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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.
Please don't forget to put your name on top of the sheet.
Next week, we'll discuss the ROT-13 encryption used in some EBooks. Class dismissed.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
This sounds like it would be cool, but I don't think your average dial-up user is going to wait to download 500mb.
Besides, 250 of the 500mb are previews..
That's my guess. Of course, if they preview the format and ask for comment like SDMI I give it 3 months from the preview.
If there is a hardware component involved, I'll give it another..oh, say 3 more months.
Thats my guess.
Still, I think this is a good thing, as the MPAA basically has no choice about whether the stuff goes online or not. They may as well offer it online themselves, and if they make it reasonable I bet the majority of the public will pay to use it, DMCA or no DMCA.
Of course, if it's successful, the MPAA will give credit to the DMCA for stopping piracy, and if it's not a hit the MPAA will blame pirates. I have a feeling though the success or failure will more have to do with the number of people with broadband and their willingess to watch movies on their computers.
Oh, and if Passport is required to use it, I'll be pissed.
W
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This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Perhaps this is too obvious, but this seems to have a few fatal flaws. If the article resolves them somehow, I'd be happy to hear, but I don't have a NY Times account and don't really want one.
First, people don't watch movies on their computer. I spend about 15x more time on my computers than in front of a TV, but I still watch all of my movies on TV (mostly for the screen size, my chair and sound are superior on my computers). For most people they have larger screens, better sound, more comfortable seating for a group, etc.
Perhaps the most obvious is the 500 mb download. I rarely make such large downloads with my cable connection at home and network connection at work (1/2 T1 now, soon to be full T1). In fact, the only downloads I can think of that large are Linux distribution CDs, of which I have several. Why spend 30 minutes or much, much longer when I can make it to the video store, rent, and travel time both ways in about 20 minutes? We don't really need internet bandwidth sucked so much by having movies sent around - I'd rather see more streaming sources personally.
So of all internet users, only those with high bandwidth connections can use the service. There goes a good deal of potential customers. I don't think there is much of a market left. I actually think that DivX (the rentable DvDs that diabled themselves) had more chance of succeeding than this ill-fated concept.
Of course, since these are so obvious I hope the article dealt with them.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Didn't we just go through this with the e-book story?
There's no such thing as the "rental" of electronic information!
If you can view it on your screen, through a machine you own, you can make a digital duplicate of it! That's all there is to it, no matter how long the big companies try to struggle to come up with the next best way to cripple/encrypt the content that you have paid for.
And as soon as someone cracks whatever scheme they plan to use to "time-limit" the movies, we'll be seeing the lawsuits flying. As usual.
Until the media megacorporations realize and accept this (I'm not holding my breath waiting for that), we're just going to see the Skylarov incident and the DMCA invoked to hurt innocent people over and over and over again.
User: slash2001
Pass: slash2001
Enjoy.
Scarce, scared, scarred, sacred... -Col. Bruce Hampton
Downloadable movies? Haha, who are they kidding? Ok, let's go over the math again.
First, 90% of American households with internet access STILL USE DIAL-UP. Like people want to sit there and download a 500 meg file to watch it ONCE.
Secondly, those with broadband already have easy sources for movies currently in theaters or just released on DVD. Kazaa, Gnutella, Hotline, FTP, IRC, etc...
Thirdly, why would anyone want to wait to rent movies that are available as DVDs? If you have US Postal Service, you can sign up for NetFlix and rent DVDs thru the mail. It's $19.95 a month and you get to check out three DVDs at a time. They have new releases and foreign films. There aren't any late fees and to return DVDs, just drop them in the return envelope they provide. Mad easy! (Only problem with NetFlix is that since I'm located in NJ, it takes a while for them to ship and receive the DVDs I rent.)
w00t!
Rangers Lead the Way!
I don't know about anyone else but I treat downloadable movies (ie cam rips) as previews, mainly because I'm in Australia and we get movies some times months after the US. I download the first half and watch it while the second half is downloading. If the movie is bad I'll cancel the second half. If it is an ok movie I'll watch all of it. If it is really good I'll actually pay to go and watch it when it comes out. They are not good enough quality to replace the real thing and no substitute for the big screen.
Other than this the only indicator of whether or not you are going to like a movie is the trailer, an advertisement designed to make you want to go and see it, not to help you make an informed choice.
Most games you can get a demo of, books you can read a bit of in the store or at a library, a car you can take for a test run but movies you have to just fork out the cash and hope that its good. In my mind that just isn't good enough - if the movie is worth it I will pay to see it - otherwise I'll save my money.
'Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson...'
It seems like there's something very wrong with that idea of movies that "erase themselves off your hard drive" after 24 hours...Why does this sort of thing just give me the creeps? Is that just me?
It seems to be part of a bigger picture: The industies in control are literally trying to change the entire way of the Internet right now, to make it fit a more "profitable" model without them trying to change their existing business models.It seems a strange idea to me that anything or anyone but me should control what happens on my hard drive, but that's exactly what we are seeing...software that takes control of your personal computer and works it into a business model contrary to natural structure of the decentralized Internet we use today.
This little thing is not that scary...But behind the guise of lots of these little things lurks the ominous monster of a global information infrastructure controlled by corporations, not by individuals. We need to take this seriously...
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
DeCSS was created, and quickly became widespread, because it was the only way to play DVDs under Linux. If the studios have learned their lesson (and I bet they have), they'll release players for as many operating systems as they can think of. This might not slow down the development of a crack, but the crack would not become as widespread, and the media would be less favorable toward it than it was toward DeCSS.
The shareholder is always right.
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Yay, we can watch it go under a SECOND time! :=) Just like Hollywood tradition to produce bad sequels...
Well, the article says it will be priced similarly to pay-per-view movies. Also, it will be functionally better than pay-per-view movies (which don't give you the ability to pause, rewind, etc.), except that you have to use your computer to view it. People buy pay-per-view movies now. Therefore, the only factor that its success hinges upon is whether people who buy pay-per-view moves are able to use this, and don't mind watching on a monitor (unless they have TV output). The time expiration in and of itself can't cause it to fail, because pay-per-view movies sell. Also, they might later decide to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of watching on a computer.
Actually, I don't think this will go over all that well, but that's because I suspect that the intersection of the set of people who buy pay-per-view movies and the set of people who want to watch movies using their computers is small. My main point is that people already buy time-limited movies for the price they will be charging.
If they would allow me to view movies in the timeframe that they are in the theater, or just before DVD rentals, this would provide value to me. Charge me as much as a seat in a movie theater, but keep the revenue all to yourself.
But delaying until after DVD rentals are available? Forget it. The service isn't bound to go anywhere.
The movie industry is stuck in the same paradigm. They want to figure out where internet technology can be used to ADD to their current offerings. (Purely chasing up the revenue tree.) What they should be doing is asking, "What do our customers want?" But, there is that paradigm again. We're not customers anymore. We're faceless consumers who will take what they are given.
See how the whole mindset feeds on itself?
OK, for now there's not going to be a huge amount of people who want this, but as it becomes more popular I can see that the mainstream will pick it up much more willingly. There'll always be people with cracked movies just like there's still people who sell pirate videos, but if this service is simple enough then people will use it. People use Pay-Per-View when they could go and buy a priate copy of a movie for less money, so why shouldn't this work.
Additionally, they could eventually extend this to their whole movie library. Want to see some obscure flick from the 50's that never made it onto VHS? Well all you'll need to do is swing by IMDB, click on a link, and you'll be able to download it. This is a good idea (definitely better than just ignoring the problem and letting other people distribute your movies for free), and once they work out this niggles and broadband becomes more widespread I can see the service becoming incredibly popular.
The list of dumb ideas from dumb people hall of fame:
-CSS (if i can see it i can copy it)
-SDMI (they should have learnt from css)
-CPRM (the hard drive protection)
-That thing to disable electronics with GPS
-DMCA (not such a dumb idea as an evil one)
-SafeAudio (cut off your nose to spite your face but didn't work)
-WMA (we want to wean people off mp3 and onto superior digital rights management)
-DivX (the company)
-eBook (rot-13)
-Renting films (you cant rent data. period.)
Anything More?
Most companies have some sort of technical advisor/analyst/window-cleaner who can tell them if an idea is dumb or not. Obviously these studios don't. This is _very_ serious, these people along with those responsible for the list above, are making business decisions everyday. Its plainly obvious to see that something is very wrong here so i have come up with some possible explanations:
1. They are on crack or some other expensive narcotic and need money to keep the habit growing.
2. They have been abducted and replaced by aliens who have no business experience.
3. They never went to harverd etc.. and just lied their ways into high positions and now they don't know what to do.
4. They are just really really really dumb.
5. They actually have a plan and all these seamingly dumb ideas somehow fit together to produce something big that we couldn't possibly figure out.
-tfga
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/08/17/technology/ 17STUD.html
As always.
"Didn't you say the neighbors had a copy of this on DVD?"
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
As we have Streamgate here, this is somehow pretty much what those hollywood-companies try to do. You will get a DSL (with 1024kbit/s download and 128kbit/s upload) and you could watch movies which will be "streamed" to you and could be watched for 24hrs.
1. Order movies for later viewing, it downloads to your TIVO or similar device.
2. Movies NEVER to be on DVD, or old TV shows of the same. (now that I might pay for, if the movie was like 2 dollars or something, tv show 2 to 3 dollars per 5 episodes.
For existing content, they can forget it. If I can get it on DVD the charge for the movie that I HAVE to download would have to be in the 2 dollar range to make it even worth my time.
(still downloading to a computer is useless overall to me, I have a big TV just for watching movies, and my computer is NOWHERE near my entertainment system)
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Legal: Yes
DiVX
Legal: No
That right there is enough to make most people avoid DiVX. Most people don't want to be criminals, even if they know they won't get caught.
the clock starts ticking so no peaking until you're ready to watch it ALL
:)
i think it refers to the habit (which i, of course, would never condone, let alone indulge in) of taking hallucinogenic drugs before sitting down to watch a movie or video.
2001 on the big screen is very good.
deus does not exist but if he does