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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. "
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...
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
$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 :)
Is that starkly different from the people who purchase "pay per view" movies?
The ultimate factor there is convenience. I agree with you however and would rather go to the store and rent for cheaper. Still there is certainly an audience for this feature. This is nothing new.
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troll blacklist. Please mo
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
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!
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...
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)
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(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.
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.
Oh, that's brilliant. That's right where the market is. People don't care as much about renting movies that are older, but people are desperate to see movies on opening day. That will be really good for the movie studios that they can get more people to watch it on opening day, thereby avoiding the "Hulk sucked!" word of mouth that drops off attendance after the first day/weekend. Unfortunately, I don't think that would happen because the theaters would put up a huge fuss over that because that's where they make their money. If people could see movies on opening day at home, the theaters would lose revenue on the $6 bag of popcorn and $4 pop that people buy in there.
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
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.
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.