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New Disney / Samsung HDD Video Set-Top Box
MDMurphy writes "Disney announced a new set-top box built for them by Samsung that will hold movies downloaded over the air
via what they call MovieBeam in an internal HDD. You'd pay a monthly rental fee for the box and $2.39 - $3.99 per movie for a 24 hour viewing period.
Dotcast Inc. provides the
movie beaming, sending the digital
data out over terrestrial TV broadcast stations. "
The movie will not be of the same quality as DVD. Also, if it's the same as Movielink and other pay-per-view, there is still a ~6 week window that movies will be available at the rental store before they make it here.
I don't understand what the benefit is to people who are already paying for DirecTV or Digital Cable.
Eastday.com
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
You wasted your FP on that?!?!?!
I give it 3 days.
Whatever happened to the Sony/Matsushita deal to create a media-box oriented Linux distro?
Here's a link
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
Oh Boy! for a 2 dollar rental feel I can download movies at a day/$4 that I can get for a week/$4 at blockbuster. What a deal.
I do security
I can't really see this working too well. Sure retunring tapes and DVDs is a pain in the ass, but limited systems such as this don't exactly have a good history of success. Remember those DivX boxes that could play movies that would expire after a couple days? Crashed and burned, all it did for the world was provide an amusing angry character for Penny Arcade. I'm betting we won't really hear much about this again.
Yup...
...this won't get hacked just like DTV, DishNet, 802.11, and everything else sent through the air!
Anyone remember the Divx DVD wannabe? Doesn't Disney ever learn. I personally would not pay $x a month for a box, and then an additional $y to rent a movie for 24 hours. that's just stupid.
Will you get widescreen, or at least the option? What about the 5.1 sound? And I doubt the video quality will approach DVD. When they say you'll get exactly the content of a DVD, then there's a reason to switch. The only service to do this seems to be netflix, which just sends you the damn disc.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
The RIAA are the ones that need to implement some kind of system like this.
It needs to be inexpensive and very easy to use (like, easier than P2P).
Until then, they won't be able to curb the use of P2P for copyright violations.
$7/month rental fee for set-top box.
$4/movie
$30.00 activation fee in some areas.
Holy shit. Break it down...let's say I watch 7 movies a month (yeah right, I wish I had that much time).
$4 for movie + $1 rental + $.50 for activation fee (assuming roughly 70 movies a year, activation fee spread out over year) = $5.50 per movie, with more restrictions than you get with traditional rentals.
Where's the cost savings? Why on earth would people buy this...are they really so lazy that driving to the movie store is such an effort (please don't answer that!).
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
Sounds cool, but why only 24 hours? If there's one thing people want these days, it's not to be bound to any arbitrary schedule. It'd be cooler if they could allow you to have, say, five movies at a time "checked out", with no time limit. Then it'd be like NetFlix, but without the mail :)
You sure have a knack for searching Google news.
Instant Karma's gonna get me!
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
I know one difference was you still needed to buy the disc in the store.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Now if you'll excuse, I've got to slip into my mid-afternoon tin foil hat (the mid-day one has worn out it's blocking powers by now).
Of course, with the current roundheeled FCC majority, it's probably a safe bet that if TV broadcasters wanted to start "premium" terrestrial pay services, they'd probably be allowed.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
I'd prefer to have all the movies I want for a flat monthly fee... or better.. higher UL/DL speeds...
fortune is my favourite linux command
I like the price and I'll be game to use it 'on demand' but the monthly service fee has to go for the box - I'd rather just buy a box for $50-$100 and have a glorified dvd/vhs player.
Disney should take the next step though and for $20 bucks you should be able to 'own' a license to unlimited playbacks of a movie. Just press a few buttons on my controller and a pin number and wala we own the license and the kids are watching their movie.
It would be enough value for me, in 'unlimited' form that I'd be interested because that way there would be no 'wearing out' like vhs/dvd's have and my kids (who watch their favorite movies literally hundreds of times before moving on to the next 'favorite') would not be costing me $3/movie each time they wanted to see it on the 'current' plan.
The problem I see with PPV I currently have is that I've gotten snobbish with not wanting to watch Full Frame non surround sound presentations of a movie. I can pay 4 bucks to watch cropped stero movie or drive to blockbuster and pick the same movie up, widescreen and surround sound for the same 4 bucks. I don't need crisp clear amazing dvd picture quality, it can be close enough but it has to be widescreen and surround sound would be great. The lack of choice means that my TV viewing is limited to what's on High Def tonight or pop in a DVD, until they get the presentation correct I won't sign up. I think slowly at a trickle, consumers are getting widescreen snobby - even surburbanites know the difference now and not just the geeks =) - Mindee
TV
DVD
VCR (legacy)
Cable decoder
Tivo
Surround sound receiver
Playstations (1 & 2)
Xbox
Game Cube
and now a Disney decoder box you rent PLUS movie rental. Great. Another box to dust.
Sig Applied For
If you're going to use the here's the same article... karma-whore bit, at least learn how to spell "article".
Disney is just trying to get into the "last mile" game. Its media business is well vertically integrated except for its lack of cable/telephone/ISPs that actually enter people's homes and generate monthly revenues.
In contrast, Viacom, AT&T, AOL et al have last-mile capabilities, which freaks out other media companies like Disney and NewsCorp. (This is also why NewsCorp is going after DirecTV.) Disney/NewsCorp are afraid that they'll lose pricing power, not to mention being more susceptible to the advertising market because of the lack of monthly cable fees.
Anyway, it's an interesting play by Disney. I don't suppose that cable companies will much like it. I'd expect "HBO on Demand"-type services to be beefed up soon, because that in effect price-undercuts Disney's new service (HBO service for many people is a sunk cost.)
Fax Baba!
Lets hope this goes the way of Circuit Kitty's DIVX concept. The whole idea is lame, the cost is lame, the fact its another device is lame. Can we also say a little late to market. We already have set top boxes like tivo. So now there seriously thinking that we are yet again going to stack another device in our home entertainment system. Can we say NetFlix, hell even block buster is doing the all you can rent for x dollars a month. Sounds to me like some suite had this great "idea" about 2 years ago and has somehow convinced executives not to cancle the project. I wonder who their given favors out to and what favors?
Serenity|Chaos
Its just payperview that costs more. How is this any diffrent from a cable box with a built in DVR.
the notion causes the eyecon0meter to lurch.
the ONLY way we'll purchase ANY more recorded media, is when we get to own the material, & there is NO time limit/phonIE payper liesense hostage agreedmeNT.
the real artists should get busy protecting their futures from the corepirate nazi softwar gangster greed/war mongers. they're trying their execrablest to drag most of US into hell with them.
we've scene enough thanks.
consult with/trust in yOUR creator.
...great engineering idea ruined by management.
And yes, I like to wait in line.
AC comments get piped to
So that means that your first movie is gonna cost anywhere between $39.47 and $40.97.
And since I rent on average of 2-3 movies per month, this is not a very cost effective alternative. It's only convenient. This is clearly targeted at people who rent something like 10 movies a month.
Anyone know via what means the movies will be downloaded? Do you have to have a cable or DSL connection for this?
For my part, going out to rent the movie is part of the movie viewing experience. Interaction with the clerks makes it seem a little less solitaire.
Seems like a lot of these new technologies try to make money off services that already exist (and work perfectly).
Why should TV go digital? My existing TV works fine!
Why VoIP? The phone system works okay for me!
These so-called next-generation products are boring!
It sounds like they have taken care of #3. But if I have to wait longer than it will take me to go to Blockbuster (I didn't see a download time in the article) for something that is going to be less than VHS quality, they aren't going to get my money.
Oh man no way would I plug this thing in.
Blar.
No. Don't you get it? It's a subliminal message, not a mistake. The post was sent in by an employee of Samsung. By using "buy" instead of "by," they're trying to get us to "buy" this piece of crap.
Not quite true. SelectTV started as an over-the-air scrambled channel. It required a set-top box but no cable. This was back in the early- to mid-1980s.
A long time ago (25 years?) there was a company called ON TV in Phoenix that broadcast their pay signals over a normal UHF channel (channel 15 I think). They had a contract with the local indy station to take over their broadcasts from something like 7pm until some odd hour in the mornning.
In order to receive the channel content, you had to have/rent/purchase a decoder box that had nothing but a big knob on it that said-- wait for it-- Off and ON.
My grandmother had one. It worked well enough. Nothing special, really. But it was pay tv over a "free" broadcast channel. Everyone received it for free, but you had to pay to decode it.
Heck, the video stores give you a week! And they have a limited supply of physical DVD discs to work with. With this thing, there's nothing to "return", so there's no reason not to let users have access to it for least a week. Obviously they won't let you have it on your set-top-box HDD indefinitely, since they want you to buy the overpriced DVD, but 24 hours is too short a time. I estimate that the DRM will be broken within a week of release, making this whole point academic, however...
An initial lack of customer interest if not outright failure. This should be immediately followed by loud public statements blaming the lack of interest on air piracy (hacking the signal see also here), the Internet, and El Nino, at which point they will look to begin lawsuits, sell the technology to someone else, or change the law to compel each and every one of us to buy the damn things.
Perhaps they'll even sue all satellite dish manufacturers and radio makers under the DMCA!
"Disney announced a new set-top box built for them BUY SAMSUNG that will hold movies downloaded over the air..."
:)
Now the editors are hiding subliminal messages in the form of "typos" !!
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
I think it's interesting all the ideas that have come and gone, that use the TV spectrum. Intercast for one. I also remember a C-Band satellite service that used the entire channel to DL data (barcodes on parade). XDS and closed captioning. Up next turning the entire system into a Broadband network.
"HONEY!!!! Snow White is coming up all distorted, will you adjust the Pringles can again?"
"Damnit!"
... i can just use my computer, skip their fee, & watch what i want when i want.
TV is dead folks, it just hasnt stopped moving yet
This offers JUST what we've been waiting for, high quality pr0n, anytime, without the late return hassles.
...uhh, nevermind.
Will this support HDTV? Also, I don't see too many people paying a membership fee and then paying for each rental. You'd have to be a very heavy movie watcher for that to make sense. They should have filler content that is free with the membership like documentaries and such.
mbbac
Honestly, how long will it be before the delivery mechanism is reverse engineered and the security broken? Even when systems like this have a decent attempt at good cryptography (DirectTV, etc.) they usually get broken. And then there are the other schemes (SDMI, cuecat, etc.) where the attempts at security just give the /. crowd a good chuckle.
:)
It's hard enough securing Alice and Bob so they can talk to each other securely. It's much harder when there is one Alice and *many* Bobs, and the Bobs are divided into a group you can only barely trust (those that subscribe) and those you can't trust at all.
Anyway, bring it on! I'd love to see another example of applying security techniques to this kind of problem... it's just that I anticipate that it will be another "whatever you do, don't do this" kind of example.
I would have expected the pr0n industry to be first with this. Go Disney!
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
Just like digital satellite, which is a total free for all. They are yet to produce a secure technology that can prevent those that are really determined from circumventing their protection schemes.
They can not produced a system that can not be breeched. As long as the receiver/decoder is in the hands of the end user the end user holds the keys to the kingdom in his hands. He only needs to figure them out. And after that, free shit for everyone with a desire and an Internet connection.
Put current releases on this for $10 and watch the green roll in. After two-three weeks in national release, release to this system, and they'll do great. It'll cut into theatre revenue a little, but less than you'd expect.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
You need more friends. Perhaps one of them should be a female.
Life in Orange County
As a rule, organizations that end in AA are evil. Ones that start with AA usually aren't (e.g. AAA, AARP).
First, I'll mention the obvious thought that will come to people's minds: "It has a HDD in it. I wonder if we can run Linux on it!"
Aside from that, there is going to be more potential for hacking/modding the boxes to pirate movies and, voila! copyright infringement lawsuits galore! Pretty soon, all their lawyers are going to be sitting lopsided because of how fat their wallets are becoming. This will probably get into the same grey area that is being worked out in the courts now about unsecured WIFI networks since these movies are being broadcast on regular TV waves. "You are broadcasting your signals through my body; why don't I have a right to decode them?"
I agree that the monthly rental fee for the box is awful; it's bad enough that they are charging you about $3 for a one day rental, without even the replaying value of a DVD. I guess this does play to the old standard of marketing in this country. There's always money to be made from banking on the laziness of the American people.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
Disney sucks in the first place
"My shit always works sometimes!"
Besides, who'd brag about buying all that junk on Slashdot? "Look at me! I'm rich enough to buy every consumer grade ephemera on the market" (maybe I'll get that homophobe anonymous coward to come out of the closet)
Sig Applied For
(I didn't see a download time in the article)
In the aticle, it says that in an area with two towers, dotcast can upload 25 DVD-quality feature-length movies in a day. Wait, 25 movies? During any month, they're offering a choice of 100 movies. That means that if one chooses poorly there could be a window of 4 days(!) from when one chooses to "rent" the movie (I bet they charge you then) until you actually get the movie. And what happens if it's downloading in a bad storm and reception is bad ... well, it'll come again in about another 4 days. But then, since they claim DVD-quality, they might actually have down point 1, but point 2 is painful. And what happens in later areas (if it doesn't die quickly) which might only be able to get one tower? 8 days. 8 painful days. Now just imagine if the 24 hour viewing window started when the movie's done downloading rather than when one starts watching it.
Especially since the article claims that Disney is aiming this at people who rent 2+ times a week. Part of the thing of renting that often is that you get what you want, when you want it. If I want to wait days, I'll start begging netflix to ship to canada.
Imagine the pr0n that Disney could produce! All those mousketeers grow up... and then there are the animated characters! Dopey Does Dallas!
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
This might be an interesting alternative. There is already a website that does this with books, but this would be sharing more media. It's free and it looks like they want to make their money from amazon. I don't really think it will work, but it's a nice idea.
Who wants to pay a service fee, plus $3.99 for a movie. I don't even need an HDD recorder, and I pay the same thing for an all day movie on Dish Network. I'm sure that cable companies and DirecTV offer the same things. Heck, if you live close enough in town to pick up terrestrial broadcasts, then you probably don't mind the walk or very short drive to the video store. Sounds to me like this is going to go out of business as fast as Circuit City's Divx (not DivX ;-) ) movies.
I'm pretty sure that as long as the licensed operator provides the service they're licensed for, anything else they might do is OK, providing they aren't causing extra interference and are operating under all of the limits they're required to ( serving x percentage of population with whatever required coverage, etc ).
To be more explicit, as long as the TV stations which are broadcasting these encrypted signals _also_ broadcast a signal you can pick up on your normal TV, there's no regulation I'm aware of saying they can't charge for the ability to descramble an encoded signal.
Having said that, yes, this does seem like a bastardization of the original intent of PUBLIC airwaves and of course, I Am Not A Lawyer. If you don't like it, start a grass-roots campaign and write your congresscritter.
I agree with other posts that the point is moot. Who is going to pay a monthly fee to have these boxes when you can have NetFlix instead ? Of course, I wonder why you'd buy a Microsoft operating system when there are alternatives, too...
This is just a test, though. Hopefully the results will tell them they have to drop the monthly fee and extend the viewable hours. If they make it cheap enough, they just might have a killer app. What we want is video on demand without montly fees. It must be competitive with DirectTV, cable, NetFlix and BlockBuster, which this is not. Pricing may in fact be their biggest problem with this.
Disney eh...? Imagine a BigBadWolf cluster of those!
AT&ROFLMAO
I personally mine, smelt, forge and press my own tin foil hats. The whole reason I'm living at this "abandoned" tin mine is to get the raw materials I need to be safe. SAFE!
Aluminum? Amateur.
Disney could partner with Tivo to create a movie download service using your broadband connection and your existing Tivo box. Advantage for disney is an already established hardware base and also Tivo gets a cut and possible new customers as well. Of course this would only be availble to series 2 customers because that has the necessary encryption. The ISP's would probably fight it though.
I have no sig...
is that you can only rent disney movies through it. I hear the first month will feature "Herbie the Love Bug Goes to Camp" and "Don Knotts vs. The Kicking Mule".
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
...then I turned down a job to work for them last year. It's a startup division owned by Disney, located somewhere near Burbank. Basically they were kinda lowballing the salary, and had all of the problems (risk/no security should the product fail) of a startup with none of the perks - eg stock options. Plus it would have been a long drive..
:)
Anyway, the back end of their digital distribution system was a large Linux-based storage system which received the digital content nightly from another facility IIRC. So, if you buy this you are supporing open source
It was interesting to hear about the security those digitized movie images went through - there was quite alot of paranoia surrounding the possibility of an employee copying the content and walking out with it.
Well. According to DirecTV's recent lawsuits, even owning hardware that could be programmed to break signals is implication enough to sue ya for $12k. Doesn't matter if they have any proof at all. All they need is to see a credit card transaction from years ago with someone who sells the stuff and you are toast.
:]
Toast in the sense, that even if you fight it, you'll still be out a few thousand in legal counsel. Then if you lose, add $12-20k on top of it and possible criminal charges.
I'd just say fuck it, man. There's no point in stealing less-than-DVD quality signals when companies like Netflix have such an insanely affordable service.
For some reason I just thought about those goons who would spend 2 weeks downloading a 320x200 divx camera rip of some blockbuster SFX movie on Kazaa. Sometimes free isn't the best option..
"...a new set-top box built for them buy Samsung that will hold movies downloaded..."
it seems someone has a hidden agenda.
I should have noted that it has to contain some form of DRM that the studios "trust".
I know it is possible to get what we want, good quality, decent file size and the extras. It's getting that and what the studios are willing to use that's tough.
The reason Movielink or any other online studio approved streaming site forces you to use IE on Windows is that it's the only platorm that the encryption works. That and WMP on the Mac sucks.
It's the same model of early PPV (whose success was only marginal) that required you to pay attitional fees per month in order to get PPV.
"Doh! Let me get this straight: I pay you for the privledge of paying you for the privledge of renting from you a movie for a couple of hours?
"I don't think so, d00d."
It seems to be part of the idea of MovieBeam is that a) you can start a movie whenever you want and b) it's pausable/restartable over 24 hours after purchase. You can't do that with DirecTV or digital cable without a PVR or PVR/Decoder combo attached. You're still at the mercy of the broadcast schedule.
I bet a lot of a families with kids would a have a higher video consumption if they could watch the movie instantly instead of waiting for the start time or driving to the rental store.
AAA lobbies for more highways and less mass transit. AARP lobbies for preserving massive entitlements for retirees that will bankrupt America's youth.
Dotcast says it can move that many movies in a day, but if you read the disney release they say the box comes with 100 movies and 10 get replaced each month.
it would be the MPAA. Music is the RIAA.
Who is music videos?
Will I retire or break 10K?
week, not month. sorry.
Why on earth would people buy this...are they really so lazy that driving to the movie store is such an effort (please don't answer that!).
Actually, I will answer this. Some people choose not to own an automobile because they choose not to pay for the expensive high-risk auto insurance that all potential insurers have tried to force on them. Such "risky" customers include males under 25, people who take prescription medications that affect ability to operate heavy machinery, and residents of New Jersey. The price difference between renting a movie through this proposed set-top box and renting a movie at a video rental store is no more than the price of a bus ticket.
In addition, a video on demand system is less likely to run out of copies of a particular title than a video rental store is. Often, video rental stores will run out of undamaged copies of a title that has subsequently fallen out of print *cough*Vault Disney*cough*.
Will I retire or break 10K?
New Line is distributed by Warner, and Miramax is distributed by Disney. From the quote you gave, it appears all the MPAA distributors except for Paramount have signed onto this.
But where are the independent films? Will studios not affiliated with a Big Seven distributor be able to get movies onto this system?
And how much of a cut will Disney take? I don't want to give any more money to Disney's lobbying department than I absolutely have to, for these reasons.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is yet another attempt by the lovely folks at Disney to circumvent the existing home video standard. Disney was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Circuit City's stupid divx system. Its all about charging the same price up front for a DVD rental without offering any of the DVD's special features, and then getting extra revenue off a monthly access fee and 2nd day viewing window. Lame. Circuit City's divx was crushed thanks to the online community's boycott; its time to launch another one - this time against Disney. And please don't forget to support NetFlix while you are at it; its bad enough they are having to compete with Wal-Mart now...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
There are no regulations regarding "non clear" transmissions that are ancillary to your main television service. Already there is data going in many vertical blank and horizontal blank (Microsoft Actimates) intervals on analog TV. Now there is Dotcast modulation as well.
In the DTV realm, you have the possibility of sending IP encapsulated in MPEG-2 transport stream, which is fairly standardized. Already there have been tests of sending Windows Media UDP streams and multicast file transfers over DTV signals, while at the same time other MPEG-2 PIDs carry "in the clear" MPEG-2 video streams. It is really up to the DTV station how they want to split up their 19.3 Mbps of data, as long as one primary service is "in the clear".
Optical drives in PS2 consoles playing PS1 games wear out faster than optical drives in PS1 consoles playing PS1 games.
A PS1 and a PS2 can be used on separate TVs, so you still have something to do while somebody else in the household is watching eight Meg Ryan movies in a row.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This analyst doesn't like it.
His prediction? "There's a $100 million write-off headed Disney's way."
Why do I need a sig? I never post.
three DVD players (DVD,PS2,XBox)
PS2 is, by most accounts, a mediocre DVD player at best. Can it do 480p output? Or is it limited to 480i, S-Video?
Xbox can't play DVDs without the extra-cost memory card that contains the DVD player software. It may also wear out faster (see PS1/PS2 comment below) if used as a DVD player.
and two playstation 1s (PS2 can play PS1 games)
PlayStation game consoles contain moving parts. A PS2 console pressed into service to play both PS1 games and PS2 games will wear out faster than a PS2 console that plays only PS2 games.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Stored on a LOCAL HDD?
Seems that this could easily become a haven for any cracker to get free movies from. It would also have to depend on whether you had to pay and then download, or download then pay to view. If the former, I see this product dying a quick, painful death.
is consumers can easily see there's something wrong with being unable to play their dvds without constantly paying more money. This is because they're used to having unlimited use when they've bought physical media. Here, there is no physical media other than the box. The box will seem like cable pay-per-view to the consumers, which they're already familar with. In this context, consumers won't see anything wrong with paying for content over and over again. Basically, this is how the media giants are planning on sneaking pay-per-use on the consumers.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Great Disney now that you've basically made the video store obsolete what are you going to do to help the 2 or 3 million people that make that industry function? MacDonalds does not have room for them and surely anyone working at a video store is not about to work at a fast food place.
Companies need to think of the social impact of their inventions lately. Putting 3 million people out of work takes 3 million people out of the circle of capitalism. I think those who are benefitting from capitalism the most are forgetting that they need small jobs to empower those who work them to make sales. Otherwise it's like trying to feed a cow in a desert.
How is this any diffrent from a cable box with a built in DVR.
Because with this box, Sonny Bono owns you.
Will I retire or break 10K?
No amount of coolness can compensate for the Evilness(tm) of Disney's hand.
.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
The truth about Disney
Will I retire or break 10K?
Disney have little regard for such concepts as democracy and consumer rights.
They throw so much money at one particular senator that he has come to be known as the 'Senator from Disney'. Surely this is contrary to our image of democracy.
Until they retire their constant stream of 'donations' and make a public apology for further corrupting an already pretty fucking corrupt political system ( land of the free, my arse ), I urge everyone to do the same as I do: hire their DVDs, re-encode them in DivX;) format, burn them onto CD, and distribute them as much as possible amongst your friends, reminding them each time why you have unresolved issues with Disney, and that the alternative - giving them more money - is only going to make matters worse for all.
I think I'll keep paying 19.99 a month for UNLIMITED movies via NetFlix (for which I am averaging available freetime for 8 movies a month). And if I am really an El Cheapo, I'll go WalMart to save a whopping $1 and change a month. I'll use mye already paid for DVD player as well... mothly box rental fee... $%^& that! These people just don't get it... do it right or don't do it at all.
http://www.nisbett.com/science/ Creation vs Evolution ... give me a break, soft porn is harmless compared to this.
I can get ppv's via my tivo and save them forever. There are also some nice movie extraction tools and howtos to expand your hhd space...
No one has been able to provide a secure system that can't be breeched by someone determined (even OSS). Just look at OpenSSH and their recent problems. I predict the death of the lock industry. A free for all. We have the desire and the bolt-cutters.
I have on-demand digital cable. It already does this for $3 or so a movie, and no extra fees over what I already pay for digital cable. (yes, pr0n is like $10)
Chalk this up as too little to offer, too much to pay, and too late on the technology. From what I understand, the quality won't be near DVD. $2.39-$3.99 per movie for 24 hours PLUS a monthly fee is *WAY* overpriced. And this is coming from Disney! What a horrible pair.
Why a horrible pair, you ask? I'm not a parent myself, but I'm very aware that Disney is like crack for children. Try telling them "you can only watch this for one day" and you'll never hear the end of it. Kids want to watch the movie over, and over, and over, and over, and over, ad nauseum. This will never work! That's why Disney movies sell so well, because the parents have to be hardasses to rent the movie for a day and cut the kids off cold turkey.
I also work at a video store, where our new releases are $3.90 for 3 days (including tax), and all of the older childrens' movies are free the first day, $0.49 each additional day. Pay per view pricing, while only a one-time view (unless you're sneaky/sleezy enough to video tape it), is around that price (and no monthy fee besides your cable bill), and now at least Comcast is offering "on demand," where it's like PPV + DVR features of ff, rw, pause, play and stop, and you can watch it for as much as you want for 24 hours, still around the same cost. I'd love to see where this thing goes.
THE BOX COMES WITH THE FIRST 100 MOVIES PRELOADED. It's a 160GB drive. Read the article.
10 movies get swapped out every week on a trickle basis. You don't know a movie is available until it's been loaded on the drive and ready to go. There's no waiting for a movie since you don't know what's being transmitted next.
They are one of the many players trying to take public airwaves and make proprietary data applications that run on top of them.
So, what you would have is some shady broadcaster who got a license for our public airwaves, and they carry a crappy standard definition broadcast of their home shopping network. On the remaining bandwidth in that ~20Mbps ATSC broadcast pipe, they would carry encrypted data that could only be used by subscribers to this Disney service.
Screw that. If they want to broadcast, they should pick up the tab for the service, not use our "free" spectrum.
And, the broadcasters trying to do this should also be smacked down. If they don't plan on using the bandwidth for HD broadcast, which takes the full pipe, they should be forced to share the bandwidth with other broadcasters who only want to do SD.
Another way of looking at it:
8 movies per month, chosen from the Netflix catalog of 15,000 titles: $20.
8 movies per month, chosen from Disney's catalog of 100 titles: more than $30.
Getting the Samsung box cheap after the service folds, and turning it into a home media system: Priceless.
...and he would play....
Dude, The download speed over the VHF television airwaves (remember that, before Cable and Satellite TV?) will be between 4.5 Mbps and 5.5 Mbps, which is about 3x faster than a typical Cable/DSL internet connection. And when HDTV becomes more popular, the same movies will be transmitted over the DTV airwaves at approx 8~10 Mbps. At those speeds you'll easily have 10 movies overnight. Trust me, I used to work there.
Well lets see Time Warner Cable in New York City, for digital cable its 10 bucks a month, plus the service package(mine is the ultimate cuz I got internet too). total bill is like 130 a month but for that i've got 200+ channels, HBO,SHOWTIME,Cinemax on demand plus 200 or so movies to "rent" for 24 hours all in high quality signals plus this month they are releasing a PVR that will hold stuff indefinately so yea i think disney is coming a little late to the party but i applaud their effort but the delivery method is a little suspect especially since Dotcast's website claims it can transmit more data in one day then a user could use in a month? well what about 50 users or hell a hundred.?
Anyone know what compression format this thing is going to use?
MPEG-4 would seem like the obvious choice for a set top box, but I haven't heard any indication of what it really is going to be.
My video compression blog
Di$ney wants nothing more than to have young children (who watch a Di$ney movie hundreds of times) pay each time they watch it.
This is like stupid, civil liberty destroying, laws. One system gets rejected; they are back six months later with the same concept, wrapped up in a new, more obfuscated package.
The whole thrust of Di$ney is to lock up their catalogue so they can feed it to you (and more importantly, your kids) in pay per view chunks, thus ensuring revenue for years to come. Micro$oft is no different. They will not rest until they have a system in place the public will swallow.
America's obsession with laziness just helps the system along even quicker. ("Wah, it's too hard to rent a movie AND take it back the next day!")
Recognise this for what it is and you will be able to reject it that much faster, and inform others of their real corporate goals of lifetime subscription models to ensure their payola for years to come.
Quizo69
Visceral Psyche Films
24 hours is the most stupid thing I have ever heard.
if I'm downloading a movie to watch, I'm going to watch it straightaway
if I want to watch the movie again later, then the earliest would be the next night, which is just outside the freaking 24 hour limit so what the fuck is the point?
Just give me to three hours and 85% of my money back. You can keep the change
The only way to push a new system like this, especially if it costs as much as renting DVD's,
would be if it supported HDTV. Disney movies,
especially Pixar, look GREAT at 720p. Unfortunately
it is impossible to get HDTV content on demand. I
would pay for this system if it did HDTV, otherwise
no way.