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."

Comments

Downloading movies?

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

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.

Re:Downloading movies?

[Anonvmous Coward]

"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."

Fair point, though I disagree. I've seen 500kbit video that was quite acceptable. However, I don't want to debate about personal tastes. I have an alternative proposal.

Why doesn't AT&T provide this service for it's broadband customers? All they have to do is place a few servers between their customers and the outside world (heck, those might already be in place) and provide these movies as streams right to them.

The stream wouldn't have to go out to the net, so ATTBI would have pretty good control over the QoS. The connection should be pretty fast and reliable. And, it shouldn't cost them any extra to stream it down since they're not going to the outside world.

I'm a little surprised AT&T hasn't done this yet. It'd be quite an upsell.

Re:Downloading movies?

[nathanh]

Downloading movies in any decent quality over the internet, simply for viewing it, is a joke.

You're being short-sighted. 30 years ago it was "a joke" to waste your expensive long-haul serial links on e-mail. 20 years ago it was "a joke" to waste your precious BBS caps on images. 10 years ago it was "a joke" to waste your 14.4kB Internet connection on music files.

Today I have no concern with downloading email, colour images, music files, etc. Movies are still too big for me but I've no doubt that in 10 years it'll be par for the course: just like music files are commonplace today. The companies are going to use the bleeding edge crowd - the people who can afford a phat pipe - to develop and test software interfaces and licensing.

This is the frontier. These people are the pioneers. You're the luddite proclaiming "there's no immediate benefit so there's no point in even trying". Pooh to you.

Way too expensive

[m0i]

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?

Ah, no way...

[weave]

Let me count the ways why this will fail...

1. Bandwidth caps
2. Max usage per month caps
3. Per GB pricing
4. Cable/telco company will label you a bandwidth hog

The Bandwidth of Blockbuster

[nweaver]

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.

there is simply no way

[sydlexic]

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.

Re:Too bad...

[Johnny Mnemonic]

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.