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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.
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
$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 :)
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 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
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!
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...
"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
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
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
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....
I don't really mind double posts on
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.