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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.
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.
There is a knoppix CD with MythTV on it if you are looking to try something. ftp://ftp.rdt1.org/From/KnoppMyth/ -Mary
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.
Their target market is very small, according to the folks at Disney that I talked to. It's targeted at people who rent like 10 movies per month and also incur a lot of late charges. This way they can still rent a lot of movies but not suffer from late fees.
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.
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".
Looking at the MovieBeam web site helps :-).
The box is delivered with 100 movies pre-installed (see here for a list of them), 10 or so are replaced each week. Movies are sent continuously in the blanking interval of normal TV signals (probably ABC stations). Dotcast claims datarates of up to 4.5mb/s for analog TV and 10mb/s for DTV (I'd assume it depends on whether SAP or other datastreams are also being shoe-horned in). There is no way to request a particular movie for download nor any way to watch a movie that's been swapped out. Some will be in letterbox format and/or 5.1 Dolby depending on what the studio provides. No alternate soundtracks or DVD style extras. Rentals are for a 24 hour period and may be paused, rewound, fast forwarded, and watched an unlimited number of times during that 24 hours. Video connection is via composite or s-video, audio via L/R or S/PDIF (optical). MovieBeam claims that you can not record movies off the box (Macrovision?). And you must agree not to open the unit (at least one site has claimed the unit self-destructs if opened).
Even MovieBeam's FAQ admits that the only difference between this and cable/sat PPV is the rewind/etc feature and the fact you don't need cable or satellite service. So it may be good for people who can't get or don't want either. For those of us with hi-def satellite, 16:9 monitors, and surround-sound, it's not really too appealing.