Dear Movie Industry,

I love movies. I go to the cinema nearly every week, buy and watch lots of DVDs and occasionally catch a flick on TV. I also love high definition video, and now that the ‘format war’ is finally settled I’m looking into buying a Blu-Ray disc player. My problem is however that I own hundreds of movies on ’standard resolution’ DVDs. I’m afraid these will look poor by comparison, and will eventually have to be replaced.
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As an old school web designer, I consider myself to have a firm grasp of what pixels are all about. Back in the early 1990’s I used to optimize the hell out of tiny graphics, manually editing colour palettes and using things like Floyd-Steinberg dithering. Maybe this is why I don’t understand the hype about upscaling DVD players like this one.
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OK, i admit it. I’m probably the only person bothered by this. In the age of broadband where mobile phones browse the web at high speed, I’m probably a dinosaur for trying to keep movie file sizes down. But still. There still are people out there who browse the web at 56 kilobits per second, waiting for minutes while a web page full of graphics is transferred to their computer by two analog modems shouting bits at each other.

That’s one reason why I decided to see if re-writing my WP-Cumulus Flash movie in Actionscript 3 would yield a smaller file. Unfortunately, the outcome was not all I had hoped it to be.
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Ziggo is a new cable company here in The Netherlands, that was formed when three major television providers (including mine) recently merged. They introduced their new philosophy in what is probably the worst-recieved TV commercial of the year, so they rubbed me the wrong way even before I had to contact their support desk today. If it wasn’t already clear, this is going to be one of my ‘incompetent companies’ posts…
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