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Napster And Legal Movie Distribution
FreakzZ sent us linkage to an MSNBC story which talks about Napster and Hollywood getting in bed together by forming a new start up known as AppleSoup. It doesn't really say what sort of stuff will be on the site, but one can only hope that this isn't just vapor.
Its £104, (unless it went up in the last 4 days). Anyway, I haven't actually read through all the terms and conditions, but I'm pretty certain that if you have a radio and no TV then you get it for free.
Although if I'm right, this means the radio service must be funded from the TV only licence. These people without TV's are stealing from all us couch potatoes I tell you!
This has nothing to do with Napster! It's founded by two of the investors in Napster. It is a totally separate company from Napster and totally different software.
Macintosh humor! MacComedy.com
Between Apple Computer for all things digital and Apple Corps. for all things musical, I think they will have a hard time retaining that name.
13 - 17 is a rather useless spot to be trying to get customers from
That's not true. You gotta remember that even though they don't have very much income, they don't have any expenses. Most 13-17 year olds will find a way to get money (from their parents, or by getting a job) and spend that money faster than an adult will. Or, if they don't have the money to blow, they can get their parents to pay for it.
Why in hell would a major company (i.e. we're not talking garage bands here) that wants to distribute content legally want to use the Napster model, particularly for HUGE content? More than half of my Napster downloads fail, and they're only 3-4 megabytes. What's going to happen when they're 100 or 1000 times that big? And why would you want to make your customers have to go hunting for your products and hope that someone just happens to have them available at the time? If you're distributing content legally and therefore have no reason to fear being sued, wouldn't it make far more sense to put the content on some nice, fast, highly-connected servers at a well-known place and just let people ftp them in peace?
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
The demographic is useful. Youth buys, but only certain things. With the economy such as it is, and many parents both working and spending less time with Jr, many parents are placating children with "stuff". A few years ago, mind you this is quite out of date, the 12-18 year old market, spent on average, about 20Billion a year. This does not include what their parents spend on them for clothes, food, etc. but rather what they personally spend in discretionary income.
The most desirable of demographics remains women, 26-54, however. They are responsible for the sale of big ticket purchases, cars, appliances, etc.
As I learned in marketing class, "A man may decide to buy a car, but a woman decides the features, color, type and price". It may sound outdated, but I know that is what happens in my home.
hmm... I'm fairly certain that when bandwidth increases in the future the differences between MB and GB won't matter much.
The bit that DOES matter is that nobody will want to pay for the subscription service, when people can just rename their Star_wars.mpg to Home_movie_31337.mpg . I doubt that the 'policing' that is being proposed goes further than looking at the titles of the films proposed. I'd be insane for them to try to d/l and watch each and every film to check whether it is copyrighted.
The napster method is definely not the right one if you're trying to make money off people's downloads - you need a central server for that.
Da Warez D00d
Considering that apples would make a horrible soup, their corporate name does not seem like a good omen. Of course, one could wonder what kind of a name "Napster" would make for a file-sharing service.. NetShadow
NetShadow
He didn't say it _was_ Napster )at lease reading it over a couple times, I don't see it) He did say "the Napster model" which isn't the same thing at all as saying this is Napster.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
AppleSoup is working to produce a next generation peer-to-peer network that lets content owners distribute "anything digital" via the Internet while giving them a way to control and monetize their intellectual property. For more information, send email to info@applesoup.com So bassically this will be a gnutella clone.
"Basically we're using technology to give copyright owners a secure way to use viral distribution without losing copyright protection," said Bales.
(Emphasis added)."Hey, cool! It looks like AppleSoup is hosting a porno movie! Something called 'ILoveYou'...."
"Oh, man. I don't feel so good. I think I just caught a bad case of Battlefield Earth from that unprotected contact with AppleSoup..."
The possibilities are limitless! And the irony of modern pop-crap spreading unstoppably like a metaphorical disease is just too much...
Incidentally, does the name "AppleSoup" imply that all of the video will be in Quicktime only?....
Joe Sixpack is dead!
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
You've probably never heard of DivX ;-) (yes, that's the actual name, including the emoticon). It's a high-quality video codec (actually just MPEG-4 with MP3 audio hacked in). I downloaded a 2 minute trailer for The Matrix the other day, and it weighed in at 640x480, 30fps at a whopping 13MB (and it looked as good as some of the videotape formats I have access to at work, although not quite as good as Betacam SP or 1-inch). It can be used to re-encode a DVD down to more manageable sizes, but it can also be used to encode original content for easy distribution over the net.
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Scott Jones
Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
Commodore 64 Democoder
FC Closer
I read the press release. I don't see that your quote contradicts the idea that purveyors of IP content would join their network and serve their content off of big servers. The server scalability is the "member"'s concern and not AppleSoup's. I was not suggesting that AppleSoup would run those servers, just that they might end up sporting features that would make the arrangement work better than it currrently does on Napster.
Agreed.
Pac Bell just sent me my letter telling me that I'm not eligible for DSL service (prolly too far from the CO, as I suspected). The bandwidth aint there for movies. It just aint. 56k is barely enough to just surf - I don't even like wasting my time waiting for pr0n downloads.
And cable? I'd rather give Bill Gates a rim job than go back to giving Charter Communications my hard-earned dollars.
if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Quote.com was founded in late 1993, and made a profit in the fiscal year ending Sept. 1995. Bill joined Quote.com in the fall of 1995.
He also misled Quote.com about at least one important issue while he was employed there.
What do they mean by: Compensates the artists. Is this going to be a paying service?
goat
You raise some interesting points.
Less facetiously, I am wondering what Napster gets out of this. They'll have to pass on some royalty to Hollywood, and probably will be resticted in the kinds of things they can do to the data.
And what would Hollywood get out of this? If they think this is some cheap way of not hosting the Gigabytes of download, they are just going to be in for a shock. Chances are, Joe Random's harddisk is not going to have as much throughput as they expensive servers, unless Napster is going to do a different model. Then the question comes down to why Napster. I would imagine that some other company would have the relevant experience in setting up high bandwidth streaming servers.
Then again, I could go on about the silliness behind a name like AppleSoup. How strange
They are definitely trying to capitalize on the brand name that Apple has built up over the last 23 years, to give themselves instant recognition and credibility.
Reminds me of that shameless "Dodge Different" campaign that Chrysler is running.
So let me get this straight - I pay you for hosting a movie file that eats up half my hard drive and pretty much all of my bandwidth (not everyone has T3 access you know)?! Ok I'll bite...what's available? Hmm...a trailer for the new Julia Roberts piece of crap and a short montage of scenes from last year's Kevin Costner box office flop. Cool, where do I sign?
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It's a former employee of Napster that left and is now starting AppleSoup.
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
Something tells me, that these people are looking at their options... Hrmm, lets see, real, windows media player, doh, why can't people just get the whole file at once, oh, look, I bet the kind people at Napster could come up with something, and we could save them a lot of legal trouble.
Yes, and now we can set up a buggy distribution network.
Of course, we could have just set up an FTP site. Duh.
We're all different.
Eh...
Did anyone catch the Future of Digital Music hearing on CSPAN on Saturday? It was excellent. I was just flipping through, and there on CSPAN was some kid, last name Kan, who was listed under Gnutella! I *had* to see what this was about. Actually it was a great hearing. I will be writing Senators Schumer, Leahy and Hatch thanking them for keeping an open mind. They were surprisingly clueful!! The funniest part was when Hatch demanded the RIAA shill to answer the question whether it was legal or not to copy a cd to tape for his wife. She fumbled and backtracked. There was also a joke about the Senate server going down because of people downloading Schumer's voting record. I think their cluefulness should be rewarded with at least a thank you letter of recognition. I will probably post that letter somewhere on Slashdot when I finish it.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I am skeptical about this working. How good can the quality be on a movie downloaded from the net? Unless it's going to be a bazillion megabytes in size, I don't see how the quality could compare to popular technologies like DVD.
Fact is that I, like many other people, have no desire to watch movies on my computer screens when I have a large projection TV in the room next door.
On the other hand, this could lead to more 'fun' and entertaining law suits.
loev,
Axel
mhm23x3, alt.fan.karl-malden.nose
If someone would read the story they would notice, AppleSoup, the new company, was founded by an early Napster investor and founder (Who left). This not Napster. It is a totally new, different company.
This isn't Napster. Gosh!
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
The problem with Gnutella, and any peer-to-peer ("P2P!", ugh) paradigm for distribution, is that it's just not going to work for movies - not for the feature-length ones that would be the main draw, anyways. Many people speak in ominous tones on Slashdot and in the newsmedia about the copyright cataclysm that will occur with digital video & ripped DVDs as it has so emphatically for music recently. Frankly I just don't see it. There just isn't the bandwidth to pull this off, and there won't be for a long, long time. Just do some simple math - the average MP3 is probably 5mb in size; the average DVD is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-17gb big depending on length. Even at the most conservative estimate, people would need to increase their bandwidth by three orders of magnitude to emulate that speed and convenience of Napster. Companies like Qwest proclaim with alacrity that bandwidth is doubling every few years a la Moore's law. Even in their wildest, most orgasmic bandwidth-filled dreams (you have to see their commercials to know what I'm talking about), I don't think they can concieve of a thousandfold increase anytime soon. Neither can I.
And that's just downloading. The idea that people could actually start serving these behemoth files to other people is just ludicrous - there is even less upstream bandwidth in a consumer connection that downstream, usually.
So you are sort of half right and half wrong. Their advertiser-supported service isn't going to work, but neither will Gnutella. Nothing will. Movies are just such a bigger beast than music. They will take horrendous amounts of time and effort to distribute, and time is the enemy if you've ever used Napster. Most people don't have the patience or goodwill to let some stranger tie up their computer for the next four days finishing their "Driving Miss Daisy" download. The one thing the P2P paradigm was not made for was longevity.
In short, I just don't see digital movie distribution taking off in the near future. Even if people could download at 30mbps off their cable modems, which is a long time coming, it would still take more than a day to polish off a single DVD movie. All but the most dedicated of geeks will just pay the $19.95 at Best Buy and get it over with.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
I found this interesting. I wonder what Pops has to say about this one. If John is in it for the right reasons, talk about a 180 from his father.
I'm actually suprised it took this long for this story to get on /. because I heard about it on ZDTV over a month ago. They didnt think it would fly and neither do I. If you use napster for downloading 1-10MB MP3s then you know why it'll never work for multiGB movies. There's nothing wrong with hosting movies on a passworded FTP serv unless the movie companies just want free hosting instead of paying for the bandwidth for downloads.
I Don't Work Here
Well, great. To appease the legislature and the judiciary and everyone who's been jumping down their throats recently, the US Copyright Cartel has decided to make vague noises about vaporware that might kind of begin to solve all the problems that everyone's talking about. Oh boy.
Let's face it: we haven't put nearly enough pressure on these thieves and scam artists to make them cave yet, and this is going to just be more of the same SDMI-tainted, pay-per-listen, don't-you-dare-loan-it-to-your-friends drivel that I honestly can't stand anymore. If they've got something to say, they should say it, but if they don't have anything more than hand-waving, they need to shut the hell up.
I'll believe it when I see it, and even then only after they've shown me the fine print.
1. They want to charge people.
Noone is going to want to pay for this, especially since it's
2. Proprietary Content
This won't be a place to shoot around your vcd dump of The Matrix, they are going to distribute their own content. Until they are putting up some kind of programming that people know and like there is no hook for people to sign up in the first place. People loved Napster because it's easy to get something that (and this is important) they want for nothing. This program doesn't seem to offer that, and if Valenti jr. is involved, you can believe that they will be keeping close tabs on what goes through the service.
Rev.
Napster ?
Hollywood ?
Could be some sort of streaming media company aimed at interactive digital broadcasting...
Sounds Deja-vu.
I mean, this is so buzzworded that it would really be interesting if there were sufficient hype 'round this to democratize Internet/Radio/TV, this time.
Of course, this'd imply more bandwidth, cheaper stuff but also... pity... a deeper supermarketization of the Net.
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Trolling using another account since 2005.
If they change gears, they're going to lose their popularity. Their venture capitalists are going to pine for the days of being sued and being so popular!
What could people "trade" that's about movies? Whole movies? Probably not. Trailers? Oooh... like I need to have ALL of those. Celebrity pictures? Maybe. Nude pictures? Probably not. I can't see how they could say 'yes' to this file, and 'no' to that file. Unless they wen't and 'tagged' all the files that are 'allowed', but if someone is going to tag all the 'allowed' files, then they might as well just provide all those files at one site.
Rader
Hollywood wants to sell movie tix, etc. etc. to napster users. Took them long enuff. Assuming most people on napster are say, 13-25, what better way to send your message to this most desirable of demographics than get in bed napster?
www.latimes.com/business/20000717/t000066998.html
Beats me what this is, they already have a service for new artists...
Bizar technology?
I've already read comments about how this is premature, downloads are still too slow etc. etc. but I don' think that's the point of this at all. My thought is that rather than attempting to be a "finished" product this is more an attempt at a proof of concept - that the Napster model can be used in a way that the industry (movies in this case) can accept.
Using this they can test out different approaches to things like security, validation, pricing and so on without the dangers of designing a system from scratch to be their Big Thing. The things they learn from this will be used to then develop future systems when using the Internet to stream TV-on-demand and feature-length films is viable.
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Jon E. Erikson
Jon Erikson, IT guru
Before we start celebrating about how AppleSoup is going to give some legitimacy to Napster-type file sharing systems, read the article, especially this sentence:
"As for what will be carried over the networks, Biondi said he expects short videos to be distributed first, but eventually he envisions the Internet having either network television on demand or its own programming, or a combination."
It sounds like Hollywood is planning on using AppleSoup as a platform to have other computers host videos it wants to distribute. In this sense, it wouldn't really be a file-sharing system, but a way to take the load off of their own servers when Hollywood starts moving toward computer-based distribution. In other words, you can share only what they want you to share. Also, from the article:
"AppleSoup promises to actively police its network to try to find and weed out any file that is violating copyright law."
I'm wondering how they plan to do this. My best guess is that AppleSoup will have a list of the "only" legitimate files allowed to be distributed. Again, this will allow AppleSoup to distribute only what Hollywood wants. There's a good chance, in my opinion, that the average Joe won't be able to post his own homemade shorts or anything. "Actively polic[ing]" the system sounds like they're going to use a whitelist instead of a blacklist.
And of course, the article doesn't say what format these videos will be in. Possibly something specific to AppleSoup, and I'd bet they aren't going to release software for the average user to create these files either.
At least, that's the feeling I get from reading this article.
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"Better dead than smeg."
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The real Captain Derivative has a Slashdot ID.
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"How many six year olds does it take to design software?"
dinner: it's what's for beer
luckman
luckman
I don't involve myself with flames, much less know how to bait one.
Why would Hollywood invest in a "napster" company?
This is probably more of a pre-emptive maneuver by the movie industry, the music industry has been reduced to playing a defensive game, reacting to developments on the Internet i.e. suing. Offering pay-per-view downloads won't work if there's anything like the piracy in the music industry.
Because of bandwith issues, the threat to video hasn't really materialized yet, but eventually the bandwidth will arrive, and by that time they'll have learned a lot about this type of filesharing.
Why would Napster do this (or ex-employees of Napster)?
Napster is not really a winning business model is it?
They're dealing with lawsuits, competition (freenet, gnutella), and a bad image towards investors, legitimacy and an exit strategy are probably the main factors.
..... Trying is the first step to failure
Read the Offical Press Release here.
-If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
Less facetiously, I am wondering what Napster gets out of this.
One thing they get out of this is some serious ammunition in their ongoing court case against the RIAA Cartel.
The courts might be persuaded to ignore the rights of a legitimate company, if it is percieved to have a product which is primarily used for "illigetimate" purposes (this has happened before - Bong makers in some states, whos tobacco product is banned because most users use it for marijuana instead). However, if the company has a product with a clearly legitimate use, and an alliance with Hollywood is a pretty high profile "legitimate" use, the RIAA will likely be slam dunked for trying to strong arm them out of existence.
And if the deals with Hollywood prove to onerous, napster can withdraw after the trial is over.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The alternative view is that Napster and its VCs spend so much money and time on the elusive Next Big Thing of video that they forget their core audience, which is music listeners. Napster service quality suffers, customers get frustrated, and either they buy legit MP3s or just go back to emailing them around.
Meanwhile, Hollywood threatens even more severe legal action if Napster backs out of this deal, even if they lose tons of money. So they can't. They burn through their VC, can't pay their ISP bills, get cut off, finito.
I for one cannot rule out sinister motives, at least in this case...
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
The best form of copy protection the record industry could find is larger files. And how do they get larger files? Start supporting DVD Audio!
I want very high resolution audio, dammit!
Refrag
I have a website. It's about Macs.
1. Bill Bales is not a founder of Napster, Inc. He joined the company in late August, 1999.
2. Bill Bales was forced to leave Napster, Inc. for gross misconduct December 17th, 1999.
3. Napster, Inc. != AppleSoup. The relationship is disingenuous in nature and constitutes a fabrication to gain press attention.
jordan@napster.com
But one thing is pretty clear. If they are distributing media files that are larger than MP3 they will not rely on Joe Consumer to serve up the files.
If Napster did offer IP protection, industry distributors would log into the Napster network with big honkin servers that could serve up quality MP3s at optimal bandwidth. These servers would be advertised; they would be on-line at all times. We would all learn to keep them on our hotlist and use them in preference to Joe Bloe's random PC. (And Napster would undoubtedly enhance their support for hotlist to make it all work well.)
I don't have any answer to the physical problems of sharing multi-gig files. But do not assume that Napster is the end all, be all of peer to peer networks. Once the legal issues are settled, service will improve and the distribution model will be more valuable.
As with normal TV, why don't they just use advertising to generate revenue, and keep the downloads free? Makes life easier for all of us. And they can then encourage individuals to distribute their content, rather than labelling such people as "pirates". Most people wouldn't bother editing an MPEG to get rid of all the adverts (someone recently had this idea with MP3s).
But then again, the motion picture industry could just be too greedy and try to make money both ways...
Oxymoron of the week: "Secure Digital"
However, the company's press release contradicts pretty much everything you say: There you have it. These aren't stupid people, judging from their backers, so I'd say they know a bit more than they're letting on in their release. Nevertheless, the idea seems just totally brain-dead as it stands now.
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I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
People have been paying for TV and films for years through cable subscription and the like. Ont the other hand, the last time I heard about people paying for audio was years ago when you still needed a radio licence in England.
Society is much more willing to pay for video even though its still just data,
Given a reliable place to get films, people will be willing to pay for the service. If a cut goes to the person who supplies the film, then it will suddenly become more beneficial not to pirate, but to get official authority to sell the film. A central server like Napster should be able to deal with all the finances. The studios should be happy because they can get eliminate the cost of media.
Aren't they going to have problems when AAPL sues them for taking their name? The even InterCapped the name.
Then again, I could go on about the silliness behind a name like AppleSoup. How strange
Also, How long till whatever encryption they use gets cracked? Problems ahead indeed.
Perhaps I'm dis-illusioned from being subjected to Ads on TV, at movie theaters, and so forth. Hollywood.com and a few others in the theatres, and every DotCom under the sun on every channel imaginable. They now have a talk-over-the-web product that will do nothing but increase the required bandwidth of the net AND increase the minimum speed of InHell processors. Frankly, we don't need any more startups. Go away!
Your resident Dot Grump..
Lowmag.net
With unregulated content-neutral file sharing programs like Gnutella around, I fail to see the advantage of using an advertiser-supported service that bans copyrighted content. If one feels morally obliged not to download pirated material, he can still use Gnutella to find the legal files that he is looking for. Even for the service's target audience, there is no benefit to using this service and no cost-advantage that would justify paying a subscription fee.
I fully support the industry's attempt to use a distributed distribution mechanism for legal media, but I think that they need to add value to such a service if they want it to succeed. Value-added services like real-time voice chats with celebrities, access to movies and music before they officially debut, etc. that cannot be replicated by Napster/Gnutella are what is needed to drive such a service.
ByteMyCode.com: A Web 2.0 code sharing community.
This is a smart move by the MPAA because they are trying to prevent what is ahppening with the Music Recording industry.
I could get cynical about MPAA delving into the motion picture industry, but I won't. Fact of the matter is that the movie industry needs to change even more radically then the music industry. Theatres (at least to my understanding) do not generally turn a profit - especially on movies that don't attract large crowds. And for movies that do attract large crowds (E.g. X-Men) the theatre is unable to turn a profit due to licensing and fees imposed. Movies are a growing industry in the making part, but the actual showing of them has become so terribly expensive and overrated that most people do not want to go to see one - they will just kozmo it =).
Being that as it is I imagine that we will see AppleSoup be a completely different method of being able to buy a movie. Something like pay 20 dollars for a theatre ticket, and get the ability to download the movie - or get the DVD for an extra 3 bucks. This would piss off video rental stores, but remember they haven't been turning a profit lately either.
The eventual dream (as I see it for AppleSoup) is for movies to become more pervasive such as what Napster did for the music industry. Regardless of if the music industry will accept it. Napster has created millions of loyal music fans most of whom I guarentee buy more CD's now then they did prior.
What it comes down to is this, old media is no longer profitable, and entire industries would rather not kill the cultural significance that a movie theatre generates. And I doubt that MPAA wants to go out completely - so who knows it could work.(technical impossibilities aside)
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
They should start a Napster-like service for DivX ;-) trailers, I can never seem to find any new ones on Gnutella :-)
And this isn't the sames as MP3 i.e. downloading whole tracks - the trailers may make people go out and buy DVDs.
At least, after seeing the Bullitt trailer that's what it did to me.