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. "

Comments

Whatever happened to?

[swordboy]

Whatever happened to the Sony/Matsushita deal to create a media-box oriented Linux distro?

Here's a link

Oh boy!

[Gyorg_Lavode]

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.

TV broadcasts have always been free to recieve...

[isaac]

I wonder about the legal issues here, since licensed broadcast TV signals have always been in the clear and legal for anyone to recieve. I'm not sure if it's clear that TV broadcasters can deliver encrypted pay services on their sidebands, or that it would be illegal to break such encryption, DMCA notwithstanding.

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

Great Concept

[Honest Man]

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.

Re:This is just great

[phalse phace]

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.

Re:Based on my experience

[snubber1]

1. Xvid or Divx containered in OGM format can support 5.1 and subtitles, with *amazing* quality in 1400 MB.

2. With your average 1.5 Mbit cablemodem connection that is just over two hours for 1400 MB, so give a little queue time.

3. Just over $200 for an Xbox and a mod chip..... ;)

4. If I could be legit and do this... well....

Re:Why don't we get it for a flat fee?

[Awptimus Prime]

Then get Netflix.

Another option is to get a dual tuner PVR and record PPV with it. It's not technically video on demand, but close enough.

I've noticed one of the real crappers about how americans watch movies. One word sums it up: impulsive.

Go to www.imdb.com, browse around. Find artists you like, directors, etc. Read reviews from real people, select your movies, add to your netflix queue or record them off the PPV channels with the PVR. Then watch them on Friday/Saturday/Sunday with the lady.

You can't really beat that for download speed. Realtime PPV signals equate to around 1.6MBytes/sec (assuming DVD quality). If you want to equate UL/DL speeds using a different transmit medium, such as snailmail, you are still doing pretty good:

I figured it up and, assuming a 72 hour turnaround on my netflix movies, I'm getting what amounts to 104,166Kb/sec via snail mail when I do 3 movies at a time. This also has the advantage of getting all the extras and unlimited access to the DVD until I feel like sending it back. If you were evil, you could even rip the movies onto DVD+R media. Don't do that, though, it's illegal.

Please excuse my random babblings.