Monday, October 7, 2002

My wife and I went to Circuit City yesterday to pick up some random DVDs as gifts for various family members. No particular reason to go to CC over any other store-- there are certainly stores with better selections-- it simply happened to be conveniently in between where we were and Home Depot (our original destination). It amazes me that there are many relatively new release films on DVD for somewhere between $10 and $22. That's pretty cheap considering that you get the full length film along with a bunch of extras. $22 is cheaper than two people going to a movie theater ($19 or so in tickets + another $5 to $10 in popcorn / drink / candy costs). Back to CC... just two aisles over, I could pay $15-$19 for just the soundtrack for those same movies. This doesn't take into account that the soundtrack CD very likely contains badly edited (i.e. short and mangled) versions of the songs combined with annoying little snippets of dialogue from the film. Something seems to be horribly wrong with this picture. If the RIAA wants a clue as to why CD sales slipping, maybe they should visit their local Best Buy / Circuit City / The Whiz (who just refocused all media sales around DVDs) and do the same kind of comparison shopping. In terms of return on investment (as if there is any "investment" in buying a DVD or CD), the average consumer is very likely going to view dropping $15 on, say, the Harry Potter DVD as a better use of their money than, say, $18 on the latest No Doubt CD. (Personally, I don't -- I find music to be a much more "lasting" investment than a DVD. I can listen to an album several orders of magnitude more often than I can could watch a DVD. But I have learned that my media consumption habits are far from the average.) In any case-- the RIAA really needs to bring their product's price inline with the rest of the market. I would be willing to bet that doing so would lead to much greater profit than their current pricing model. 5:03:26 PM  pontificate

Accessorizer -- useful ObjC Dev Tool A new version of Accessorizer came out today. It is a very useful little app that, given a variable declaration, generates the various random Obj-C idioms that developers have to create over and over and over again when building Cocoa/ObjC apps. Very useful. The link will take you to the VersionTracker entry. The home page is currently located at mac.com. 4:49:29 PM  pontificate