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."

Comments

They must be...

[BarryJacobsen]

They are also eyeing the multibillion-dollar video game market video game market.

They must be eyeing it with both eyes.

Re:They must be...

[gilrain]

They certainly seem alert enough to be using both eyes!

I think it's really refreshing to see a CEO doing more than spouting positive press for their stock holders. NetFlix isn't scared to say it like it is: "Yeah, we've got this market covered; but competition is heating up, and we need to expand or things could get rocky!" Way to go, NetFlix.

'Course, I'm a big NetFlix fan. Love seeing those red envelopes in the mail. :)

No matter how flexible the DRM

[TheKidWho]

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.

Re:No matter how flexible the DRM

[Dr Reducto]

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.

Re:No matter how flexible the DRM

[maxbang]

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.

Re:No matter how flexible the DRM

[LupusUF]

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.

Re:No matter how flexible the DRM

[gglaze]

yes, exactly...

take my XBox for example...

um, nevermind...gotta go!

Video-on-demand, eh?

[Faust7]

The servers with the porn titles better have some mighty good hardware.

Re:Video-on-demand, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Netflix doesn't rent porn.

Re:Video-on-demand, eh?

[Bobdoer]

Netflix doesn't rent porn.
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.

Re:Video-on-demand, eh?

[drinkypoo]

If it's BDSM porn, it'll be demand-on-video on video-on-demand.

Re:Video-on-demand, eh?

[Cranky_92109]

Netflix used to carry 'Mature' titles. Softcore type stuff. I suspect that either they figured it was too easy for kids to get a hold of or perhaps people kept renting it and not returning it. I know that most of the titles were always listed as 'Long Wait'. Errrr.... not that I ever had any in my queue or anything......gotta go!

Re:Video-on-demand, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's open with pr0n, you can watch BDSM on BSD!

Re:Video-on-demand, eh?

[Manfre]

I guess they realized that it was too hard to compete with newsgroups and p2p programs. Why go to your door to pick up the porn you ordered, it's too much effort!

Re:Video-on-demand, eh?

[bill0755]

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.

Recursion?

[spellraiser]

They are also eyeing the multibillion-dollar video game market video game market.

Hmmm - so they are going to market video games inside video games? Wow - that's like, so cool!

I don't know about you,

[Bobdoer]

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...

Re:I don't know about you,

[superpulpsicle]

I agree. I think the U.S. market is trying to push too much through the bandwidth. This ain't exactly Japan where everyone lives 3 inches away from each other with 100baseT networks.

Re:I don't know about you,

[retto]

I'm sure they mean renting the actual disc, like they do for movies. I doubt that games would be downloadable, at least for the current generation of consoles.

Sony seems to be pretty interested in it as a future distribution method, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it in a couple of years. The story-driven, linear RPGs popular in Japan could work, if you are able to download the content as you go. Each night download the next few levels, and unless you run through a lot of the game in one sitting it wouldn't be a problem.

Re:I don't know about you,

[wronskyMan]

The story-driven, linear RPGs popular in Japan could work,
Or the rocket-driven (but also linear) RPGs popular in Soviet Russia...

Re:I don't know about you,

[NineNine]

But if I could make a backup copy...

Rumor has it [cough] that PS2 mod chips work very, very well. And from what I've heard [ahem], you can get a good chip + installation + shipping for about $100. Of course, this is just heresay...

Bandwidth?

[agent dero]

I really wonder how they ever expect to have this idea profit, while shooting GB's worth of files constantly down the pipes, and if I can download it off bit torrent, why would I want to pay for it?

Cool idea, but some questions should be answered first

Re:Bandwidth?

[Bagels]

The obvious answer is that they'll take a leaf out of BitTorrent's book and have people that are downloading/viewing the movie share with each other (maybe they could even give you a little discount if you provide enough bandwidth). Only, of course, it would be a closed, DRM-encumbered system...

Re:Bandwidth?

[grotgrot]

and if I can download it off bit torrent, why would I want to pay for it?

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).

Re:Bandwidth?

[retto]

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.

Re:Bandwidth?

[Deraj DeZine]

Nice troll. Lotta bites today.

Re:Bandwidth?

[athakur999]

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.

Re:Bandwidth?

[pla]

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?

Re:Bandwidth?

[grotgrot]

WERE all rosy and DRM free

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.

Download Speed

[Luminari]

Download speeds for files as large as full games and video are still too slow. Video download services are going to be a niche market until that can be improved. I hope netflix isn't staking their near term future on this.

Re:Download Speed

[jfengel]

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.

Download speeds...

[Faust7]

Hastings expects that Internet VOD market is still relatively small, with relatively long download times for even those with cable or DSL Internet connections.

Is there a rental timeframe? Wouldn't it suck if your download didn't finish before the period was up?

"Just 5K more to go! Just -- "
"Sorry. Your rental period for 'My Pipes Need Cleaning' has expired. Thank you and please come again."

Re:Download speeds...

[MCherry]

Just a bit of information about Netflix, but the whole point of it is that there are no rental times. Currently, one monthly fee (about $20 for three movies at a time) lets you hang on to a set number of DVDs for as long as you want. You get an online queue, and each disc you send back prompts the next one to be sent to you. No late fees, a vast collection (all of Star Trek, M*A*S*H, etc.), I haven't been to a Blockbuster etc. for a very long time.

Three at a time?

[SnappleMaster]

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.

Competitor

[kilocomp]

I guess they want to take on the currently established market leader....Kazza. I just hope Netflix edits out those annoying messages, the ones that say this is a screener copy only so call this number if you are not suppose to be watching this.

Re:Competitor

[BlueCup]

*whistles*

I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

Absolutely no idea at all...

*whistles*

DVD Writers

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:DVD Writers

[LetterJ]

It may actually dramatically increase DVD rentals for a while as people start just ripping DVD's and sending them back/returning them. With a service like Netflix and a careful schedule, you could get movies in the mail, rip them and return them the next day, burn the ripped copies during the mail delay and start the cycle over, getting movies for $1 + your monthly fee. Even with Blockbuster pricing, you could rent a DVD for $4, rip and burn it to an $0.80 DVD-R and have a copy for under $5.

Where this process breaks down is if new DVD's themselves drop below that $5 mark. At that point, it's not worth the effort to make a copy.

I actually feel that way about music and don't download anything off of the p2p services, not necessarily because of any legal or moral issue (though they do exist), but because I can buy used CD's cheap enough that it's not worth the effort. I mean, if I can buy a disc for $4-6 and get the entire album, there's no way I'm going to find all of the songs on the album, consistently ripped and encoded on any of the available services in any reasonable amount of time that compares.

Not likely to work...

[LostCluster]

I don't think anybody can launch a Hollywood-movies-on-demand without having the cable companies on board. They can place servers closer to their users, and have the advantage of being able to allocate more bandwidth to themselves on their cable systems. They're going to have an advantage over any outside provider...

Re:Not likely to work...

[Aero Leviathan]

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...

Re:Not likely to work...

[NanoGator]

"I don't think anybody can launch a Hollywood-movies-on-demand without having the cable companies on board. They can place servers closer to their users, and have the advantage of being able to allocate more bandwidth to themselves on their cable systems. They're going to have an advantage over any outside provider..."

Their biggest advantage is that it's out today. I would assume not in all areas, but in Portland it is. I've already watched a few movies on it. Not too bad at all. They just stream the digital signal down to my TV over the cable. Frankly, I have NFI how Netflix can beat that unless they make it cheaper. Right now it's $4 a movie streamed right to my TV. If they had some movies for $1 to view, I'd watch some of the movies I'm less excited about on my laptop. No biggie.

Re:Not likely to work...

[nvrrobx]

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.

first step in playing defensivly

[miradu2000]

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.

Re:first step in playing defensivly

[Dirtside]

Maybe it's a trick. Netflix could be making noises about getting into a market that they know is pointless to enter, causing other companies to waste time and energy trying to beat Netflix to market, when Netflix has no actual plans to go there. Mwa ha ha ha! And so forth.

Re:That's just a bug

[Toxygen]

Uhh, the previous post should probably read:

They're still developing their Video-On-Demand system. That probably should read:

They are also eyeing the multibillion-dollar bufferring...bufferring... video game market.

Video games...VERY smart

[TrentL]

I read an article about 6 months ago where the Netflix guys said they weren't interested in the video game market. I'm glad they've wised up.

In the meantime, Gamefly is an excellent video game rental service. The pricing and service are almost identical to Netflix.

If the movie streams to my cache can I keep it?

[darthcamaro]

So I get a video on demand over the internet - and I assume that it'll stream and make use of my cache (or some other temp file). If I keep the cache/temp file, does that mean I can keep/own the movie??
Or will these guys have some kind of no-cache proxy in place?

Re:Netflix?

[Patik]

Come out from under your rock.

It's an online DVD rental system -- you pick out DVDs to rent, they mail them to you. You can keep them as long as you want, no late fees -- but you can only have three checked out at a time. $20/month, they pay for shipping both ways (USPS first class). Huge selection, lots of hard to find movies, in ~20 warehouses around the U.S.

I hope they do game rentals

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm already copying and burning DVDs from netflix as fast as I can get them. Game rentals will be awesome for my stock pile.

Getting ready for the day when everyones dead, except me. And the power is still on. Oh yeah, and my girlfriend will be there too.

Yea for piracy. I love piracy. It feels like I'm making money!

Won't be easy...

[ccnull]

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....

Re:Won't be easy...

[ccnull]

Netflix has a problem now with discs that are broken in the mail or otherwise go lost. When this happens, they apologize and send you another disc. Only rarely is the consumer blamed for this -- and when he is, there's no fine assessed, the account is simply closed. So Netflix is currently eating 100% of the cost of lost, broken, and stolen discs, which by some accounts has hit 1% of all shipments. Charging a fee is loaded with problems, since the US Mail service is probably responsible most of the time, and if Netflix tried to bill me for something that wasn't my fault, I'd cancel my account immediately.

The problem here is not just that games will cost the company more, but they're probably more likely to be stolen than DVDs, and there's not a lot the company can do about it. With a brick and mortar Blockbuster, there's no intermediary to blame, so they can get away with charging you for losing the game.

Re:Won't be easy...

[ccnull]

If that made any sense, why doesn't Netflix insure shipments already? The USPO would absolutely not give insurance to Netflix for free, that would be ludicrous. They may give a nice discount as they do with all bulk mail, but it won't be more than 30% or so... In any event, postal insurance costs (retail) $1.20 per shipment minimum -- and that would be $2.40 to ship both ways. Considering the current shipment cost to Netflix is about $.60 round trip, bumping that up to $3.00 per shipment would quickly kill the company. Even at $2.00 per shipment, there's no way the company could make money without dramatically raising costs -- which, in the case of games, they may have to do. My theory is that they would return to standard $X per rental pricing where you are entitled to have it out for Y number of days... or possibly X number of rentals per month for fee $Y (vs. all you can eat).

In any event if a disc got stolen, Netflix would break even; they wouldn't profit, as they would have to prove the cost of the disc they insured.

Does downloading games require a mod chip?

[ispcay]

How can games be downloaded from netflix or any other place. For instance X-Box games have to ripped from the DVD and converted into a ISO using something like XISO. Then you have to burn it to a CD so that you can play it on your X-Box. Or you can FTP over to your X-Box which in either case require a mod-chip. Are they honestly expecting us to delete the game once we done "renting" it. I mean I'm not going to pay $0.75 for a DVD that I just burned a very good game, just to throw it away after a few days.

The other side is are you required to have a mod-chip on your gaming console so that you can download and play these games. In either case I think the gaming downloads will fail miserably but the movie downloads will be huge hit.

Re:Does downloading games require a mod chip?

[Gabriele Capone]

The article doesn't say that they are going to offer downloadable video games. It just says that they may enter the market for renting them.

Re:Does downloading games require a mod chip?

[NanoGator]

"How can games be downloaded from netflix or any other place."

There's a relatively simple way, well simple if Microsoft lends a hand. XBOX's have a network port. Connect that to broadband. Then, create a disc that alters things on the XBOX a bit, where the data that should be coming through the optical drive is instead pulled in from the network connection. So, in essence, the data is pulled down from the net in real time as if the disc is in the drive. There are obvious issues here, but I've seen a variant of this technique done on the PC before. It'd require broadband and a special disc.

i don't understand

[maxbang]

will they be starting abm.netflix? or maybe #netflix on some dcc friendly irc network??

Greencine already does this

[CanSpice]

Greencine already does this for select films. They do WMP streaming for Video On Demand (FAQ here). I can't say that I've tried it though, since I prefer watching movies on my TV than on my computer.

Worry about the important things first.

[Infernon]

I can't say that I'm exactly super-pleased with Netflix. The past three DVD's that I've sent back haven't even arrived in time for the next weekend when they were mailed out on the previous Sunday and it's not even like I rent a ton of movies-- these three were over the course of 5 weeks!

We tried VOD at Enron Broadband with Blockbuster

[GodBlessTexas]

And it failed miserably. They're going to have a very hard time convincing the MPAA and the studios to allow them to stream the content without some serious consideration to DRM.

Other services already do this

[kamapuaa]

Another DVD-by-mail service, Greencine already does this, with WMA and DivX - I've only done the video preview, but it appears to work pretty well. The problem is that movies are apparently hard to license for online viewing - mostly just obscurish indie movies, and porn.

To be honest, I can't see movies being so much quicker to license these rights to Netflix, even if it is larger than Greencine.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

CinemaNow's hard to beat.

[agslashdot]

Lion's Gate (LGF ) owns a majority stake in CinemaNow, the closest competition. LGF stock has been all over the place in the past few months due to Video-On-Demand deals with major studios. Unlike LGF, which grew from strength to strength after acquiring Artisan Films, is based in Hollywood, and has exclusive rights to several hundred movies as well as ties with the major players in the entertainment business, Netflix is more a rental mall for DVDs.
otoh, Netflix's CEO has been predicting his entry into the VOD market for the past few years, and they did trails with sample footage for most DVDs.
Competition's always beneficial to the consumer.

Re:Netflix? (yes. that's a valid question.)

[Patik]

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?

Great for games, wonder about quality.

[natelr]

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.

Legal/history question ...

[cpu_fusion]

If I recall correctly, at some point the music industry was able to successfully push through legislation that put music-rental stores out of business. In other words, there's a legal (not marketing) reason why you can't go and rent a CD for a few bucks like you can rent a DVD/VHS.

How did the MPAA not managed to shove similar legislation down our throats?

Has the video industry just not been successful at squashing Netflix via "senators-in-the-pocket", or are they actually embracing these rentals?

This isn't new...

[sailracer6]

I can think of three companies that are offering, or have offered, major movies-on-demand. My university (Duke) had a distribution deal, no longer in effect, with a company called Cflix last year.

There was also a company that was forced out of business by the MPAA so they could push their own services. I forget its name.

Then there's Movielink, also being heavily promoted on college campuses right now. I believe it was started by one of the major companies.

Of course, I can remember Yahoo! Movies trying to do VOD four years ago, but they couldn't license anything big.

So, in conclusion, this is nothing new, except maybe this time the advertising will get to the people who care (geeks). Most people don't want to watch a movie on their computer and can't figure out TV-out video cards.

It's about f**king time!

[Shafe]

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!

DVD REVolution

[Johnso]

The future is services like DVD REVolution.

They deliver DVDs and games to your door in under an hour. Order your movies or games online or by phone and they'll be at your door before a pizza would.

Their trick is they have vans driving around with all of their inventory inside. Talk about bandwidth!

Re:DVD REVolution

[Alystair]

Watch me go from zero to dvd collector in one swift car heist!

Re:DVD REVolution

[evilviper]

The future is services like DVD REVolution.

Actually, I'd say it's the past.

I know I can go and pickup a movie quicker than that, and I'm sure a LOT cheaper as well. The reasons Netflix is popular are not applicable to this service. They are not cheaper, they do not have infinite rental times, unlimited number of rentals.

Besides all that, downloading movies is almost certainly the future. Bandwidth is cheap, and it won't be long before many homes have pipes fast enough to download a 2 hour movie in less than 2 hours (ie. You can start playing it instantly). MPEG4 isn't quite effecient enough with current bandwidth, but H.264 might be just good enough to make instant, realtime, near-DVD-quality playback (over Cable/DSL) feasable. And no more need to worry that the movie you got is damaged!

And lets not forget that KISS already has a networkable DVD-player that plays MPEG4, so instant gratification for even the tech un-savvy could be just around the corner.

Then again, I hope Netlix doesn't screw this up. I like them because DVDs are very platform agnostic, so if their download system is Windows-only, I'll be quite unhappy.

Netflix Are SPAMMERS

[Erbo]

I decided not to do business with Netflix a while back, because they send spam. (That's not my page, but the guy who posted it apparently got the same spam messages I did.) I encourage everybody to avoid doing business with them until they stop abusing our inboxes.

greencine...

[yulek]

...has been doing video on demand for several months now. and they have a much more interesting selection of movies.

greencine > netflix

Seems like an obvious Tivo feature to me.

[Moderation abuser]

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.

multibillion-dollar video game market

[arclightfire]

They are also eyeing the multibillion-dollar video game market.

Sony is also looking to get in the downloading act: "Crucially Reeves [A Sony Big Boss] also mentioned Sony's 'ultimate goal' for PlayStation 3: 'To get into electronic broadband distribution'. By 2006, when Reeves anticipates that all of Sony's currently in-development hardware products should be available, Sony hopes users will have always available online access along with viable broadband distribution....This massive statement has huge potential ramifications for the industry at large and is likely to cause a storm among retailers, with the suggestion that Sony plans eventually to sell its games as downloads, cutting overheads, cutting out the middle men and, ultimately, cutting the cost to the consumer." http://www.plugincinema.com/plugin/news/newslist1. php

This is Inevitable

[Shafe]

While other people have tried similar ideas, no one has really brought it into the spotlight as successful, probably due to download speeds. However, perhaps if Netflix uses an improved transmission system such as the proposed FAST TCP, it will make the downloads a bit easier. Furthermore, we are seeing continuous increases in bandwidth by the broadband ISPs who are conforming to pressures of competition. I'm thinking with a 3 Mbps pipe, downloading several movies per week should be no problem, as long as your ISP doesn't mind.

But think about it: we're in the digital age of downloading everything. iTunes has shown to be a tremendous success, and it's only a short while before movies are all downloaded as well. Someone will have to nail the movie download market, and Netflix already has an enormous user population. While people rip and burn Netflix DVD's in a pipelined fashion, there would be no need for such efforts if you could, say, begin watching a movie that's still downloading after only, say, 15 minutes of starting the process. Why would people need to pirate DVD's if they could get whatever they want whenever they want? I'm a big fan of this system and will happily use it, assuming I have a very nice high speed connection.

I'm just hoping they put up archives of Discovery Channel. Movies on Demand -- I love it!

greencine.com

[toastednut]

i'm surprised no one has mentioned that greencine.com has had video-on-demand available to its members since last year, including adult titles.