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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."
From Real.com (a web page which doesn't load in Mozilla, because it checks my connection rate (without asking)! Rrrrrrr...)
.
Access over 100 movies for one low monthly fee -- 25 new titles added weekly
Download movies on up to three computers -- take them on the go with your laptop
That's about all the info Real has made available, other than movie titles.
I'm intrigued - now if only it weren't for the "possibility" of DRM sys-crap coming down the pipe, along with the movie . .
<grrr>
That was supposed to be a hot, up-to-the-minute broadband movie-on-demand service, but that didn't pan out. They still have Spiderman 1 trailers on there, for goodness sake! I don't think the film industry is really taking piracy enough to actually get off its arse and do something.
Going from $8 per view to $13 per month certainly looks like a step in the right direction. Maybe market forces will drive things toward a workable model after all. This is almost something I'd consider subscribing to.
Ok so if I'm paying $13/month for this service, why not pay $13/month for Starz (and HBO for that matter). Not only do I get to watch movies on my MUCH larger TV but everyone in the family can watch. Along with my TIVO or Dish PVR I can record shows and watch them ANY time I want. While I'm sure there is a market for this, it seems like a very small market
I'm not looking to pay a monthly fee for streaming movies (which never works, I'd love to see a 500+kbps stream last for two hours over my cablemodem without hiccups).
Streaming video looks like crap.
I'm looking to download the movies - in DivX or whatever - that I can burn to disc and watch in my DivX set-top box, or game console.
Since they're lower quality than DVD, I'd say 5-10 bucks would be a fair price.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I was about to put this on par with an AOL CD that offered more hours per month than there were existant...
"Leisure is the mother of philosophy" - Thomas Hobbes
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.
Yep. The music business is doing so poorly. Those record label executives are going to be on welfare pretty soon. Actors, directors, and those prop guys are going to be on there next.
Wait.. didn't Harry Potter just make $90M in the US alone in its first weekend?
Yea... but you broadcast your IP all over the place to others on the tracker and basically advertise yourself as a no good pirate to the {MP|RI}AA and their enforcers who are out to keep their content from being pirated.
Even the inventor of BT thinks it's dumb to use it for piracy because it is so non anonymous.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I cant wait for the letter I will be getting from my ISP about how I am abusing my internet connection and using more than I should be.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
but only if you have a 600Kbps connection or higher
The post says download and watch - this is Real Networks, though, so what they really mean is use up all your bandwidth to watch stuttering video with horribly out of sync audio.
Really, how does streaming help anyone? I can handle the minor inconvenience of waiting a bit to view what I'm downloading, and once I've downloaded it I won't be stressing the servers of whoever I got it from if I want to watch it a second time.
And I still can't get the friggin gxine/Mozilla plugin to work for *any* codec, much less Real (which should work automagically, once gxine works).
Who would watch 100 movies in a month? Assuming a movie is 90min long, a reasonable estimate for the total length is 9000min or 150hours. Split over 30 days, that's 5hours of films a day. If people have 9 to 5 jobs and are out of the house from, say, 8AM to 6PM, that would leave 14hours in which to sleep (approx. 7hours), eat (2 meals, say 90min total), get ready for work (say, 30min to 1hour), read the newspaper, etc..., so the only way I can see it working is if people spend the entire weekend watching films.
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
subscribers will be able to download and watch 100 or more movies each month.
A movie in compressed divx form is what, 600MB, x100 = 60000MB, or ~60GB in one month. Perhaps they can compress it more, but even so that's a hell of a lot of data. It'll be interesting to see how the broadband ISPs react to this, since multimedia is one of the big pros of broadband, but the providers nonetheless tend to rely on folks not actually using their full bandwidth much of the time (that's why they hate big P2P sharers).
the downside to this program is that you have to use the all-intrusive real player.
Is it 5:30 yet?
I believe that piracy hurts bad movies (and albums). There have been plenty of movies that I haven't gone to see in the theater because I've watched a copy I downloaded and hated it. Not so much recently, but Hulk and MiB 2 both come to mind. If i hadn't downloaded them, I probably would have wasted $7 in a theater to go see them. Other movies, however, that I've seen first on my computer, I have gone to see multiple times in the theater.
Same thing goes for music. If a band I normally like releases a followup album, I'd likely go buy it -- except now I'm being smart and checking online first. If it sucks, then I don't buy it.
Its amazing how many illegal and unethical things are free.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Until your ISP cuts you off because you had excess bandwidth traffic this month. And if you do it a couple of months in a row, you'll probably get cut off for good, because it is assumed you are pirating.
I wish all the parties involved, would get together and iron all this stuff out.
When will companies learn that people want choices? The only reason iTunes is working out for Apple is because they put it on windows too.
I love STARZ and watch for the saturday night movies all the time. I might have subscribed had they supported the mac, I mean we have real player, why not just support it? Stupid move Real.
Real is an absolute joke. These big-time websites still insist on using it, and the only reason must be because of the damn built-in DRM. I'm sick of watching 320x240 ~500kbps, noisy movies and clips when I'm paying for them. Please, use Divx or xvid, I BEG you.
While not directly commenting on the article (which I did read), I do have an issue with all these online video services which only seem to carry the older releases. If these people want to replace 'my' trip to the video store, that would mean they would have to carry the new releases. I understand that in this case, they are just putting the movies online they usually broadcast, which are in general older releases, but why is it that no company will put new releases online? If you want my money or replace my trip to the video store, offer new releases the day they are releases in the video stores, it's that easy!
Wake me up when you can burn it to DVD with reasonable quality to watch on a TV. I wouldnt expect it to make a clone of a genuine DVD - that would be a real incentive to piracy - but if it was at a resolution at least as high as a broadcast TV version I'd accept that.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
If the answer to any of these things is "not bloody likely", it seems a rather pointless thing to me. Why subscribe to kill your bandwidth watching crappy movies in crappy quality?
Harry potter (and whoever his involved in the process) isn't the one that pays the price of piracy.
.. :p)
Big movies will always make money, less but still large enough to make one rich several times over.
Music is in the same boat. Madonna, Limp Bizkit, Garth Brooks, Metallica (name 'em) aren't THAT hurted by piracy. While I don't have records of their actual losses due to piracy, I'm damn well sure they still get some good dough for their albums.
Economics is a good teacher to teach us anything that involves money.
- The less you have, the more you pay -
(Ever noticed how huge companies evades all income taxes ? All ratio kept, the casual worker pays a lot more!)
If you're a good band, you just started out, piracy WILL hurt you. it will seriously hinder your means of producing a better product.
Same goes for movies, good movies rarely have a big budget, they can't afford that much marketing and any sale they lose digs them that much deeper in their grave.
I'm not saying we should never download any movies or albums. Download it to listen to it/ view it. If you like it and you think its t he kind of stuff you'll watch/listen to again, then buy it. (or make a donation to the band via paypal
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
Some quick math...
100 movies, approximately 2 hours a piece. Divided evenly over an average 30 day month...
hmm, so yes, if some person wanted to spend 6+ hours a day every day, yes, they could possibly watch 100 movies in a month.
This reminds me of those AOL CD's that offered something like 1000 FREE HOURS (to be used in 45 days). Um, hate to break it to you, but in 45 days, there are only 1080 hours... Shit I have permanent connection and I'm till not on 1000 hours in 45 days.
yes yes, I know. The 100 movies don't have to be viewed by the same person (as families can watch stuff here and there). But they are just using the 100+ in the same way that seven eleven sells super gulps that contain 2 liters worth of soda. 99% of people will come no where close to actually consuming this much of their product. But you could.
About bloody time! Perhaps they're finally learning that if you make things easily available for a low price (like, say, the iTunes Music Store did), people will pirate less and pony up more. Everyone walks away happy.
How are they "breaking the law?" They own the copyright on the work. So, presumably they are the only ones not breaking the law when they participate in the bittorrent network.
It isn't wire-tapping. They are not government employees. They didn't need any special privledges to the internet or hack bittorrent to figure this out. It is more like just finding a list of phone numbers for crack houses. Calling them up and ordering crack, and having the crack house send it to you, reciept and all.
They are private citizens that discover and have proof that their constitutionally guaranteed right to control distrubiution of their copyrighted work is being actively violated.
Hell, what can be simplier for the MPAA/RIAA? They can get the file once. Demonstrate they have a copyright on it. The tracker tells them everyone that is sharing the file. All they need is to hand it over to law enforcement agencies. The case itself open-and-shut.
Look, copyright is messed up in America. Copyright should only last for about 30 years. But, even so, you can't justify downloading the newest Harry Potter flick. Even under a more reasonable copyright system, that would still be illegal.
Legal worries aside, it is wrong. Content creators that express that they don't want you distributing something they created are legally guaranteed to do so for a limited time. People should respect that. Even if the MPAA/RIAA is a bunch of money grubbing asshats, it doesn't make it right.
Don't try to play with the legal technicalities. Rest assured, the law will eventually catch up to illegal distributors.
But, I appluad Real and Starz will be trying to do something that sounds like it might be really cool. Although, only time will tell if they can overcome the problems they will face (from technical to social). But, I think it is pretty sweet that they are trying.
Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true! -Homer Simpson
The problem is, DiVX/XViD aren't designed with streaming in mind..
Make a container format (like OGM/MKV) and build up a streaming platform for them, and maybe we'll get talking. But we all know that will never happen.
Not All Who Wander Are Lost
>The problem is, DiVX/XViD aren't designed with streaming in mind..
I would argue that "streaming" is the major reason people don't like RealVideo... If a movie clip is going to stop and re-buffer while I'm watching it, I'd rather not watch it. I'd much rather download a clip and watch it later uninterupted.
You do know that this has never been a problem with Real any more than other platforms.
It's just that Real was trying to do real-time streaming back in the modem era. None of the modern formats* should have significant numbers of buffering errors with well-encoded content between current versions of the server and player.
*I'm not counting QuickTime here, since it doesn't have a functional scalability system.
My video compression blog
This should be a free pirk for subscribing to the Starz network, just like On-Demand.
Otherwise, what's the point? Why else would you put up with low quality video, and let Real trash your system?
Small bands get a lot of exposure through piracy. If you happen to play avant-garde industrial music, or neofolk, or one of a million other genres, your stuff is never going to get played on the radio. When people have never heard of you, they don't buy your CDs, attend your concerts, or purchase other merchandise. Some word-of-mouth advertising takes care of that, but sending someone an mp3 over the internet is just about the best word-of-mouth advertising you can get, because it lets people actually get hooked on music they otherwise may not have ever known existed. I know that's how I've found most of the bands I currently listen to.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10