Speaking of QuickTime, specifically Paramount’s new trailer for Star Trek: Nemesis, why exactly can’t you save the full screen version? It’s bad enough that Apple makes you fork over $29.99 just for the privilege of being able to save a file, but then we can only save “certain” files. Yeah, I know QuickTime Pro gives you more stuff than that, but most people just want to be able to save movies, and could care less about the rest of the included features. What gives? Why exactly does Paramount not want people to be able to save the full screen version of the trailer, but will let them save the smaller versions of the trailer. Are they afraid that people might distribute the trailer to others on the net and give the movie too much publicity? Is that it Paramount? After all, trailers are really just advertisements for upcoming movies, and God forbid that advertisement got seen by too many people. Why exactly wouldn’t Paramount want the trailer distributed around the net? It’s cheap free publicity. Why do they want to send everyone to the Apple site to download the trailer? It’s not like bandwidth is free. If the trailer were being traded on services like Kazaa it would not only reach a larger audience, but would save Paramount a few bucks in bandwidth costs. I’ll tell you why. Control. Hollywood is so hell bent on not losing control of their content that they have lost sight of the bigger picture. Sorry to break this to you Paramount, but people trading your movie trailer is not going to automatically lead to rampant file trading of the whole movie. But it might actually get more butts into theaters when the movie is finally released. Oh, and by the way, when someone has just forked over $29.99 for QuickTime Pro and they realize out of 20 trailers that they try to watch, only one won’t let them save the file, they tend to get a little annoyed at the studio that released that trailer. I tried to download and save the full screen version of Star Trek: Nemesis because I was looking forward to the movie coming out. Had I been able to easily save the trailer to watch again, it may have even built up my anticipation for the film. But as it is, I am left with a sour taste in my mouth. While my butt may very well be sitting in a theater on Star Trek’s opening weekend, it is far less certain that the theater containing me and my butt will be showing Star Trek. Good one Paramount.

¶ 10/01/2002 05:58:00 PM

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