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.

Comments

Napster model nonsensical for legal content

[Vassily Overveight]

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?

Re:Napster is a demographic

[thesparkle]

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 A few years ago, mind you this is quite out of date, the 12-18 year old market, spent on average, about 20Billion a year.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 It may sound outdated, but I know that is what happens in my home.

In bed together?

[(void*)]

But who is f*cking who? :-)

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.

Re:Will It Succeed?

[drix]

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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Movie Distribution via Napster

[Space]

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.

Doomed to fail.....

[TheReverand]

Ok this is a good idea, take video and share it like Napster. However,

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.

This is a speculative move

[Jon Erikson]

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

Too Good to be True?

[Captain Derivative]

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.

--
"Better dead than smeg."

Read the press Release

[miss_america]

Read the Offical Press Release here.