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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 :)
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