Slashdot Mirror
(Almost) Free Movies On-Line... Sorta
Snaller writes "See the latest movies on the net? Its possible - apparently the law in Taiwan says that for a movie to be protected by copyright law one has to apply for such protection within a month after the opening in the theaters. This rarely happens and as a consequence movie88 has opened a virtual movieplex: See any of their films for 1 dollar. The movie is streamed in a format that doesn't allow you to save it on the harddrive, but for that 1 dollar you can view it anytime and as much as you like for 3 days. The selection includes movies like "Shrek", "Legally Blonde","American Pie 2","Gone with the wind", James Bond and Batman." Yeah this'll last.
Right. But it really demonstrates what TV will be like in the future
when you have access to thousands of movies. And the buck a film
rate strikes me as awesome. I'd watch a lot more movies if they were
only a buck.
With such a large amount of movies available for streaming, the amount of people involved in transferring and encoding must be staggering. I'd like to know what sort of source they used to get all of these movies on disk.
I can't imagine that this will stay around for long, as the content producers will go nuts when they hear about it. It would seem that they took all this time to do this in futility.
I guess this is fine - yes - but what about the quality? I work in a company doing video-on-demand (VoD), and VoD in less quality than 2Mbps MPEG-4 isn't a good thing.
... I'll love to see this 'hacker-proof' format of theirs. I bet a hundered dollars it's already creacked :-)
And
roy
Computers are like air conditioners.
- They stop working when you open Windows.
I wonder how much sway MPAA has in Taiwan. Certainly in the US this little "problem" would be fixed quickly...
Better mark Taiwan up on the Axis of Evil list too..
Somethings that are free are not worth the price.
On the other hand, a dollar, euro, etc, is probably the minimum that most people would pay, since much less is possible too much of a hassle. dollar stores, dollar menus are popular because people think these provide good value, even if it is not true.
and think: when was the last time you changed a candy bar to a credit card? by itself? there is a point when paying by electronic means is perceived to be too much of a hassle.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
So now, for a dollar, I can not only make a 20 minute phone call with 10-10-220, but now I can watch Shrek on my 'puter.
Heh. Eat that, Terry Bradshaw.
So long, michael. Don't let the door hit you...
You get a movie for free and a five dollar (5 movie credit) just for signing up. You can watch - dont pontification and see it go down or get slashdotted -- regardless of whether you feel it should stay up.
Even thought it is real streamed at 300k bps, you'll get an idea of what the future could look like if we really could get our film libraries live.
Remember that many US concepts of copyright, fair use, etc don't translate into equivalent laws in other countries. This may be legal now and forever for agreements executed under the laws of Taiwan (this site). Note that some countries consider region coding to be unlawful (NZ?.
Note that the fair use concept in the US is stronger than in many others.
US owned a lot of IP and is considered to be unfair in its licensing practices in other countries -- they don't like embargoes on content, restrictive format licensing on contects, copy protection, delayed release dates in other countries and other US centric concepts.
When I first acquired broadband (a landmark event in my life). I figured it would be the nice thing to share out all the movies that I had downloaded for myself. All the movies I had downloaded were fresh releases, sometimes I had prerelease copies that weren't even in the theateres. I offered them in a format that could be saved to your hard disk... for free!
but the MPAA managed to hunt me down and send me and my ISP really naughty obscene letters. they quoted obscene literature such as "Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 106(3" and "we hereby state, pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 512" Eventually the letters started to get to offensive so I decisted all activity. But man, if I only had a team of lawyers at the time....
Somethings that are free are not worth the price.
Amen to that. I've downloaded several divx movies and after the nuisance of finding it in the first place, followed by a couple of weeks of broken and resumed downloads (and thats with a reasonably friendly file-sharing utility), using the better part of a Gig of bandwidth, and having other miscreants weezing stuff off my hard-drive, I'd rather go out and spend 20 bucks on a DVD. It's a better picture and sometimes they even throw in some other goodies (though I thought the tone poems on the Episode 1 DVD kinda sucked). I really wish someone would clue in the MPAA to this: That downloading movies is a pain in the ass and though I can't speak for everyone else's preferences, I really don't think that movie attendance or DVD sales is going to be threatened by it in any perceivable way. Please leave off the copy-protection shit and the regional encoding...you don't really need it.
You're using her as bait, Master!
I wonder if the US government is going to threaten a trade embargo with Taiwan until its government passes a DMCA-like law. But then again, could the US really afford such a trade ban with Taiwan? Almost everything is made there!
Maybe it's just my connection, but I can't seem to get to this site very well. If it can't suvive the /. effect, exactly how are they going to succesfully stream video ?
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
These guys definitely have gonads. Not only are they throwing a big "up yours" to the MPAA. but they are also charging for access to hit TV shows like "Friends."
Some of their pricing decisions seem a bit arbitrary, however. For example, you can view the 3h17m movie Magnolia for the price of a single download, but the similarly long Schindler's list is broken up into three streams that must be viewed separately.
I give them five days before the US government threatens to give China the green light to annex unless the Taiwanese government cracks down on this site.
It can't even keep track of my username. "Welcome VISITOR" after it tells me 'signin successful'.
It's a big endless loop of 'sign in', choose a movie, 'sign in', etc.
Already slowed to the point that it's worthless...
Also, no 'Clerks' or 'Chasing Amy'. Or the search function just doesn't work...
sigh.
The *buffering buffering buffering buffering 3%*
Da *buffering*
mn *buffer--*
movi *buffering*
e got sla *buffering buffering buffering buffering 3 hours remaining*
shdot *buffering*
ted! *buffering*
--joshua
A new development - the site was slashdotted - it's extremely slow and video downloads do not work!
I can almost hear the engineer in the background... " She canna take much moore of it, keptin! "...
I'd suspect that even if they have access to the fattest pipes in Taiwan, the international feed to Taiwan would be saturated with
Here's to their good luck!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I'm not convinced that you're right about the impact of cheap online movies on ticket sales. For the forseeable future, the best quality movie that can be reasonably distributed electronically is going to be highly compressed, e.g. MPEG-4 or similar, video streams. While this format looks okay on a computer monitor, slap it up on your home entertainment system with 60-inch TV and 18 speakers, and the result will look and sound like absolute crap. That is why people are going to keep going to movie theaters -- to see a movie with very high fidelity on audiovisual equipment that they could never afford. If anything, look for ticket prices to keep going up as this will become the major draw of movie theaters.
Where this sort of streaming will have a big impact is in the video sale/rental market, which depending on the movie accounts for anywhere from 20-80% of total revenue. After all, an online stream or download is likely available before the video is released, is cheaper by far than buying the DVD, and likely looks better than the thouroughly beaten up VHS tapes at your local rental store. If anything, look for audiovisual effects to be regarded as a defense against online availability of movies in the future. Then people might actually go out and see the movie in a theater after downloading it, just to see/hear what they were missing.
On the other hand, $100M is an awful lot of money to spend making *anything*, and is certainly out of line with what is spent on most works of art. The protesters dancing outside the WEF in New York right now might have some ideas about how that money could have been more productively used. If summer action blockbusters go the way of pyrimid building as an art form, many would argue that cinematic art would be better off.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
For what it's worth, one of the sole benefits of living on the Chinese mainland is DVD's for 7 Chinese yuan (US$0.84)! Sold at foreigner-friendly restaurants - you get to flick through a huge selection of DVDs (little prOn though) and settle the bill for food and movies together. New releases are available about 2-3 weeks before debut screening in the US.
A dream is good. A plan is better.