RE: Is the blockchain the movie hero we need?
The bottom line is that right now, digital ownership sucks, and we don't own anything.
This, right here, is why I hate buying the digital version of anything. At best, we can only rent most digital things because of the walled gardens and DRM. But it is (slowly) getting better.
Thanks to places like humble bundle, we can find lots some DRM-free books. No starch press and others are offering DRM-free ebooks for purchase in friendly, portable formats.
MP3s and other audio formats are usually not locked down (apple still do there own encrypted audio format?) but, in addition, there are services like with amazon where when you buy a CD, you can immediately access the mp3 titles from the same disk.
I made the mistake of "buying" some digital movies from Amazon when the service first came out. Maybe some day they'll let me download them and watch them as easily as their music store. For now, I still just buy DVDs and rip those to portable formats, because it's easier than getting the app to work on unsupported devices.
Vevue sounds interesting, but I can't tell if the movies are on the block, or if it's just a token to be able to go watch it from someone else hosting the video, in which case, that someone else could go out of business and then the permanence of the block chain doesn't buy you any permanence of media. Also, the login is centralized, the user doesn't hold their own keys, and anyone that can snatch a cell phone can gain access to your account... still interesting, though.
I hadn't yet looked into it, as I'm sure the number of movies is extremely limited. I had considered buying the movie though, just to support them. Perhaps after crypto recovers a bit. Perhaps not if it's just a token to watch it online. Having a linux computer, such services don't always work exactly right with my distro.
D-Live didn't work for a long ass time, and D-Tube stopped working for me for a while.
Even as walled gardens, it doesn't necessarily have to be that bad, if the companies chose to be a little more open. I spent a ton of time rating movies back in the day on Netflix, and then they just dropped all the ratings to just thumbs up or down. That was my data. I couldn't download it or anything though. If these companies allowed any app developer to access their data, with the user's permission, and watch a movie with any app capable of viewing a supported format, and allowed you to verify that you own something...
Basically, the problem is that they're closed off and greedy. There are small changes that are happening, but they're really slow going. Maybe in a few years, we'll be able to access our ratings on a few services. With a miracle, maybe we'll be able to watch the movies we own across different apps. I think it's all going to take quite some time. There's probably some out there that are DRM free downloads for at least some movies. Still probably better to host your own for the time being.