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New Movie Download Pay Service
SailorBob writes " After nearly two years in production, Hollywood-backed Movielink is giving the green light to its online movie rental service.
The Web site, a joint project of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros., will debut Monday with a limited selection of first-run and classic films from the five major motion pictures studios, in a test of the technology to select U.S. residents. Though the film studios have licensed content to other video-on-demand sites, it is the first time they've introduced a service of their own.
Of course, just like the new music services, this is also only available to US residents. "
Dont they want money from outside the US?
I am interested in this, but they are not letting me in, so does anyone know of any open proxy servers based in the US so I can have a look see?
Cheers
Thank you for your interest in Movielink. We want you to take part in the powerful Internet movie rental experience that Movielink delivers, but it is presently unavailable to users outside of the United States.
;)
I'm don't see why I can't even have a look? Are they just paranoid of people copying their service in the rest of the world?
I'd be nice to know more, but seems we have to resort to Gnutella/eDonkey/etc... here
.: Max Romantschuk
The only appealing use of this that I can think of right now might be to load a movie or two on the laptop prior to a plane flight.
I was hoping that this may allow you to burn a DVD or VCD from the downloaded site but no such luck. I can't think of any time that I would sit and watch a movie on my PC except when travelling.
I can't quite see how they expect to make any money off of this. To be competitive this services has to offer something better than the existing distribution channels. I see far too many bad points and only one good, no returns or late fees.
Any would they care if it ran on anything else but windows?
Before some linux fanatic mods me down, look at
this. In the "Web Browsers Used To Access Google" graph, IE clearly dominates everything else.
This is from August, but I doubt anything has changed. Linux is only 1% of the OS used to access google. Even with it's own linux portal!
I'm a big fan of linux. My websites use linux. My firewall is linux. My Tivo is linux! However, if you think that companies will try to build a web application that only 1% of population will ever see, then you're misinformed.
Now let's see if I get modded down...
Live web cams
Yes, gasp on that last one. I do actually pay-per-view right now, when there's something showing that I want to see. Look, actual currency, waiting to go into your bloated pockets! I'm not a habitual collector of free content. I'll only leech if there's no easier way to view the content (like, you refuse to make it available to me to maintain your artificial market segmentation).
But this is asking too much, offering too little, and it's hostile as all hell. It looks as though it's pretty much set up to fail, which might be the point.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
"Back in the Day" I ran on-air ops for a major cable premium network, from whence this anecdote, and perhaps some inkling into H-Wood's current mindset, arises:
In the big hubbub prior to "The Day The Skies Went Black," i.e., the time when HBO and Showtime began encrypting their signals (early 80's), denying them from the long-standing C-Band pirates, various congressfolk went ballistic. Their gripe (inexplicable and amazing to us in the industry at the time) was that the cable networks could not all-of-a-sudden deny the pirates their entertainment; we had to at least offer a for-pay alternative to what they had gotten previously for free. This neccessitated a tremendous cost in building out certain shared encryption operations centers that would pool subscriber data, etc etc. (Happy upside that nobody predicted was that the revenues garnered from catering to the former pirates was HUGE, in some networks' instances well in advance of Cable susbcriber revenue.)
Of course, this didn't stop the real dyed-in-the-wool, off-shore-operating, parrot-on-the-shoulder, chip-modding, math-prodigy, Trans-Am-On-The-Cinder-Blocks, Complete-and-Total-Social-Outcast Pirates, who set about cracking the (ridiculously loose, in hind sight) encryption we used at the time. But... because we had gone to the pain and expense of creating this "inclusion" distribution for all the dis-affected Big-Ugly-Dish geeks nationwide, we as an industry had tremendous goodwill with the Gov't. This led to numerous FBI sting operations against the pirates, whereas before the industry couldn't really get the authorities' attention on the matter. In fact, my boss at the time was one of the industry guys who travelled around with the FBI agents cuffing the pirates. Big, Big, Fed-Entertainment Industry co-op, once the Ent Industry showed good faith in creating a system that ensured "no one was left out."
You see where I'm going with this. "Back In the Day," the pirates said, basically, "If you don't want me to view your network, keep it out of my living room." Tough to argue with, so the Ent industry encrypted and provided Joe Dish-Geek a means to buy his entertainment. Flash forward 20 years (ye gods... has it been that long? Christ, I'm old...), and Joe Internet-Geek is saying, "Look, I'm getting this entertainment on the Net, I'm accustomed to getting it on the Net, you can't deny it to me." By providing a net-based, for-pay service, H-Wood is "fulfilling its tech evolutional obligations" yet again. And they are doing so faster than their peers in the Music and Book Publishing industries.
Only Windows? Only US? Who cares? Certainly not H-Wood, or US Law Makers and Enforcers. It ain't about wide-spread adoption (although if they can make some money on this, they won't turn it down) it's about having some credibility and teeth in the subsequent piracy pogroms.
dude, you CAN spoof the OS in the browser useragent. I use a mac and believe the numbers, but if you believe that an OS can't be spoofed in the useragent you are mistaken.
"
Thank you for your interest in Movielink. We want you to take part in the powerful Internet movie rental experience that Movielink delivers, but it is presently unavailable to users outside of the United States. "
I guess Denver, Colorado isn't a part of the US. (Or AT&T Broadband, either.)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I worked on the site, so I can't comment on the political aspects of it (which are large and complicated) but I can tell you this:
Last night I downloaded a 650mb film in under 20 minutes. I was even shocked when the Movielink Manager estimated the time to download at "less than 25 minutes", thinking it was in error. But the sucker came down at a steady 4mbps.
I've only ever gotten speed like that from Apple FTP, MSDN and one or two Internet 2 guys on IRC. Maybe it's due to huge capacity with probably only me using it (heh) but whatever the complaints, it's hard to complain the download is slow.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
It's a bit low-tech, but since I moved to NY I've been getting four or five movies a week from the public library.
I'm considering becoming a library contributor; I'll buy a movie, watch it until I'm tired of it, and then give it to the library for the tax break and the possibility of renting it again later.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.