other scripts, now and then, the same way... and I suspect a lot of the scripts in freebie boxes came from the same source.

The freebie store owner may be motivated by that, but he's usually not the maker of most of the freebies.

You know, 6 months later and he still stands by that view that there's a group of people who hate selling things and want everything to be free that are the FIC.

He should atleast get a technicolour view

This is only true if the market is a zero-sum game, where there is no mechanism for new kinds of products to be developed and so forcing people to buy inferior products is a lesser evil. This attitude is closer to that of the soviet so-called communists than to any real advocate of the free-enterprise system, and if it were true personal computers capable of running something like Second Life would still be science fiction.

I've actually checked out a freebie creator's store on multiple occasions because I was impressed with a free object. Interestingly, I rarely bother to look at such things when they're posed IN the store. Which means when I run across a free item I like (usually at a free item 'dumping ground' like the Free Bazaar), I'll actually take the time to look up the person and scour their "picks" for their personal store!

While I can't say what the long term impact of free items on SL is... I know freebies ended up putting a few more $L in the pockets of store owners I've run across.

ok, heres the breakdown

money = power
power < pie
pie == money
pie = pie
PIE FOR ALL = FREE STUFF FOR ALL

but yeah, i agree that free stuff is about as useful as spam email

Speaking as someone who had to quit accepting mail from entire COUNTRIES because he couldn't afford the bandwidth surcharges for all the spam he was getting... that's just wrong.

Let me quote myself. Yes you did.

Everything I wear is free except for my undies. Why can't someone make good free panties by golly?

I'm paying for spam email when you can get it for free?