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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."
Downloading movies in any decent quality over the internet, simply for viewing it, is a joke.
Even with a very fat pipe, downloading 700mb for an ok-quality divx or 1400mb for a good quality DivX is still a very long wait. Streaming a pixelated mosaic still sucks over broadband, too.
Besides, if you have a broadband connection, chances are you live in a town with a Blockbuster video, and you can afford a $50 DVD player -- it's still by far an easier solution.
The media companies should just give up these crappy pay alternatives to piracy, as the capitalist model does not work in the digital world where there are no laws and the ability to mass-duplicate any form of media, unless the draconian Palladium takes over -- which will be over my dead body.
It'd just be easier to sell cheap DVDs and CDs ($10/DVD, $5/CD) with a business like newegg, where you get everything in 2 days and the prices are rock bottom. More people would actually buy their music and movies at full quality instead of downloading them if their prices weren't exorbitantly fixed.
How can they justify such a high price, whereas for cheaper you can rent a DVD:
-with a sound and image quality far superior
-that you will get in less time that it takes to download it
-that you may be allowed to keep longer than 24h
-that you can watch on your home theater and not on your 17" computer screen
Do they have customers for this service at all?
have you been defaced today?
No you cant!! You buy. And its yours to keep, but it for personal/private use. You cant open a theater and charge people to get in. You dont have "the license" to redistribute it (the content of the movie). Yea you can have friends over to watch it, but you cant charge people and advertise.
The last part of your is true though, DVDs can really dent box office sales.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
It's the time limit. If it was a week, it might have a better chance, but think about it. How long does it take you to download an iso? When does that 24 hour period start? After you have the whole thing downloaded? Or when it starts getting sent from the server? You don't really get 24 hours in the latter case.
Not to mention...$7.50 a movie? come on now. I'm not so lazy that I'll wait 6+ hours to download a movie at twice or more of the price of a dvd at the blockbuster or hastings or hollyvood video, all within 10 minutes.
I appreciate the effort, but it's just not gonna be pleasant to use. People download movies because they want to keep them and watch them when they feel like it. How about me being able to download a movie for $7.50, or even $10, and keep it for an unlimited duration? Heck, even if I have to put in a credit card number each time for verification (ala e-books) it wouldn't be bad at all.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
Joke?
Just because you're not aware of the big leap coming in streaming video...the joke will be on you, me thinks.
The liscensing is being worked out now....
I don't see how 700 MB downloads, for $4 and expiring after 24 hours, are worth it for anyone? They are trying to compete against Blockbuster, which is both cheaper, higher quality (DVD), and has much more bandwidth:
Remember, if it takes you 15 minutes through BlockBuster and back, with a 5 GB DVD, you are getting a nice 5 MB/second transfer.
Test your net with Netalyzr
no way an open source product will support the format... and not because they don't want to. think about it.
if they're enforcing a 24 hour playable window from time of download, this can only be enforced via software control. you can't throw in some downloadable atoms that will explode after a day. so that means if an open source program can play it, it can also be recompiled to disable the 24 hour restriction.
I saw on The Screen Savers that Intertainer.com WAS doing online films. They had sample content, old TV shows and such, that ran pretty well over broadband.
They just closed shop and filed suit against the major US movie studios claiming that they couldn't get content at a reasonable price. It turns out that the movie studio "synergies" are set up to get any other source from being able to provide content.
So as we suspect, the MPAA isn't against movies being available on the net, they're just against the content coming from anywhere else than the big studios.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
I was actually reaching for my wallet. I have wanted something like this for a long time. The internet offers the promise of more choice than the still choice limited and time restricted movies available through cable TV pay-per-view--like that advertisement, "every movie, in every language, ever made, ever." Truly refreshing--even my local Blockbuster doesn't have that.
And I even have the latest Windows Media Player installed--so I'm good to go, right? But oh--no Mac support, irregardless that I got WMP from a legally purchased copy of Microsoft Office for OS X. I guess Windows media isn't Windows media, so I'm back to Netflix as my best option. Too bad. My wallet is back in my pocket, and another company loses me as a customer due to a short-sighted market penetration strategy.
--
$tar -xvf
Shouldn't it be cheaper than renting a movie? - You wait longer to DL than to go to store - You only get it for 24 hours as opposed to 7*24 - It's of poorer quality, since the quality would be reduced for download - Most users don't have TV-out... they'd be watching on their 15" CRT Monitors... - It eats away at your bandwidth cap That's reason enough for it to be cheaper, since you, the consumer get a shorter end of the stick. There's more, though. You save them money by cutting out the middle man. They don't have to pay someone to press it to DVD. They don't have to pay truckers to send that video to the store for you to pick up. They don't have to pay the store to store it or rent it to you. Hmm...
Region-encoding on DVDs is completely unjustifiable, save from a monetary standpoint.
Say Australians will pay the equivalent of $25 USD, but Japanese will only pay the equivalent of $15 USD. Region encoding allows them to market to both areas at the price people will pay there without allowing Australians to pay less. It's called price discrimination. If you take economics and study the supply/demand graph for estimated purchases vs. price, you'll see what I mean. Basically it's a method for a company to charge a higher amount for people who are willing to pay more, while not losing those customers who are unwilling to pay the higher price. It's not illegal to do price discrimination, (witness how cell phone companies charge more for minutes during the business day...people who need those minutes during the day will pay more, because, well, they need them.)
However, the method the MPAA has chosen to use does infringe on Fair Use rights.
-Terralthra...
DRM Failure=IP Spoofing+Video Capture
If the client address is spoofed then it can't expect any IP datagrams to be routed to it when the hosting site responds to that address.
"Specious Argument" + "FP Syndrome" = "embarrasing declaration"
HTH
why run from Vincenzo?
For the record the downloads are priced at $4 American, its 7.30 Australian. Four bucks ain't expensive.
For the sake of objectivity I'll list some Pros:
-700 megs if encoded properly should be somewhere
between VHS and Satellite TV quality.
-You don't have to drive to the videostore to return it.
-The possibility for a huge selection. How many Blockbusters carry that foreign or hard-to-find film you've been dying to see?
-The 24 limitation isn't bad if you consider that this is "on demand" with some serious lag. You simply download it the night you want to watch it.
A few people have discussed quality already but I think you make the best criticism here with:
>-that you can watch on your home theater and not on your 17" computer screen
Exactly. Watching this on a monitor will only make its lack of quality more obvious, the sound will be poor unless you have a kickass sound card and speaker system, you can't crowd around it like you can the TV in the living room, etc.
What this is lacking is a internet/TV convergence device that lets people (especially non-techies) transfer the download to their TV. The lower resolution of a television compared to a monitor will help to cover up the artifacts and other low-quality issues. Sitting 8+ feet from the TV helps too. If WB leased a webtv-like broadband device with a HD big enough to hold a couple movies along then I'd be all over it.
If you consider self imposed restrictions on availability on an otherwise world wide network 'convenient', then I guess maybe it is.
It's just like DVD region coding. A convenience to the people who are lucky enough to be in the right locale, and an artificial hindrance to others.
Ray
I think there safe. They can stay right where they are thanks very much.
That's crazy who would download that big of a stupid basically rerun that breaks in 24 hours...
I got a tv. I'll watch movies on tv, Computers are just sooo much more. Why would I want to watch TV on a computer? TV's are cheaper.....
People need there heads examined.
"It's about time content providers realised the Internet was a place to do legitimate business!"
Wow, wouldn't it be a wonderful development to actually see dot coms working on a legitimate business? Imagine a simple plan where consumers pay for a rational price for goods, and the actual content providers get paid for creating content.
I could really use a dose of honesty. I'm burned out on all the stupid selling for less than cost and making up on volume...funding free music with parasitic programs that try to claim commissions on all internet sales--popup ads and all the other silly things dot coms do to make money for nothing.
I could really use some good down to earth honesty from the mainstream-culture. I am just too burned out from the dishonesty of the counter-culture.
Now, I can understand the desire to prevent people from watching the movie on-line so that they can go see it in the theater first. But why is that such a priority anymore? Seems like they still make money either way. In some respects, they could make even more money. There are movies I want to see. I'd be happy to watch them if I had the tape, but I'm not so interested in making it to a theater to watch them. I'm sure there are lots of people that feel that way.
I think they would lose a lot more that way than they might gain (and I'm sure that's what they think). The goal is too maximize the revenue potential of each distribution channel. The studios have always been convinced that most people won't go out to a movie if they can or have watched it at home. Most films make a big chunk of their box office take on opening weekend, and then attendance drops off. With the methods currently in place, they can always pick up the people (read: $$$) who didn't catch the film in the theatres with the rental/sale release, but they don't lose any of the people who do go to the theatres -- people who might just stay home and rent if they had that option. A lot of people rent or buy a movie they liked when they saw it in the theatre. So the studios make money both ways, but they make more by getting people out to the theatres first.
My guess on the Harry Potter download being restricted to the U.S. is that Warner Bros. is just nervous about the whole thing. They want to get their feet wet and see how it goes. I doubt they'd have picked that film if the second Potter film weren't opening soon...it probably comes with at least a trailer for the new flick. It's hard to imagine they are very worried about piracy ... they know it has been all over the P2P networks for months already.
Michael
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
If you used some kind of a time-stamped public key on 10% of the frames (to be downloaded live), and those frames used as the source frames, couldn't you make it so that the decryption would have to be done live?
I don't think that such an idea would be impossible -- but I'm inclined to agree that practically, we probably won't see that happen.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Why were you reaching for your wallet? I understand that its exciting to see the beginings of an officialy sanctioned movie distribution system online. Nonetheless, there are some major problems with this.
However, Harry Potter and the other Warner titles in the deal, such as Mars Attacks and Dial M for Murder, are sold separately as a download for about $US4 ($7.30).
Like this for example. I can download this movie (call it 700 MB) over my fairly quick little connection here (1 Mb/s peek) and spend 8 (bits/byte) x 700 MB = 5600 min or about 1.5 hours downloading the movie. I can then watch it for upto and including 24 hours.
Or... I could get in my car, drive to Blockbuster, and rent the DVD for about $5.00. I can watch it for at least two days, probably three if I rent it at the right time, and spend about 10 to 20 mins depending on traffic conditions.
So what, exactly, is the draw of this?
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.