"We used to be friends."

Film When I backed the Veronica Mars project, I was weary and cautious and in the UK so I chipped in $5 so as to feel like I was part of the epic sweep of the thing without actually spending that much money. I'm poor too. But I also knew I'd end up supporting it anyway through buying a blu-ray at the other end, and I still will. There are streaming and download options, but like recently discovered Doctor Who, I'd like to only pay once for a thing and to actually have a thing in my hand at the end of the process.

All of which said, I can understand the frustration of fans, who having spend the $35 so they could have a digital download on the day of release found themselves stuck with technology everyone hates when people like me and those who didn't have anything to do with funding the project had a choice as to how they watched it. Well, from those of us waiting for the shiny-disc release because unlike "A Field In England" which appeared on dvd at the same time as everywhere else, we're going to have to wait a little bit longer.

Liz Shannon Miller at GigOm (capital O? Small o?) has offered a thorough description of the baroque process she ended up going through in order to get to and enjoy the content. The most frustrating moment is when, having managed to register and log-in to all of these services she might never use again, she then tries to watch the thing on her television but is met with a “licensing and studio restrictions” error, even though this is something she's paid for already, demonstrating why I'm waiting for a physical.  As the first commenter under the article notes aptly: "Only the movie industry could ask you to fund a movie and then treat you like a criminal, multiple times, for doing so."

Any-sigh-way, Warner Bros having noticed that the PR surrounding the release of the film had turned from "This is good" to "Fans who paid for Veronica Mars are having difficulty watching it" are offering refunds. But it's still an example of how  what seems like a perfectly reasonable way of going about things from a consumer point of view, making this thing available on as many of the services we use as possible, becomes dust when faced with the mechanisms of a corporation and its in house distribution systems.