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Miramax To Distribute Films Over Net?
cinchel wrote to us with a story talking about Miramax's latest move. They've partnered with Sightsound.com to allow pay-per-view downloading of 12 films. They haven't yet decided which films, but this is a cool step in the right direction for film distribution. Now if they can just work out some of those broadband issues *sigh*.
a nominal fee if "Clerks" (the best thing to come out of Miramax IMHO) was available on the 'net to me on demand.
Uh-huh.
I'm not really impressed by our 'friends' at sightsound.com. On the one hand, designing a site that "needs" Java, IE5, Microsoft Media Player, Shockwave Flash, etc., etc. is pretty mean, and they don't give you any feedback if those aren't present. (You need Java to find out that you need IE5, etc., etc.)
:)
However, they did give me a reason to test out IE5 for UNIX again, and it's okay. It looks significantly better than the old IE4 for UNIX, (it loaded for me, maybe that's because I'm running on an older SPARC, or maybe they finally fixed some of those version-specific issues they had.) but it doesn't support any plug-ins, or no one has written any. (same thing?) Oh, and they're using Sun's JVM on Solaris. I got a kick out of that.
Anyhow, yet again, I'd love to live in a world where web sites really were cross-platform, or companies would bite the bullet, and develop apps properly. It looks like IE5 for UNIX should work great as long as (a) you have enough RAM for it, and (b) you don't plan on doing anything else.
If Microsoft would release a decent version of IE5 for Linux, they could really capture some market share where it matters, or if the Wine project develops to the point where IE5 runs decently, (the installer too, please...) they might get some converts anyhow. But as it stands, I'm not too impressed with their attitude either.
Looks like another reason to use Mozilla, and write friendly letters to companies: "I'd love to use your software, but..."
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Expect them to use some kind of "secure," proprietary format with a player that can read the datestamp and disable it. Someone will crack it, yes, but we don't know how long it will take.
I still think that a subscription model would be great for movies and music. They've got to make it easier to find the music I want and pay for it than it would be for me to pirate it. If I could have access to, for example, every Nine Inch Nails album for $20 a month, for streaming from anywhere, I'd pay it, and over a year they'd have made just as much money as I've spent on the CD's.
The internet is not for movies, yet,
But, the head of the MPAA thinks the Internet allows someone in their basement to distribute a DVD quality feature length motion picture to 4 billion people instantly!
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
It is my sincere hope that the people who do that, eventually end up trading movies with an investigator, and end up getting fined. And if they do it enough times, maybe they could even get an education in anal sex at a "corrections institute."
This would have great advantages. If enough people got prosecuted for piracy, then pirates might start getting scared and cool down. Then the entertainment industries would have no excuse/reason to continue using closed or copy-protected formats, and that would make life much easier for people who are not thieves. When Disney sells me an unencrypted Tron MPEG, I'll be happy.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
If I want pay-per-view movies I can just switch my digital satellite receiver to the appropriate channels. MPEG video equivalent to DVD-quality, for just a couple of bucks. I think Echostar's (Dish Network) latest receiver models include a TiVo-like disk system so you can pause/rewind the movie if you need to take a potty break or grab a snack.
Heck, in the time it takes to download even over a fast line, I can drive to Blockbuster to pick up the video and be back. (I don't recall who first made the comment about not underestimating the bandwidth of a stationwagon filled with magtape, but I do recall once calculating the bandwidth of the highway that ran between two university towns where I lived/worked.)
-- Alastair
Oh, happy days. Miramax is our saviour. Now we can download low-quality videos (Windows Media Player) of low-quality movies (Miramax) and watch them in our low-quality operating systems (Windows 98.) Welcome to the new millenium.
Give me pay-once downloadable mpeg's, and then I'll be happy.
Ah, but then evil HACKERS will pirate the movies using their elite underground network of black market bootleggers.
(heh. I feel like a journalist.)
Seems like that, no matter how good the encryption they provide is (and it probably will be pretty lame anyway), people will just do what they're doing now with DVDs. Take a perfectly legal playback, then do a high-res screen capture and then re-encode it using a better codec than the original. Then, they can join their 3l33t friends on #pr0n-m0vieZ-wAreZ-fbi-go-home and trade tiny ASF files that are at least as good as VHS.
I'm still a believer in the "drug dealers don't sell aspirin" argument, I just think that Miramax is going to really have to make the pay-per-view fee really small...
Can your IM do this?
First, until everyone has broadband, no one is going to bother to download a likely lower quality than VHS video from the net? Also, who wants to tie up their bandwidth for hours and hours to watch some movie when they can just go rent it for 2 dollars and still have their computer available to them? It's still far too early for this to be a good idea - give us 10 years to improve broadband access to the point where the net would be useable even if EVERYONE on it was downloading these movies. I'd rather just pay for pay-per-view tv than pay for pay-per-view internet. The internet is not for movies, yet, so I dont see this idea succeeding in much magnitude.
It looks good until you think for about .01 seconds and realize that this is nothing more than divx that wastes bandwidth. Add on top their (almost certain) proprietary encryption, viewing software, etc, and you have a product that bascially sucks in every way it can. Give me pay-once downloadable mpeg's, and then I'll be happy.
I recently read that TiVo plans to offer on-demand movies and found that interesting. I'm curious how this will work though! One hour of video in respectable quality requires about 3Gb (!) of space. An average two-hour movie would take about 1 DAY to download through my 640Kbps ADSL connection (assuming it was working at full capacity)! Now imagine a few hudnred thousand people doing that on the net at the same time...!
Obviously, broadband is not up to this and I do not think it will be up to this for quite some time. I believe the way TiVo will be doing this is by using some of the few hundreds of PPV channels to schedule essentialy multicasting of the movies. So, you say you want a movie in the evening. That movie is scheduled to be multicast (in analog form) at some point during the night and the TiVo wakes up and records it (with MacroVision enabled, if the distributor chooses, BTW) and you can watch it the next day. This is somewhat better than NetFlix (overnight, instead of 2-3 days for delivery)... However, you get no extras and no 5.1 surround like with a DVD (and I think fully digital transmission of video and 5.1 surround will take some time, mostly because of legal reasons -- watch what happened with poor MP3 and imagine how happy companies would be with Dolby Digital... ;-)
BTW, if you do a search for multicast file transfer you might be surprised with the volume of results... This seems to me the only viable way to do things (if company lawyers allow it, of course! ;-).
Why the hell would I want to pay $3 for a crappy mpeg4 movie that takes 30mins to d/l when I can rent a perfectly good DVD for $3? Unlike most Americans, I'm not a fat, lazy bastard who cares about getting off his ass and returning a movie.
Let's talk about Mpeg4. Mpeg4 supports up to 10mbps streams. At its highest bitrate it's equivalent to a NTSC broadcast, meaning somewhere around 330 lines or so. Nowhere near as good as a DVD and no Dolby Digital 5.1 support to boot.
There is no possible way they're going to encode the movies at 10mbps, 700k-1mbps seems more likely. While the movies look decent at that bitrate, even my 1.5mbps cable modem tends to choke on them realtime. Can you immagine every cable user on your block trying to watch a 1mbps stream at once? It just ain't gonna happen. If this is the market these PPV-Streaming companies are shooting for they've got a serious flaw in their business model.
On top of that, throw in no Dolby Digital sound, having to sit in front of your PC, etc. You get the idea. I think the real future of mpeg4 movies is when they start building it into cable boxes, that way the tech is seamless. You won't really notice the movie is coming over the net, because everything is.
I agree advertising only leads to more advertising and shitty service.
Case in point: You can watch 'free' television with 15 - 20 minutes advertising (30 %), pandering to the lowest common denominator (When Animals Attack? When Good Pets Go Bad? ) , lack of minority representation,and a complete disconnection from viewers and disinterest in improving the quality of the shows (or even killing off good shows that have passed their prime). Or you can watch premium TV and for $10 a month get quality shows (Sopranos, Sex In The City, Oz), no advertising spam in between shows, shows that end once the spark is gone since with no ad dollars there's no point in keeping a show alive once its past its prime a la Frasier or Friends (thus the Sopranos will end in the 5th season), minorities being represented in realistic, non-stereotypical, gripping roles and constant improvement of service (or else you switch service).
With this prior knowledge, why would anyone clamour for more advertising supported services?
I'd rather pay once and for all and keep away advertisers than have my personal data, tastes and habits sold to one and all to defray the costs of me watching a movie. Like, my personal viewing habits, address, etc. are worth how ever many measely dollars I am saving by watching advertising supported material. Yeah, right.
Am I the only one that opposes total electronic distribution of art? I like holding my DVD's, CD's, and books.
Don't worry, you're not the only one.
I also like to read books (the good old fashioned paper kind), watch movies (on DVD or VHS) and listen to music (audio CDs). However, I also like the convience of having these same things available in electronic form. How often have you looked for hours for something in a book when having grep and and electronic form of the book would have take seconds? Or, when have you really wanted to hear a song and all of the places that sell CDs in town are closed? Or what if you want to take your CDs with you on vacation (laptop -vs- lugging 200 CDs)?
I don't feel anytime soon (read: next 200 years) that movies, books and audio will be available strictly in digital format. Why? Because there is a higher cost of entry as opposed to the "hard copy" forms. Want to watch a VHS tape? Buy a $50 VCR. Want to watch a movie in ASF or MPG? Buy a $1500 computer. There's even more of a case with books. It costs me only the cost of the book to purchase and read it, but if the book was only available in electronic form, I would also have to buy a $1,500 PC as well. Put simply, it isn't worth it to publishers; it makes the entry level higher for consumers.
Put simply, I like having both mediums available. I usually choose hard copy (books, CDs, DVDs, etc) over their digital counterparts, but having them in both forms allows more of an "on demand" type of viewing/listening/reading.
So, how long until the MPAA files an injunction against "unauthorized" programmers of TCP/IP stacks and hard disk manufacturers for distributing tools whose only real (wink, wink) purpose is the unauthorized copying of M*ramax films?
Maybe they'll get lucky and the government will classify movies as "munitions" to prevent Bambi and The Sound of Music from falling into enemy hands.
Hey, it worked for cryptography, didn't it?
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Nah. Sooner or later, somebody would create a magnetic storage medium to "archive" this streaming video and then the entertainment industry will go bankrupt!
Stay up hacking each weekend. Sleep is for the week.
Netflix distributes movies over the Net... kinda. OK, so you rent your DVD's from Netflix and they send them to you in the mail. It still beats this Miramax crap and Blockbuster. Who would turn down unlimited rentals (only 4 discs out at once) for around $20 a month?
Am I the only one that opposes total electronic distribution of art? I like holding my DVD's, CD's, and books.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Good idea - in theroy
"A feature length movie will take 8 to 10 hours to download over a 56k dialup connection" - which I'd guess the majority of people will have. What they are forgetting is that 56k is the MAXIMUM throughput and who can sustain a reliable connection for that length of time? I haven't heard of anybody yet!
"20 minutes to download on a DSL or Cable Modem connection" sounds a lot better - until you realise that this is 'pay-per-view', once you've spent so long downloading it you'll have to pay every single time you want to watch the movie. Something that I don't really see taking off.
They also speak of "The films will probably be available for viewing for one day, after which their files would become disabled" - does this sound like it will be multi-platform to you? Doesn't to me :(
Ho hum.Richy C.
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Sell the movies. Use an unencrypted and open format, and just sell unscrambled files. There's your money.
But won't people circumvent? Yeah, some will. So? One can also trivially copy an audio CD or a VHS tape, and those markets somehow survived. Very little computer software is copy protected these days, but the software market doesn't seem to have a problem. I'm still getting paid.
But won't a higher fraction of the market start pirating, since the internet makes it so blasted easy? Well, the internet also make it a lot easier to catch people too. MPAA can't afford to put a security gurad next to every VCR to make sure that I don't hand any copied movies to another person. But they can quite easily have a few narcs check the pirate distrition channels (whether that be web search engines, IRC channels, Napster-like programs, or whatever) and log IP #s and collect evidence for prosecution.
Remember: The guys at ID Software were able to buy Ferraris because enough people (like me, for example) registered Doom or bought Doom 2 in stores. Doom would have been easy to pirate and undoubtably was pirated to some extent. But you can't deny the physical reality of the Ferrari: The business model worked.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
According to sightcouns.com, all they offer are one time downloads. You download the file (EXE which becomes an ASF video), which takes the 15-20 mins broadband, and you have the file as long as you want it. Whenever you want to watch the movie or whatever it is you downloaded, it prompts you for payment information (credit card, o course) which is verified over SSL and the ASF becomes viewable for a set period of time until it becomes disabled.
This is currently how their system works... for big name movies like they were talking about, who knows if they'll think of something new.
I'm just waiting for someone to hack the encryption or expirey checks so you just need to download the video, run the crack, and you've got it.
Even then I can see people 'defending' the bootlegged ASFs they get off the net, saying they purchased the download. I dunno...
I agree that this is too early for the net though... not enough interest, and the quality of video still isn't good. Now that we have DVD, and NO PLACE will stream dvd quality video for years at least, it's not really worth the download of a large video file, especially when you have to pay for it.
Storage is the other big issue. So many people have movie collections over 100's... how many people have 30GB spare for video storage?
I can see however, from the legal lines, something like this taking off for a company like SightSound.com. If their service costs them nothing, and they sell their product, they're making money, and they won't care if they get pirated. And especially if it is made illegal for the files to be pirated, they'll have the law behind them. - They can make money with no worries whatsoever.
All in all, we'll just have to see where things go with it...
Capturing a data stream to a file is fairly trivial, and even if they use a special client and/or a closed format to play it, that won't take long to break. We know this and they know this, so what is the incentive for them to do provide this service? If they charge for it, it will be circumvented, and if they don't charge for it, there is no reason for them to provide the service.
As a suggestion, how would people react to Miramax (in this case, but it generalises to other content providers as well) moving to an ad-based revenue model? ie: release a player that will show the [movie|book|mp3] at no cost the the user, but will display an ad banner as the stream is playing. It might even be possible to encode the ads into the content stream, for that matter.
This would seem to benefit all camps. Piracy would likely be reduced, as there is no financial or convenience benefit -- you still have to d/l the stream, either from the content provider or your favorite warez site, and both are free. The provider gets revenue from the advertising, and the advertisers get lots of eyeballs. Win win. For that matter, they could make the files available for stream and/or download in a standard format with the adbar overlayed on the bottom.
I realise this is likely a pipe-dream, as the providers have shown much more interest in keeping far more control than this would allow, but what do the rest of us think?
RTFA.... The download is only active for 1 day. One would infer from their description of the process that they are using some sort of cool technology to allow this.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
The cake is a pie
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