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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*.
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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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?
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