I guess my biggest problem with net video is still that I have to watch it on my computer. Which is also my biggest problem with MP3. I really wish I could play my MP3 in the car. I also wish I had my computer set up in the lounge room so I could watch downloaded video in comfort on a big screen (which I suppose isn't that hard to do and not that expensive. Hell, my DVD player plays VCD and I have software to convert video to high quality VCD... too much effort for nothing?)
Back to music. I really wish there was a central depositry of every piece of music ever made and recorded. Like everything2 but for music. Bootleg tapes, official recordings, leaked demos.. everything by every artist ever (stick a price on them, I don't care, I just want it all there and available).
We could at least start with one artist and start from there. Something like Powderfinger fan site The Odyssey but with MP3s. Or the cv.org/database but for every band.
I think I'm going to be a music historian when I'm old and retired.
I have a lot of tapes that only I have. They're crap quality mostly but some are great. I can't bare to see them rot and die. I'm converting some to CDr, some to MP3 but the CDs will rot, my harddisk will crash eventually. I know there are fans of Regurgitator who'd love to hear a crappy analog tape of a gig they did in 1996 but they probably never will....
And on that... with such a repositry of music the band could jump in and replace crap quality MP3s with any shows they may have recorded...
I've said it before but I really hope that very soon some sort of technology comes along that will allow anyone to put their music up online to sell and that artists start using it to sell their live gigs, demos and b-sides. The cost will be set by the artist and will be a minimum to cover bandwidth and server space charges. Maybe a yearly fee to keep the music available?
But hang on... MP3.com and MP3.com.au already allow anyone to put their music online, with links to purchase CDs. I guess it's a mindset thing. I want every Triple J Live At The Wireless ever made. Triple J can't sell them because they don't own the rights. The artists won't sell them because it would cost too much to put the songs out on CD. So put them online to sell? If it cost nearly nothing it would be worth doing? Only if they made a profit right? If it cost absolutely nothing and the website technology recieved a percentage? WOuldn't happen, the website would start rejecting bad music they thought wouldn't sell. Prices would be drivin up to a point so that the good selling stuff paid for the stuff that sat on disks taking up space... hey starting to sound like the recording industry.
Of course this sort of thing would already be happening with projects such as the internet archive and libraries if copyrights would just expire like they're supposed to. Hell, shouldn't libraries be funded to back catalogue all this stuff?