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The Movie Studios' Next Step in Online Movie Delivery
Con Zymaris writes "Here's another piece on the how the movie studios are trying to co-opt the movie delivery mechanisms of the 'counter-culture' set, but instill major restrictions such as IP-address range verification to ensure country of origin, and maximum 24-hour-play lifetime for each downloaded movie."
Here is how it works. According to this page, it's Windows only. Too bad.
Not sure where you live, but here in Japan with my 12MBit ADSL connection, I can suck down a 1400MB file in under an hour. That's usually about the same time I would kill driving all the way to a rental place and back, not to mention the money I save in gas and also not having to pick a different movie because the one I wanted was already rented by other people.
I've dirtied my hands writing poetry, for the sake of seduction; that is, for the sake of a useful cause. --Dostoevsky
I live in Canada, and my ADSL ISP limits my monthly transfer to 5 gigs a month. After that, I pay 10$ a gig. So...
5 gigs = ~7 movies @ 700 MB each = 40$ (monthly rate for adsl)
+ 4 US$ * 7 movies * 1.5 exchange rate = 42$
= 82$ total (plus tax)
82$ for 7 movies? That I can only watch for 24 hours each? When I can buy NEW DVD'S for ~20$ each! It seems that the movie companies are shooting themselves in the foot multiple times with a plan like this...
When I buy a movie on DVD at Blockbuster for $19.99 - I own it outright. I can set up a theatre and show it for profit.
Um, you "can", but not legally unless you jump through the proper "public performance license" hoops. Otherwise all you're allowed to do is to show it in your home to friends/family.
"The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life"
Actually, no. You do not have "public performance" rights when you buy the DVD, you need a special license for that.
ssh into a box in country B, from country A. Then tunnel the file to your machine.
connect to the internet, then connect to a router in country B, ala anonymous browsing services
have a looooong network cable from country B to country A :)
hack into a major internet provider ;)
alter the program which reports the IP, or otherwise spoof the IP address verification
et etc...
Note that there are only two main methods I can think of here:
Going somehow through a machine which actually has the country B IP address
Somehow faking your IP so the verification process is foiled.
Basic membership is free, Pay per View is $3-4, premium membership is $9.95/month.
/. weenies. Girls Gone Wild, etc...;) Have fun, kiddies.
Most of the newer relases are avialable only to premium members. Yes, they have an adult selection for you
There are a few free (as in beer) movies. Shorts mostly, a LOT of Mr. Bill from SNL, other movies no one's ever heard of.
Randomly cruising through the 650 movie list, I checked out a free 6 minute short, "Automatic". (It was pretty much the first 'free' one I came to.) Run in a window the stream quality on cable was 'not too bad'.
Pop it out to full screen, however, and there was significant pixelization.
(Philips 17" monitor, PIII 850, Intel i815 integrated video, or a Dell Latitude with AGP Matrox vid)
Oh yeah, don't have any auto pop up things (email, IM, whatnot) running on that PC. Awful annoying have your email client scream at you during a quiet scene in the movie.
Would I pay $4 for movie from here? Not a chance. Would I pay $10/month for premium access? HA. Netflix at twice the price is waaaay better.
The home movie experience is so far from the average PC user as to be unworkable via this method. I suppose if you had a hotrod PC dedicated to the living room, with all the fancy graphics, a fat pipe, a $1000 monitor, and a really good vid out signal, then maybe you could reproduce the quality of a $200 TV and a $60 DVD player.
But probably not.
Next, we shall investigate capturing a movie from here via a USB Dazzle.
Lets see.
By keeping the average bitrate to a range DSL can stram over, it's not so bad. You've got a movie at your fingertips.
But on the other hand, I know what 650MB movies look like, and no matter what format you use they still look like crap. Worse than VHS, let alone DVD.
Sounds like they'd be better suited to cap the movies at around a gig and have the users have like a 2 minute streaming buffer or so. At around a gig, you can get much better than VHS quality.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I will agree bandwidth advances are going to keep continuing for a long, long time, and i will agree that it's inevitable that yeah yeah someday we'll be able to watch DVD streaming video on a TV downloaded off of your average consumer-level broadband service.
:)
However, i for one don't see any indication that the "someday" when this big leap occurs is going to be anytime even remotely soon.
I mean, the last i checked, all the big bandwidth-selling companies-- especially the DSL providers-- are having lots of financial difficulties. Also last i checked there's an absolutely huge glut of dark fiber just sitting there because doing the last mile to most places just isn't financially viable.
I wouldn't say the bandwidth market is dying, but it really honestly looks like it isn't going anywhere at the moment, and a lot of changes are going to have to happen before we start seeing big leaps of any sort.
Am i wrong?
P.S. If by "afoot" you meant "sometime in like five to fifteen years", then yeah you're probably right and i apologize for wasting your time
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
If the movie were encoded with a high compression/high quality codec like DIVX at DVD quality, it would end up being somewhere around 400-700 megs. Any less would probably be unacceptable to true movie fans. Streaming isn't much of an option, because even with DSL or Cable, the image quality is still very poor and net congestion causes a lot of degradation.
The problem I see is that files that large at least 6-8 hours assuming a broadband connection (Linux Discs are about that big), and assuming there's no net congestion. Longer, if there is. Even assuming someone is willing to wait that long for a download, you'd have to plan well ahead if you want time to enjoy it