ParisLemon

"I Get Frustrated."

Actor/comedian Aziz Ansari shares my Games of Thrones pain. As he tells GQ:

The way people release media is so far behind the way people actually consume it. There’s so much frustration. I mean, I get frustrated. I want to watch Game of Thrones. I’d love to see it before it comes back. Is it on iTunes? Do I watch it on HBO On Demand? What’s going on? What do I do? I bought the DVD, but I can’t watch it on my iPad?

And:

This is $5, and you have a video file that you can watch anywhere. I think people like the simplicity. Many surveys have people who stream TV shows or steal content saying that if it was available at a fair price and in a convenient form, they wouldn’t steal. And I believe that. Let’s say you hear that show Homeland is great, and you don’t have Showtime. You want to buy it. You go to Amazon, it’s not there. You go to Netflix, it’s not there. OK, fuck it, you’re just going to steal it from a torrent. But if you saw that it was $10, you could get all the episodes and watch it on anything, wouldn’t you do that? If you knew that the quality was proper and everything?

A-fucking-men.

And unlike me, Ansari is in a position to do something about it on his end. He has put his comedy special online Louis C.K.-style.

For $5, you buy it, you own it, you can watch it anywhere. Support sanity.

[thanks Eric]

Louis CK: Live at the Beacon Theater

12 days, 1 million dollars.

And Louis C.K. details exactly what he’s going to do with the money. Most of it will go to charity with good chunks going to his staff and to pay back the costs of the production. As for his cut:

That leaves me with 220k for myself. Some of that will pay my rent and will care for my childen. The rest I will do terrible, horrible things with and none of that is any of your business. In any case, to me, 220k is enough out of a million.

And:

The thing is still on sale. I hope folks keep buying it. If I make another million, I’ll give more of it away. I’ll let you know when that happens because I like you getting to know what happened to your 5 dollars and bringing awareness to the bla bla bla.

So damn refreshing. And awesome that his experiment worked. All payments were done online through PayPal — even better:

No DRM, no regional restrictions, no crap. You can download this file, play it as much as you like, burn it to a DVD, whatever.