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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."
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
???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!
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.)