UEFA’s Useless DRM Videos

UEFA video service

I have a yearly subscription to UEFA (Union of European Football Associations) video site, and this subscription is supposed to entitle me to see the high lights of the matches and even the matches once their done. The problem that if I had know I wouldn’t have subscribed in the first place is that it uses DRM technology (Digital Rights Management) to encrypt the videos .. The thing that requires me to be connected to the internet and login every time I need to watch a video that I’ve already paid for and I’ve already downloaded .. That’s not the worst part .. What really pisses me off is their implementation of this service .. since more than 75% of the time I get the message “User has too many simultaneous connections” Whenever I want to view a video and I won’t be allowed to see it !!

Error MEssage

The HD videos are around 260 MB on average, and my DSL is not that fast, so I download them using a download manager, and then I TRY to watch them, I can watch the first one OK but when I try to view the second one this message starts to show and I have to wait for a long time in order to be able to see the other videos ( I got this message, wrote this whole post and found and uploaded the pictures yet the ‘User has too many simultaneous connections’ still shows ! )

I really think that these companies are really paranoid about their content, and they are making their paying customers suffer and not even think about renewing their services just because they don’t want their content to be pirated and copied while anything that is shown on the screen can be recorded and their content is already being copied anyway so they are just making hard for people to purchase use their services and making their customers unsatisfied.

MrMMM on April 19th 2007 in Technology

One Response to “UEFA’s Useless DRM Videos”

  1. Bashar responded on 20 Apr 2007 at 11:54 am #

    Well, I’m glad I didn’t follow you blindly on that one. I am a guy who respects copyrights you know me. But sometimes, as you said, you pay the price. When I copied my soundtrack content to my PC it asked me if I want to enable DRM on those soundtracks. So I said (Naively YES, What the heck?). When I had to restore my computer, all the soundtrack files didn’t work. Why? Because they were under DRM protection. Luckily I still have the original CDs to copy them again, except this time, without DRM.

    Content owners: You can protect your content, but not on the account of paying customers.

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