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

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.

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."