Rent A Downloadable Movie

Syn Ack writes: "The New York Times is reporting (free account, blah blah blah) that five (5) major Hollywood studios (MGM, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures) are going to begin offering downloadable time restricted movies. The video will remain watchable for 30 days but will become unplayable 24 hours after it has been viewed at all. Sounds like if you start the movie at all, the clock starts ticking so no peaking until you're ready to watch it ALL. Downloads are expected to be in the 500MB range. However downloads will only be available well after the DVD release of the same movie so as to not cut into DVD sales. Expect to see something late this year or early next. Perhaps the Music People can get some tips from the movie people?" What a bargain.

Comments

Decisions

[mbadolato]

Hmmm, spend 7 hours downloading the movie which I then have to finish watching within 24 hours of starting it, or drive to the video store 2 minutes away, rent it, watch it at my convienice and as much as I want over the next 5 days.

Factor in, sitting at the computer to watch it, or putting the dvd on the 61" tv with the full surround system.

<sarcasm>Hmmm that's a tough one.</sarcasm>

Dot-bomb

[Placido]

A film will remain on a computer's hard drive for 30 days but will erase itself 24 hours after it is first run.

Obviously they're going to develop a proprietry software package used to play the movies and control the copyright. It'll also have to be memory resident (or possibly run on boot) if they want to delete the film after 30 days.

To be really honest it sounds just like a dot-bomb venture:
The studios that will be partners in the service are MGM, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures. Noticeably absent were Disney and 20th Century Fox, although sources close to Disney said that it intended to announce its own video-on-demand service within 10 days. Fox issued a statement late this afternoon saying that it, too, would announce plans soon for such a service.
...
The real question, though, is how many people really want to download movies onto their personal computers.

"To be really honest, we have no idea," Mr. Waterman said.


To be read: "Oh wow! We're going to put a product on to the internet which'll be really cool and people can buy said product anytime they want. And here's the cool thing! We don't even know if said product is useful!"
Other manufacturers: "Oh I'm going to do that too!"
More manufacturers: "Me three! Me three! Let's sink money into technology just because it's technology and forget all about wether or not we will make money."

Yes I am a cynic.

Re:[Flash Quiz!] Ladies and Gentlemen...

[shut_up_man]

I don't think it will be long until whatever security they use is cracked - since one of the parties in the secure transaction is the enemy, it makes it pretty easy. What remains to be seen is if the companies involved can balance the difficulty of cracking the system against the following:

• Ease of use - AOL Joe isn't l33t. No codes, no dongles, no Captain Crunch decoder wheels. Quick initial registration, download and double-click, get billed monthly.
  
• Speed of download - Downloading DivX movies still costs TIME. The corps need to have monster servers, monster pipe, and redundant, distributed infrastructure (kinda like a P2P network ;). This is something a DSL user cannot compete with.
  
• Film quality - It's pretty irritating to spend all day downloading a movie, only to find the aspect ratio all wrong, the soundtrack in some unheard-of codec or the video stream corrupt. If the companies guarantee quality, that's a big advantage.
  
• Quality of catalog - Underground sites only host movies the operator likes, or have managed to get hold of. Having a broad catalog gives more choice, which makes the service more attractive. The catalog should also be as current as DVD, or else people will grab the DivX instead.
  
• Cost - The companies ARE competing against a free service, but they can charge a small fee for the aforementioned enhancements. Small. As in, not large. As in, "Oh pfffft, I'll get it off MovieCorp, that's nothing."
  

That's the recipe for a winning net movie delivery system. From the article, it sounds like they are screwing up cost (pay per view? ewww!) and quality of catalog (post-DVD releases only). Still, it's a start...

shut up man

i seriously am beginning to doubt the intellegence

[jstockdale]

of the movie studio's

i mean, seriously, do they employ /.'s Squadron of Attack Elephants?

ok ... lets run down the options:

Movie Studio's Official Format:
Lifetime of file: 30 days
Watching period: 24 hours
File size: 500 MB
Encoding: Proprietary (in all likelyhood)
Interface: Most likely pretty useless and annoying
Availability: Some time after DVD release
Cost: Something

DivX:
Lifetime of file: Unlimited
Watching period: Unlimited
File size: 600MB-1200MB depending on quality desired
Encoding: DivX (mpeg-4)
Interface: Anything you want
Availability: At or Pre-DVD release
Cost: Nothing

Yeah, sure the new format is gonna be successful
(opinion brought to you in part by Scarcasm(tm))

Daffy

[Graymalkin]

The highest throughput I know of for an FTP server is Walnut Creek's record of 1.39TB over the course of a day, that's about 115 movies per hour or so. Let's say you can provide this sort of throughput to several servers all the time. How much bandwidth is required for this system to make any money at all? It's pretty fantastic, especially when you figure in the cost of maintaining the hardware which has to store all these movies. To figure if this will make any money at all, decide how many potential viewers you're going to have. How many people have the bandwidth necessary to download these movies that don't have DirecTV/Dish Network (who can pay a couple bucks for an all day movie pass on a PPV movie channel) and aren't so fucking lazy that can't drive their secretary asses down to the video store. This isn't really anything I couldn't do with DirecTV and a TiVo.

Re:Good service. Bad delivery.

[imadork]

But delaying until after DVD rentals are available? Forget it. The service isn't bound to go anywhere.

Are you kidding? They don't want it to go anywhere. They want this to fail, to prove that serving *paid* content via the Internet is not profitable. Or, put another way, only Commies who don't like to pay for content are on the Internet. Oh, and pedophiles, too. Musn't forget them...

And since writing paid laws is profitable for polititians, we'll see more laws that treat the Internet as a lawless free-for-all that must be regulated to stop the Red Menace.

We're not customers anymore. We're faceless consumers who will take what they are given.

We ceased to be customers a while ago. In particular, all Slashdot readers are criminals because we know more about technology (i.e. how lame DeCSS is at its job) than they do.