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Netflix to Offer Movie Downloads
kev0153 writes "Over at CNN Money they are reporting on a story about Netflix offering a video on demand over the web service in '05. They are also eyeing the multibillion-dollar video game market. "We're playing it a little defensively, because if we lose the digital download market, you'll soon be hearing about the rise and fall of Netflix," said Netflix CEO Reed Hastings."
but I don't want to download PS2 games on demand. They're freaking huge! I've only got 512 down, and it would take forever to download some of those four disk RPGs. But if I could make a backup copy...
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Someone will still be upset about the DRM and decide to crack it. Then again movies are harder to distribute then mp3s. At least high quality ones. ....And cue the people who say it HAS to work on every platform, be completely open, and so on, ad infinitum. If you don't like it, you can vote with your wallet, and not buy it.
Variety said the VOD offering will expand that to allow for up to three physical DVD or digital downloads at a time.
Yeah... how are they gonna restrict you to three downloads at a time? Good luck with that, my friend! As we've seen just today, no protection scheme will ever be anywhere close to secure.
Be happy. Nothing else matters.
DVD writers probably have something to do with this. With the release of personal dual layer DVD writers, the world of (DVD) movie rentals will change.
Is not announcing your product an entire year ahead of launch - giving your competitors plenty of time to catch up.
Case in point: Apple suprising everyone with iTMS - and than not getting a windows version out until all the other win music stores were released.
It won't be easy to pull all of this off. VOD is going to require a wholly new infrastructure and business model for them. Renting video games might be a problem too, when people start "losing" the games. A DVD probably runs about $5 in bulk... a game will probably cost them $30 or more.
Still, it's great to see some innovation left in the dot-coms of the world....
filmcritic.com - Movie reviews on Internet time
And why would the cable companies want to help Netflix out? They've got their own video-on-demand services to push. Netflix is just more competition...
~ Aero
Some of us do have the notion that that is stealing, and actually do make an effort to pay for what we watch and play.
Actually I think if the music/film industry had treated people well, instead of treating everyone like a thief just because some are thieves, then there would be little need for DRM and people would play nice. (The vast majority of people are fundamentally honest).
if I can download it off bit torrent, why would I want to pay for it?
Because the movies on a lot of the torrent sites (when you can FIND what you are looking for) can be low quality, mislabeled, and a lot of mainstream users aren't up for looking around to download and install the right codec. And that's assuming the tracker and seeder is up long enough to download it.
A lot of the same reasons people use iTunes.
I doubt it. Reed Hastings seems to be a pretty smart guy. I think he's just hedging his bets against a technology improvement that would make his business model obsolete.
Technology improvements, actually. First there's the fact that even DSL bandwidth is too little for a real movie.
Second is the fact that the market for watching a movie on a computer screen is really, really small. People want to watch TV in their home theater, not their office. Even movies-on-laptops is, in my experience, a thing to stave off boredom on long trips, not a major way of viewing films. Perhaps he's expecting there to be some sort of household entertainment bridge, like the MP3 receivers currently on the market.
Netflix real improvement in life came from offering subscription-based movie access, which made the whole thing convenient. It depended on a technological improvement: DVDs. You couldn't really do Netflix with VHS; they're too big and fragile. It's nice that Netflix postage is prepaid, which is one fewer thing to fiddle with when you receive movies.
That was pretty clever, and it wasn't the first thing Hastings thought of. He had tried plain rentals first, but it didn't work. Maybe he's looking for something clever in VOD, too. We'll see.
Dude, I hear what you're saying, but there's a difference between voting with your wallet and a company making a product that works properly from the get-go. It doesn't make sense to me that a coporation would make something closed and spend billions of dollars defending their product from crackers, anti-trust lawsuits, and constant requirements for upgrades. The way it works today is any closed proprietary format _will_ be broken and made available to the public. Why fight it? Just create something that works for everyone and you'll save yourself a lot of hassle and dollars in the long run. And you'll look good to the hacker community and the public, to boot. Then again, I'm not a corporate vice president of legal affairs/development/marketing/etc., so I have zero badges to wear that will allow me to crow about this with any credibility.
I also reply below your current threshold.
Nice troll. Lotta bites today.
True story.
Netflix has been on Slashdot a couple times before, and it's been a popular online business for years. And, as someone else pointed out, Slashdot is a predominantly American site. iTunes is U.S.-only, but you know what that is, right?
The satellite companies would be better off to partner with Netflix and offer deals along with your satellite service.
Satellite companies just do not have the bandwidth to do movies on demand like the cable companies do.
Great news with the video games. Depending on how it will work, it could kill off gamefly. Why pay to just rent games when you can also get movies, right? I'm wondering what quality the ondemand will be. Some how I dont think it would look the same on my HD 61 inch screen with 5.1. If not, I would rather wait the day it takes them to mail me my movies.
I don't think this will really be a problem. DVD's still are around, even though their encryption has been cracked. It is fairly easy to either rip or copy DVDs anymore. Distributing them is what is difficult. Someone who set up enough bandwith to distribute DVDs would not be able to stay under the radar of the MPAA...so it would limit illegal distribution. Of course there are those who will download lower quality pictures off of slow connections, but they are in the minority. Of course as bandwith gets cheaper this will be more of a problem for the movie industry. They will have to do a better job than the music industry of making a product that people want to buy, rather than depending on DRM.
They will once they look at the numbers. Porn is one of the best selling things ever, and nobody would want to lose an opportunity that large. Except, possibly, some religious or morally incensed people, but greed should rule those out.
I seriously doubt they will rent porn just because it is a big market. Blockbuster doesn't and I wouldn't categorize them as religious or morally incensed.
They are merely image concious. That is to say, they are not willing to give up the family market just to grab the extra sales in the porn market. And being new at this (movie downloads) makes them very visible and extra sensitive to their image.
Technically, the music industry DID treat everyone as being honest. Until fairly recently, audio CDs had no protection on them whatsoever. That didn't stop Napster and Kazaa from booming as these "fundamentally honest" people began trading files in mass quantities.
Not that I support the RIAA or their actions, but it is important to remember that things WERE all rosy and DRM free at one time and it got abused.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
There are other attempts to provide movies on demand like Movielink or whatever, but I haven't heard great things about their qualities. How amazing would it be to have a pipeline of 3 to 4 movies downloading on your machine when you're at work, or hell, when you're at home preparing to watch one! And all for $20 per month. With high-speed broadband services, this is all possible. And this will all be arriving once I probably end up buying my first HDTV. I'll have a DVR, HDTV cable, and videos on demand through Netflix. I love this world! All we need now is antigravity & ZPE and I'm set!
Not that I support the RIAA or their actions, but it is important to remember that things WERE all rosy and DRM free at one time and it got abused.
Perhaps, then, you could explain Macrovision to us, in light of this "rosy" world of the past?
Or why DAT uses 48KHz, while CDs use 44.1KHz?
Or why Jack Valenti uttered his now-famous quote, "The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone"?
Sorry, but that mythical rosy world simply does not, did not, and will never, exist. Content producers have fought with the public over control issues since the very first round of suits involving Edison himself. And before that, even Gutenberg took quite a lot of heat, from both the church and governments, for making mass-distribution of media possible. I suppose I have to grant you that, before Gutenberg, we didn't have problems with the idea of copyrights (though I have little doubt isolated incidents still arose on occasion). But since then? We have lived in a literally epic struggle between over who has the right to make copies of what.
The "digital age" has simply brought this problem into the spotlight - With luck, perhaps that means we can look forward to some solution to the issue in the next few decades, rather than another 600+ years of little-known skirmishes.
Until fairly recently, audio CDs had no protection on them whatsoever.
Disingenuous, at best. True, CDs didn't start having copy protection until recently (actually, they still don't - Because Phillips refuses to allow "broken" audio discs to call themselves CDs). But that had nothing to do with trusting the consumers, and everything to do with the simple infeasibility of copying them until a few years ago. Sure, we had the ability to rip a CD for perhaps 15 years, but to do what? Even as a geek myself, I didn't get a burner until perhaps 5-7 years ago (I suppose they existed before then, but for a pretty hefty price... I bought mine when they finally broke $250). And without the ability to copy a CD, what would we have done with a rip? You couldn't fit a lot of MP3s on a 1.5GB HDD. You can'd download them very fast at 28.8kbps. So what threat did the technical feasibility of copying a CD pose, when practical issues made it irrelevant?
Or to add to my above comments, perhaps you have a good explanation (other than assuming their target market as thieves) for the RIAA tax on blank cassette tapes?
I think you will find that all the DRM nonsense did exist on DAT long before Napster/Kazaa. The RIAA had long signalled that they believed all customers were thieves. Look at blank "Music" CDs vs "Data" CDs, the taxes on blank tapes and attempts at other media in order to recover money from "pirating". The only reason there was no "protection" on audio CDs was because they couldn't think of a way to do it without breaking compatibility with standard players. Even that hasn't stopped them in recent years.
What Napster and Kazaa showed is that people wanted to buy music online, but the music industry refused to sell online. In the absence of any way to preview music, buy music online (especially back catalog/less popular stuff not available in retail stores), people did the second best thing which is stole.
I think many honest people considered it a form of "fair use" to listen to music beforehand, and when the music industry (whose primary purpose is to sell music) provided no way to give them money for music, just took what they wanted.
yes, exactly...
take my XBox for example...
um, nevermind...gotta go!
Add an extra "on demand" shows menu which TiVo keeps updated with the latest and greatest. Start playing the video and it downloads and buffers the film as it plays. I'd have thought the cable companies would be dead keen. Course it'd only be feasable on something like DirecTivo, digital cable or fast ADSL.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.