Stardate 20011120.0652 (On Screen): Some software businesses are fundmentally non-viable because they're based on chain-letter concepts. This article describes one: it's a program which you buy for $50 which you run on your computer which has a DVD drive. If you're concerned about excessive violence or nudity or profanity in a movie for your children, you play it on your computer with this program, and it's modified visually and aurally on the fly to change it. Bad words are muffled, and the graphics are modified (to cover naked breasts, for instance). Obviously this can't be done algorithmically (not on a home computer with a $50 program, anyway) and indeed what you do is to go to their web site and download a file for each DVD which contains all the instructions needed for the program to perform its bowdlerization. But preparation of those files isn't going to be easy, and the value of this program is that they'll continue to create new ones as new movies come out. But since they give those files away for free, then who pays to make them?
And that's why this is unsustainable; money from new sales of the program is used to create these data files which are then available for free to all users of the program. So this can only continue as long as more and more people buy the program, because existing users don't represent a continuing revenue source for the company. There may well be quite a lot of demand for it (sigh) but the market isn't infinite, and when it saturates then the whole business model collapses. Which means that there are really only three ultimate possibilities here: the company will die and new datafiles will no longer become available, or they'll try to introduce new versions of the program and get repeat sales, or they'll start charging for the data files. (discuss)
Kate Winslet was topless in Titanic? Why doesn't anybody tell me these things? (Who's Kate Winslet?)
