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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."
Well executed, convenient to me as a consumer, and available under terms of fair use.
If this works smoothly, I'm all for it. It's about time content providers realised the Internet was a place to do legitimate business!
// -- http://www.BRAD-X.com/ --
Just a note before the usual /. yelling and screaming about how bad all the corporates are. Remember that the people trying this sort of stuff are still working out what works. Sure, it might seem over controlling now and make people just use KazaaLite etc instead but eventually we should reach a fairly agreed level of freedom.
:]
It is pretty unfair to think they should give everything away for free however it's also unfair to impliment such strong rules on the end user. Maybe in five to ten years we will have a solid system that (most) people like. [Plus maybe some decent broadband to help online movies become more of a reality
Anyone agree?
My blog [.net, rants, general IT]
I am preoccupied with my digital rights like most /.ers. Hence, I don't participate in this garbage. However, since the fall of Napster, many have sought legal and legit ways to get media on the Internet--the Internet is more than suitable. Hence, they accept license agreements that resemble the physical limitations on renting movies at Blockbuster, for example.
As much as I hate the DMCA, etc., this doesn't bother me too much. I don't lose any rights by not using the service which I frankly don't really have a burning desire to use, as others do.
So others may face crappy lame restrictions. If they don't like it--stick with Blockbuster. However, a number of people here on Slashdot have been asking for similar services for a while, and now that it's coming, I see no reason for anyone to whine (what did you expect?).
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
The article says that this is limited to people from the United States. Couldn't someone setup a proxy or NAT server in the US to make WB's servers think that the request comes from the US?
Bah, here in Calgary, Canada I can watch recent movies from my cable company through my digital terminal set. Only costs $5 and I can watch them anytime and any number of times with 24 hours of ordering. Plus I can pause, rewind and fast-forward. Too cool. Now if they would improve the selection...
http://www.shawondemand.ca/
They are giving you the information. Only it is in a form that self-destructs (large appliance manufacturers take note). Remember that the only way for them to make sure this works is to take away your right to control the information on your system. Your right to hack your own files.
Every company in the world would like to be able to sell you a product with a self-destruct device embedded that you couldn't remove legally. Only Hollywood thinks that it is their right.
They want it to fail. That way they can say "we tried online delivery, but the pirates stole it and we didn't make any money, see?" And buy some more laws to take control of our machines.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
You know, I have gotten pretty pissed off at Hollywood - trying to make sure I watch what they want me to watch when they want me to watch at the price they want me to watch it at.
:)
Has anyone considered BMWFilms.com? I mean, their films are short, but they are free. The only product they are trying to sell is BMW automobiles, and I already own one before I started watching their stuff. Now if they could just get other films produced, then we'd be in business. They don't even care if you share the films with your friends. Only hangup is that they need Windows Media Player, or Quicktime (they offer a third option, but as I don't use it and don't remember what it is - I won't guess).
When are we going to get tired of watching stupid Hollywood films, and just make one of our own - open source film.
Well I live in New Zealand, and we get new releases from anything between a day ahead of the states and six to nine months behind.
Movies are sometimes released a day early because NZ is on the other side of the International Date Line, so we hit the official release date before anyone else. Some movies have been very late though, because the major holiday seasons are at completely different times of year. (Southern Hemisphere means that summer is around December/January, etc.)
It makes complete sense for the movie industry to restrict the sale of US-released DVD's in NZ, because often it's been released on DVD before it's hit the theatres here.
Ironically though, they can't. Region encoding was ruled as anti-competitive in New Zealand some time ago. Although the movie industry can sell as many region-encoded DVD's and DVD players as they like, it's also completely legal to take their player down to the local shop and have it de-regionised. It's also legal for businesses to parallel-import goods (such as DVD's) from other companies, bypassing the NZ movie industry.
"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."
/. September 16, but it got rejected. Ah well.
Check this out. It's exactly what you ask for: a insanely simple to use Internet/TV convergence device, which, using the PS2 as an interface, streams mpeg, mp3, divx , xvid and more over your local LAN from your PC. I've been playing with it for over a month and it's beta but cool. Works on Linux, Doze and OSX.
I submitted a story on Qcast to
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Isn't the point of online on demand movies that there is no physical overhead? No clerks, lighting in the stores, etc. etc. I can get DVDs for 3 DAYS for 3 dollars. Make it two dollars a movie and offer higher quality stuff and I'll think about it.
It looks like it had a lot to do with the monopoly of AOL/Time-Warner. Here's a copy of their letter to the public. This also seems to be the strategy of Microsoft, with the aquistion of MSNBC, and pushing their video format and keeping others from using it by legal means.
i l. html
Right now would be the time to come up with an open source/open standards video format and get it into wide use before a napster like takeoff. Now, getting another standard to be used for MP3 like ogg would be hard because so many files are already encoded in MP3, and you can't convert from one to the other because they are both lossy formats.
----
Intertainer letter:
As many of you already know, On September 24th we filed a Federal Anti-trust suit against AOL Time Warner, Sony, Universal and Movielink. On October 21st we plan to take the site down until we can work out a fair business model with the defendants, who control more than 50% of the theatrical motion picture business and more than 60% of the music business.
To the 147,000 broadband users who became Intertainer members and to our friends and colleagues in the trade, we appreciate your continued support. We promise to return when there is an environment in which the independent company such as ours is allowed to compete for your business. Whether the current environment of increasing media concentration is good for our Democracy is of course, the ultimate question.
Yours truly,
Jonathan Taplin
Chairman and CEO
jon@intertainer.com
Intertainer, Inc.
Write Chairman Powell (FCC) at:
http://www.fcc.gov/commissioners/powell/mkp_ema
Write Attorney General Ashcroft (Department of Justice) at:
AskDOJ@usdoj.gov
I guess since the MPAA is in bed with Microsoft, us linux users are going to still have to rely on newsgroups, and P2P to download movies?
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
I have little desire to stream anything because I cannot archive it. Getting my hands on plain old media is still the better value. It can be loaned, watched later when the mood arises, resold (I know they *hate* that one.), played on just about any device I have, or destroyed. All my choice all the time.
Now getting the streams at the same time the movie is in the theatre would be interesting. It would be nice to check out a movie before dropping $50 on a flop. You would not have to watch the entire thing, just sample until you know you want to go. They could even include exacly this sampling feature.
So, it is likely I will remain uninterested in this --for now.
Do I wish it would fail? Not sure really.
Even though, I am not likely to use the service, I do know plenty of people that would. They should have the choice to do so.
Problem is that boom or bust, our Internet will be changed to meet the needs of those providing these services. I think this means more lockdowns, slower access for 'non monetized' traffic, and trouble for open systems in general. Think about it, they will *NEVER* make this avaliable on an open platform because they know better. Though they could just produce a binary, but why bother. Most of the money will be in the win32 user market.
This really is just continuing evidence that we are all still in trouble. Open systems and networks will suffer because they do not generate revenue which is what this is all about right?
Something to keep an eye on though.
Blogging because I can...