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Disney to Make Movies Available Online

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the pay-to-play dept.

musiholic writes "Disney has cut a deal with Movielink to make various Disney (and Disney subsidary) films available for 30-day paid downloads. Users can watch the film an unlimited amount of times before the movie expires. The movies requre Real Player or WMP."

7 of 355 comments (clear)

  1. Wow! by WuWarrior · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can't believe Disney actually came up with this. But what prevents the people who pay for the movie to share it?

  2. They Don't Get It! by blackmonday · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't watch movies on my computer screen. I watch them on my TV.

    1. Re:They Don't Get It! by moncyb · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Are you saying you don't want to watch movies on your computer screen? Don't you realize just about any computer's display is far better than analog TV? According to my communications book, NTSC analog TV is 428x339 60 Hz interlaced. Unless you're using an Atari 130XE, that's quite bad.

      As to "they don't get it", they don't. I'm not paying money to a company who wants to take control of my computer. I don't want to pay money to a company who is trying to extend their copyrights forever, yet they will wait until the copyrights of others expire so they don't have to pay royalties. There are plenty of other nasty things they do.

  3. should be fun... by BFedRec · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Should be fun, but I don't think the disney rental world is the best for downloaded time stamped movies. I know as a parent, the KID movies are the ones you end up BUYING, as they are most likely to be watched over and over and over again for the next several years... and disney is the most common of that genre. Though if it's not TOO expensive I would probably try it... and if they tied it into a discount if you purchase the DVD... hmmmmmm

    --
    wordtrip.com
  4. Re:Screen captures? by rgoer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What's to stop me from using a screen capture program...

    Nothing, probably.

    But, assuming they are going to treat this like a thirty day "rental," my guess would be that copyright law would be applicable and such a screen-capture duplication would be illegal--since you don't own the thing you rent, it is not yours to duplicate.

    Then again, I could be wrong about this (among other things).

  5. Not going to work! by The+Master+Control+P · · Score: 3, Insightful

    * I will not use Windows to do anything, and you're not going to make me.
    * I don't want to wait an hour to download it and then get to view for 24 hours, when I could get it for the same price in 10 minutes from Blockbuster.
    * The rental will have far superior video and audio quality.
    * My computer is upstairs, and the TV with a real sound system is downstairs.
    * DRM. Although at any rate, I could simply connect my video cards' S-Video out to my capture cards' S-Video in :)

    So, in short, the quality necessary to shove it down even a broadband connection sucks, it's DRMed, and I don't like watching movies on my computer.

  6. Re:Here we go again: by Durandal64 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's why you code to standards, genius. You would spend the same amount of time developing a site and product that was standards-compliant as you would locking non-Winblows users out, and it'd be open to everyone. If a browser doesn't do it correctly, then it's not standards-compliant, and the developers need to fucking fix the thing. Imagine a TV that didn't follow NTSC in North America. Web browsers are one of the only products whose main features include performing their basic tasks correctly. Do TV's advertise "Can display any NTSC video stream correctly!"? No, they talk about features.