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'Harry Potter' Offered (Legitimately) on the Net
Skyshadow writes "Warner Brothers is distributing several movies, including Harry Potter and Mars Attacks via the internet. The price is the same as I pay for Pay-Per-View from my satellite provider ($3.99 for a 24 license), and the movies are in the area of 700 megs. I'm sure that movies on demand will eventually take off as a legitimate and feasible distribution method, but given that a vast majority of US households are without broadband, is this an idea before its time?"
I see this ending as badly as the Circuit City DIVX attempt did. the "CinemaNow" software will be cracked, and we'll see these movies all over the newsgroups in a matter of days. Microsoft, who came up with the anti-piracy CinemaNow scheme, has admitted that they don't necessarily engineer for security, so I wonder what makes WB think they can start now?
Once there is a digital copy on a PC, whatever timebomb exists to limit viewing to 24 hours can be stripped. It might take some time for hackers to develop something, but it will happen. The risk here is that $3.99 is a reasonable price compared to DVD/VHS rentals, but is it really enough to cover the bandwidth/hosting costs for a popular title from a service provider perspective? 700 mb in the 1mbit bit cap world (e.g. any high speed in canada now it seems) will take some time to download, also, from a consumer perpsective. This sounds like a really good option, but I'm still skeptical if it's got the right price point/features to be successful... also, all it needs to be is hacked once and then kazaa/bearshare/limewire/etc will get you all the free copies you need.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
In this case, I believe stuff like this will drive the demand for higher bandwidth. Up until now, if you didn't game, porn or warez, then getting off of dialup had no practicle applications. As these sort of services start to take off, assuming high quality, having a better connection to view it might become more important to your average user.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
new studies indicate that warner is losing up to 1% of it's potential viewing audience by not support lunix movie enthusiasts.
I don't think so. Two reasons: this is what plenty of posters here are waiting for, and the other thing is: it's easy, and it's there for you.
What do I mean with the second thing? It's the convenience, stupid. If I can download it always whenever I want it, for not so much money (okay, 3.99 is a bit steep, but that's new films - for older ones, consider 0.99 realistic), in guaranteed quality, then I might just as well not bother with cracking the stream (we're talking mass audience here, not hackers) and loading up my hard disk with something I might only watch another couple of times, if that. Downloading from P2P (in my experience) typically is hard work, trying to get the right stream, figuring out that the file is rotten, having no guaranteed feed and so on.
Apart, this might just be the killer application that triggers the breakthrough of broadband. Who knows.
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
Because of the following:
Which would you rather have:
Full-blown DVD, 5 days for $3-5, or:
Download - 1 day for $4?
I'd pick the DVD.
They'll have to drop the price a LOT to compete with brick-and-mortar rental store.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
DECSS was not an attempt to get free content, it was an attempt to play content on something other than a M$ box that had bought and paid for.
Will this play on my OS X box or has M$ closed this off?
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As much as we live in a virtual world nowadays, humans still like shiny material things they can hold in their hands. Hard to see how a timelocked file can overcome that urge to "own".
Which is especially funny when you consider that the newspeak for "purchase" in Hollywood is "Own it today!"
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
That's backwards. There need to be more things that increase the consumer demand for broadband. What broadband needs (and the Internet as a whole) is the next "killer app" to rekindle its growth and further legitimize. I spent much of the dotcom boom watching the pundits desperately search for this next killer app. One day it was "push" technology, the next it was Java. The next it was this and that and the other. Mosaic and the propogation of the WWW into the public consciousness was a killer app. MP3 was a killer app. Broadband is out there but there are a lot of "average users" who don't see much they can do with it.
Because of the fact that one of the most common criticisms of the media industry is that of insanely overinflated prices.
(Note: The MPAA is honestly nowhere near as guilty as the RIAA in this regard... At least not for video rentals. Don't get me started on the combination of jacking up theater admission prices AND subjecting us to advertising before the movie at the same time. A common bash of the RIAA is that the soundtrack for H.Pot is only $1 less than the full movie itself with all special features.)
In this case, they are charging an insanely overinflated price for these downloads.
They're charging $3.99 for one day, whereas most video rental stores give the full higher-quality DVD for $5 or less.
So for $1 more (Probably the same price or even less if I go to a smaller, non-Blockbuster/Hollywood Vid shop) I get 5x the playing time and DVD quality. If I'm a Netflix subscriber I'm even better off.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I agree about the impulse purchase part but imagine if you could setup some sort of client to schedule downloads for viewing in the future. Kinda setup your own tv schedule? That would be cool. oh, btw, how was King's effort "dishonest" ?
What slashdot really needs is a set of "pre-Redundant" radio buttons for every topic, where the editors can pre-post a few obvious replies. For example a Microsoft security hole could have the pre-Redundant reply "In other news: sky blue, pope catholic" and if you were going to post something that yawn-inducing, you could just press the radio button and have it registered like in a poll.
By midyear, the Harry Potter DVD had shipped 6,550,000 units (#1 for the year).
The studios should see this as proof that if they sell a reasonable package at a reasonable price, people WILL buy it. Yup, piracy sure is killing this business, isn't it?
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Mr. Burns: "Smithers, I believe I'll donate $1,000,000 to the local orphanage....when pigs fly! hahaha"
*homers pig flies by the window*
Smithers: "Will you be donating that money now sir?"
Mr. Burns: "No... I'd still prefer not"
Thank the accountants who finally realised that:
6.5 million units * the per-unit cost of licensing macrovision > the margin on the remarkably low priced harry potter dvd * the number of people who would have bought it but copied it instead
Since they are providing the movie as an individual download from their server, each download should be unique. I would be very surprised if they did not watermark each download in such a way that it could be traced back to whoever originally paid for the movie (credit card, or whatever). This should make it harder to pirate the movie, because of the danger of being caught if the pirate failed to strip the watermark completely (not easy, if hidden well and the original is unavailable).
Also, I would be very surprised if they did not require an Internet connection to activate the movie once it has finished downloading. The 24-hour timer could then start at that point. It would be extremely unfair to start the 24-hour timer before the movie has completely finished downloading, as many of those hours could be used up by a slow download! Each viewing of the movie probably also requires an Internet connection, as pointed out earlier, if only to connect to an external trusted clock (it would be otherwise trivial to change the computer's clock to defeat the 24-hour timer).
Think it will succeed? $3.99 is a competitive price with Blockbuster and other conventional video stores. However, the selection is very poor. HP is clearly an experiment by the studio, as they released it on DVD without Macrovision. They took a leap of faith there, and they are doing it again with this Internet download offer. They are waiting for results before offering any other major film (hence their padding of the service with only obscure B-movies).
I'd be interested in knowing the piracy rates for HP versus a similiar major film; my bet is that the lack of certain copy protection measures doesn't make a difference, as the DVD format has already been cracked six ways from Sunday. Affordable downloads are the way to go to defeat P2P, making it easier and less frustrating to get the content legitimately!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Well... before your time, perhaps... but the fact is, If Warner Brothers is all set up to deliver online content (and they certainly are), why not offer it, even if it isn't convenient for most? Even if the scale of use is tiny I have to believe that they could net a profit considering that the product is just bits.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries