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

The tighter they grip, the more fall through

[Drunken Coward]

When are these studios going to get it through their heads that these ridiculous copy protection schemes don't do anything but instill bad faith? The IP address restriction seems silly, the IP address has almost nothing to do with the country of origin. I can think of a thousand different scenarios in which a person may appear to have an address located in Hong Kong but is in reality in the United States. And the 24 hour playtime limit? There is a reason Blockbuster just extended the rental time from 5 days to 7. That's how long people want it! Some people say it's good that studios are beginning to get the picture, they're becoming less restrictive with digital media, but a compromise like this is just bad taste.

Destined to fail - on purpose?

[captaineo]

Many posters have commented that the pricing is rather absurd, the DRM restrictions are very confining, and hardly any big-name/popular movies are going to be released this way. I have a feeling this offering might be designed to fail - after it bombs, the MPAA can say "look, we tried to offer movies online, but nobody bought them, everyone just pirates movies, etc... So we need mandatory DRM a la SSSCA or CBDTPA!"

If my theory is correct, I predict that whatever encryption they are using will be easy to crack. This would make the MPAA's argument for mandatory DRM even stronger. ("See? They hacked it! Waaaah we need Palladium!")