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Starz, RealNetworks Offer Movie Download Service
Mz6 writes "The
New York Times and
others are reporting that RealNetworks and the Starz Encore Group will introduce an online service today that will let high-speed Internet users download and watch many of the movies shown on the Starz cable channel. This report is just on the heels of
TiVo's announcement to stream from the Web. This move is another early attempt by Hollywood to build a business out of downloadable movies and head off the sort of piracy that has hurt the music industry. The new service, called Starz Ticket on Real Movies, will cost $12.95 a month, and subscribers will be able to download and watch 100 or more movies each month, using Real's media player software, but only if you have a 600Kbps connection or higher."
I have tried cinemanow before and I think this would be the same, keep trying to download the same movie 5 times before you watch it just because you keep losing connection with the service or the download speed just sucks.
How many people:
- Can watch 100 movies a month
- Only want to see what's on Starz
- Have a 600kbps connection, and
- Like watching movies on their PC
???How is this insightful??? This is a classic case of parent did not RATFL (Read All The Fine Links). They are not streaming the video... You can download them on up to 3 computer and you can watch them unconnected (laptop on the road).
MovieLink currently runs a promotion where any movie costs 99 cents.
They have all the MPAA stuff, like Matrices and stuff available on DVD right now.
Requires Windows DRM client, and once you start watching, you have to finish within 24 hours.
I think we do ourselves a disservice when we perpetuate this line. Didn't Slashdot cover this issue just a while back on CD sales actually increasing but the RIAA using the numbers that made it look like sales had dramatically dropped.
Well, yeah, if people are buying music like crazy but it is from Apple, the sales of physical CDs is going to decline eventually (but I think using the right numbers they haven't even declined yet).
Usurper_ii
Ron Paul
But if they read the article they would see that this model does not use streaming, but rather just downloading. If they are downloaded onto your local drive, you aren't going to have buffering issues!
Indeed, it almost sounds like the model doesn't even support buffering, because if it did then quotes like
would make no sense, since a movie that takes 30 minutes to download would definitely get the data before it was needed...So I'd give it a chance. For the new generation of portable video devices, (like the iRiver on Slashdot last week), this looks like a great source of content. Of course tech geeks like us can already just record our cable feeds and process the content ourselves, but 99% of the people out there can't. And that's a pretty good market!
And don't forget that the second installment of the ever so popular Shrek series was the fastest animated movie to break $300 million (and it is also the highest grossing one after beating out Nemo)
Shrek 2 has broken the record for the highest grossing animated film of all time and has beaten its predecessor to do so.
Shrek 2 earned a not too shabby $346.5 million as of June 12, passing Finding Nemo which has made $339.8 million to date. Shrek 2 did it just 25 days after release. Shrek 1 made $267 million at the box office.
I imagine all of the big premium cable channels are going to go this way...
Actually, they already have. Comcast has On Demand for all the major premium channels (Starz, HBO, Showtime, Cinemax, etc.). The system rocks and is replacing pay per view. Basically you've got on demand movies that are pay for 24 hours, then free content from all the major premium channels that you happen to subscribe to, plus other added content like on demand anime. The service actually makes is worth paying for my digital cable subscription.
.technomancer
I get 3mbps down with Roadrunner Cable Modem service here in New York. It costs about $40 a month.
All movies are 700kbps and I should say excellent quality. You can use the service even on broadband connection less than 600 kbps , if you wait for it to download and then start watching it. This service lets you watch your movie as you download(progressive download). Now do you see where the min of 600 kbps comes from?
Regarding the drm, you are entitled to watch your downladed movies in a max of 3 computers..Get off the privacy thing. Go download RP10 and see for yourself the changes.
How can you stop someone form recording it off the screen or for that matter take the bits right off your video frame buffer? This is afterall slashdot and you got to have known the answers for these...
Starz is notorious for showing crappy B-Rated movies that you'd certainly never intentionally see in the movie theatre. Every so often, perhaps once a month they'll have 1 block buster movie that you'd consider watching...
Moviefly became Movielink. Movielink is fully up and running.
All my movie needs are satisfied by alt.binaries..... groups :)
No DRM, no speed restrictions, all the newest movies rather than old B-movies.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
> Using such blocks assumes that the {MP|RI}AA
> are using easy to identify blocks, like those
> at their corporate headquarters or those of
> well known underlings. The whole IP blocking
> strategy fails when they start having their
> enforcers work from home now and then.
Yeppers. The *AA's have stated in print that they contract that work out. The companies that do the "dirty" work just get dsl lines that look innocous enough to the casual observer.
There's plenty of anecdotal evidence of religous peerguardian users that wound up getting cease and desists.
-- r . m o s q u i t o --
I'm going to do some more research on this, see if it's DRM'd, what movies they have on there. Kudos to Real for listening to customers!
It's protected by HELIX DRM (will google later for info on Helix).
I just subscribed today -- see my thread below -- but after downloading the Real 10 player, you go to the Starz video page, and you're asked to wait while Helix DRM is downloaded. It's tiny -- a couple seconds worth of downloading -- and you can immediately start downloading movies.
Folks here think the 'Buffering' joke is funny (it seems to be the most common comment here), but there's no buffering with this. You simply download the protected REAL video file. It defaults to be saved in your 'My Music' folder.
The films have to be watched in a couple weeks -- each one has an expiration date -- but apparently they can be watched as many times as you want -- and can even be watched offline.
My first download was 'Night of the Living Dead' (before folks pointed out that it was available for free anyway), but I also downloaded 'Welcome to Sarajevo'. Anyway, DotD was around 450 megs. (I had to leave before WtS started downloading, so I didn't catch the file size.)
I've got 6.0/768 DSL, so the download was really speedy. Took about 15 minutes to download. (It wasn't maxing out my connection.)
You can also schedule your downloads -- so if your bandwidth is a little more limited, your connection doesn't max out all of a sudden.
No streaming. Very painless, actually. Not a superb selection -- around 100 or so at the moment -- but there was a mix of stuff -- blockbusters, small films, etc. etc. I was hoping for a lot more recent stuff, but this is okay.
14 day free trial. Don't know yet if once my time is up, I'll start paying. It might be worth it to see some stuff that's currently in my Netflix queue -- especially flicks that I know aren't that great but that I'm curious about (i.e. guilty pleasures).
I gotta say, though: despite the limited selection, this is definitely the way to do it. I'm willing to put up with the DRM and the expiration dates if I'm able to snag stuff spur-of-the-moment -- especially, as I say, stuff I'm curious about but can't bring myself to put in my Netflix queue and go through the whole order-wait-watch-return cycle for Netflix (which is my case is about 3-4 days.)
I got a traffic abuse letter from comcast and after calling many people I got someone to tell me that I could download 90GB/mo. That leaves 30GB/mo for websurfing and webcamming, it's probably plenty.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"