I don’t know exactly when it was added, but WordPress.com finally has a way to export your media uploads! When I moved off of WordPress.com, a couple of years ago, the only way to “get” your media was to export your posts, and your new site would download the files as the posts that used them were imported. This was obviously very error-prone, wouldn’t work for media not used in posts, and spectacularly failed to work for me — leaving a great deal of my uploaded media stranded on the WordPress servers. With this new export option I’ve just downloaded 1.5GB of media from two sites I had hosted on the service, so I might finally be able to reconstruct several old posts. Happy days!
Tonight I was hoping to watch Dredd, and The Amazing Spider-Man, as I’ve got a free Friday night, and for some reason, none of my other choices appealed to me… Explaining more would be a tangent, so lets continue with the story.
I was at the supermarket, and both films were on offer (DVD versions). I thought about picking them up, but thought “no, I’ll only watch them once, so having the DVD is needless clutter.” I figured I’d look on Netflix, or as a fall-back, rent on iTunes.
Neither film is available on Netflix, which sucks a bit, but never mind, let’s check iTunes… Neither film is available to rent1, so I’d have to buy… But the cost of Dredd is twice what the DVD would’ve cost, and The Amazing Spider-Man is almost an amazing three times the price! That to me seems like a bit of a rip-off.
So if I want to watch those movies at a wallet-friendly price I need to either a) go back to the store and buy 2 discs I don’t want, or b) pirate them. Neither option is appealing, so I’m unlikely to be watching these films like I’d hoped to.
It’s 2013, and we’re heading to a world where physical media is on its way out. So why is digital still so bleedin’ frustrating?
- as an aside, finding films to rent through the iPad version of the iTunes Store really, really, sucks! ↩