Solid Block of Ise

Has anyone seen a movie called “Interstate 60″ produced in 2002, featuring among other people Gary Oldman, Christopher Lloyd and James Marsden? If you haven’t, then I strongly recommend finding it and watching it. For some reason it never got a big marketing campaign behind it, but it’s a real gem of a film.

There might be some minor spoilers down below, in case

Either way, there’s this excellent supporting character that shows up at one point in the film, name of Bob Cody. Played brilliantly by Chris Cooper, this character will almost always stay in my mind. He’s excellent, being a man who “says what he does and does what he says”. Essentially he’s a free-roaming cynic, and one of his pastimes is listening to the radio and loudly debunking what’s said on the same.

Example:

Woman on radio: The choice is clear. The Arion 620, the American-made car for the American driver.
Bob Cody: That’s a lie. The Arion engines are made in Japan.
Man on radio: Kill Signal, the movie everyone’s talking about, from Weber Films.
Bob Cody: [laughs] That’s another lie. We’re not talking about it.
Another man on radio: We’re the U.S. post office, and we care.
Bob Cody: Oh! That’s the biggest whopper of all.

Often I hear a Bob Cody inside of me. This is especially true whenever I see a commercial, and it’s unusual that I can contain my sarcasm about commercials and their claims. My friends and family know this well.

And all this yapping brings me to the point of this entry. There’s a company in Sweden called Viasat. The history behind the company is somewhat convoluted, essentially consisting of several different companies in various genres of business merging together over a period of some fifteen years. These days Viasat is one of the largest suppliers of satellite-television, but also maintains holdings in several of the major swedish TV-channels, as well as being the producer of the TV1000-network, one of the major premium movie-networks in Sweden. Essentially TV1000 is a swedish counterpart to HBO, but without the original productions. They broadcast movies and have no commercials, instead you subscribe to the service.

Viasat-channels are also broadcast via cable, in my case through Comhem which is probably the largest cable-TV supplier in Sweden. Me and Ann-Sofie pay for TV1000 since it’s a good way to keep track of movies, as well as being a good source for bored movie-watching in the middle of the night.

Whatever.

Viasat launched a service called Viasat On Demand a few months ago. I really haven’t checked it out until a few hours ago when I went to their homepage. Essentially it’s a video-on-demand service, you can rent movies over the internet and watch them. Nothing new here, it’s all been done before. The reason for my curiosity was that since me and Ann-Sofie already subscribe to TV1000 I was wondering if we could get a free account at this webservice. It had been implied through the commercials, so I got to wondering.

Those thoughts came to an abrupt halt when I saw the technical requirements. Translated from Swedish they are:

* PC with Windows XP or better.
* Internet Explorer 6 or better.
* Flash Player 8 or better.
* Windows Media Player 10 or better.
* A minimum of 1mbit/s broadband connection. 2mbit/s recommended.
* An updated WMP with individualization for DRM-encryption.
* The clock on your computer may not deviate more than 15 minutes from the clock on our servers.
* You must allow cookies.

This means if you’re running anything except 100% Microsoft-products or Microsoft OS’s you’re shit out of luck. It’s absolutely pathetic in my opinion. Why not just put a slogan on the front page saying “Screw you if you’re not a braindead lemming”?

The irony is even more obvious considering that Viasat On Demands slogan translates to “Entertainment On Your Conditions”. When I read this I heard Bob Cody inside of me shouting:

“Liars! That’s not entertainment on my conditions!”

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Sweden License.