When VOIP and DRM hurt sales

Today I called Uniden to order some cordless phones for the shop. When the lady answered, I had a lot of trouble understanding her. Occasionally her voice would drop out or go fuzzy - like she was speaking underwater. I thought she was on a mobile phone.

But then I realised that she was on a landline. Or, more precisely, she was on a VOIP line. Probably the whole Uniden office was, considering that they sell VOIP phones.

I know that she was on a VOIP line. Other people, placing orders for regular cordless phones, might not know. They might think "I'm not ordering Uniden phones if they're going to have such bad call quality!". In any case, people ordering VOIP phones would also be wary of ordering from them.

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DRM makes my job difficult. The other day I was trying to sell a stereo to a lady. The stereo is excellent, from a well-respected name in audio, and often just "sells itself". It has a USB port.

Customer: So, I can plug my daughter's iPod into it and play the songs?

Me: Well, if we're talking about an actual Apple iPod, then not really. Apple makes the iPod so it scrambles the order of the songs, to discourage people from copying songs off eachother's iPods. You could play the songs, but they would be in the wrong order.

Customer: Oh, alright. Well, as long as she can play them, I guess that's okay. We've bought some songs from iTunes that she'll want to listen to on here.

Me: Actually, that's going to be a problem. Songs from the iTunes Music Store have encryption in them that prevents you from making copies. The stereos with USB ports can't decrypt the songs, because Apple doesn't give <the stereo manufacturer> the password.

Customer: I don't understand. <I explain again in different words>

Customer: That's not very good! How would I play those songs that we've bought?

Me: You'll have to burn them to CD, and then re-import them back into your computer.

Customer: How do I do that? Could you write it down for me? <I do.>

Customer: I'll have to check with my daughter whether this will be any use to her.

She did eventually come back and buy the stereo, but I have pity for them - having their songs playing in random order and having to burn and re-rip all the songs they've "bought" (bought a license to listen to). I wonder whether, by now, they're realized that their old unbranded MP3 player is actually superior to the iPod?

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For the last couple of weeks I've been watching Doctor Who on the ABC. The revived edition of the show, with Christopher Eccleston. It's so refreshing to see a classic show revived and actually being canon with the original, without having everything insultingly "reimagined" ala Battlestar Galactica and Bionic Woman, being "dark" and "gritty drama" where only the character names are retained and everything else is different. The new Battlestar Galactica is shit science-fiction and shit TV, where the in-flight scenes actually somehow look more fake than the 1979 original show where they reused the same 9 shots over and over. At least the makers of the 1979 TV show... heck, the makers of the awful Galactica 1980, could comprehend that not every character has to have some huge character flaw that does nothing except grind gears against everything else in the show.

But I'm digressing.

The new Doctor Who is a continuation, keeping with the feel of the original, the same overarching plot, the same enemies, and even the same sense of humour. I bought two of the DVDs from the first new series and I watched the first one last night; this made me fall head-over-heels in love with the show, and I can't wait for UKTV's Series 3 marathon this weekend with the 10th Doctor.

It's funny. I originally started watching Stargate SG1 mostly because a girl I was interested in watched it. I found out that another girl I like watches Doctor Who, so I started watching it.

Oh, I had already been interested in those two shows anyway, but in both cases this gave me the spark I needed to make the effort to watch it.

If I'm honest, for a while I watched Smallville for the same reasons; a THIRD girl; but I stopped watching it because I stopped liking her and I hated the show :-)   Did I mention that I hate the revisionist bullshit of Battlestar Galactica? Let's hope the dickhead behind that show is nowhere near the set or script of the new Star Trek "original series" movie.