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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."
Buffering ... please wait ...
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.
So torn....like the step in the right direction to newer distribution methods, but can never get over my absolute hatred of Real.
What am I waiting for? It's a bargain!!!
Kisses (muaaaaaaaaks)
--
You'd stumble in my footsteps (Depeche Mode, "Walking in my shoes")
The little boy is saying..
"I see.... dead.."
Oops sorry network congestion, oh no!!!
Osho
The wide availability of 600k to coincide with Realplay finally not having buffer issues eh?
Neat trick.
Or is 600k just the streamspeed they've been aiming for the whole time.
G
...when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears. Dr. Matson in Tunnel in the Sky
... in order to download songs that you've purchased, please click on our sponsors first, then listen to the following ads before your song, then please let us install our software on your machine and bog it down. Enjoy our Free advertising at the end of every song! Also... please do not try to remove the song from your hard drive, as it may cause major lock-ups and really doesn't go away anyway. Thank you RealNetworks.
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
wow, what a good id..... buffering....ea! finally i can stop pirat......buffering....ing all my mo....buffering.....vies and get them legal.....buffering.....ly!
thank you, starz,.......buffering.....for making it easy for me to sl....buffering....eep at night.
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
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.
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.
So it states ....
"Each film will have an expiration date that coincides with its last showing on the cable station. The movies will be encoded so that they cannot be played after the expiration date."
Any estimates of how long it will take to crack this encoding?
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
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
???For the price and quality, I'm thinking Netflix is a better deal...
...and you run and you run and you can't stop what's been done...
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).
"Nobody will ever need more than 100 movies a month."
-Bill Gates
Best Windows Freeware
the downside to this program is that you have to use the all-intrusive real player.
Is it 5:30 yet?
There are lists of IPs to block to ensure some privacy from the big **AA's and their like. Not going to say where, but trust your friend google to point the way.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
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.
100 movies a month??? Who has the time to watch 100 movies? Solution: Get a subscription for your neighborhood.
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?"
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).
If most DVD's are 4 gigs, what quality will there be in a 20 minute download. At 200 k/second, can you even get a full gig in 20 minutes? I wonder if these movies will be at low resolutions. And at 12 bucks a month, I would like to be able to use the computer to play it on my 36" TV. But I know how much worse a movie can look just by doubling the window size on my 17" monitor. I can't imagine it would look good on a TV.
RealPlayer 10 and Helix DRM Provide Highest Quality and Security
What kind of DRM will be included in this? Can I download the movie and watch it on my laptop while away from a network connection. And what will stop someone from recording what is on their screen. I can't help but think this product/service is going to suck. Plus, ever since RealPlayer invaded my privacy years ago I have never trusted them. I do not like a company where I have to search and search and search for a setting that will disable sending reports back to the company about how I use my PC.
How about getting back to where people can buy and own stuff? Like back when VCR's came out and if I taped something, I could watch it anytime and anywhere. I hear iTunes lets people download their product and use it as they wish. Why dosen't the movie companies do the same thing?
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
We get about one DMCA notice a week (usually from Paramount) at the university I work at. Either they suck at tracing other methods, or they only focus on BitTorrent, because every single notice is someone sharing on BT. Beware!
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.
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!
I don't buy copyprotected stuff. I don't buy content that requires any specific software. OTOH, I have bought many thousands of dollars worth of unprotected audio CDs and a few hundred bucks of (virtually) unprotected DVDs. That was a business model that worked, as in, they got paid and I didn't share copies. The alternative is a business model where they don't get any money from me at all, and instead, I buy from their competitors.
Regardless of whatever you think of "ethics of people clamoring for downloadable media", a business needs customers.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Why not pay per movie like iTunes, and save to disk? Pay once, download once, take it with you places and enjoy.
:-)
Of course, many people don't want to watch a movie too many times, whereas they will probably keep listening to the same song, so the reusability is of less value. Perhaps in that case a subscription model is better. But I always like small per-unit charges more -- it's the UNIX mindset I guess
5-10 bucks and:
1) It is lower quality than a DVD
2) You have to burn it on your own media
3) No case, no cover-art so it looks like ass on your shelf
That needs to be priced no more than $3. By the time movies are available as pay-per-view, they are also available used at most video rental stores and often have even made it to Columbia House. That means good quality DVDs with case and cover-art are often available for around $8 new and even less than that used -- I've bought a ton of barely used foreign and indie flicks at Hollywood Video for $5.66 after tax, the big-name titles have been about $7.10 after tax.
That comparison is a little facetious as it involves the combination of Hollywood Video's 3/$20 and 3/$25 sales and %20 discount on gift cards, and the Columbia House pricing requires more orgainzation-work than some are willing to do. But the point is that DVD pricing is in a long-term downward trend and that the market is so saturated with titles that a download service needs to provide significant improvement over competing offerings. Then there is competition with bit-torrents and the other latest P2P flavors - ignoring the fact that they are "free," the diversity of titles available via P2P is staggering, those foreign films that aren't even on DVD in the USA? Good chance they are on the net and readily available.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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!
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.
Ha ha! Too bad it's Real Media! I hate that thing... repeatedly crashed under Win 2K, couldn't turn off its auto start/integration/advertising, had trouble uninstalling it. It was fine when I first used it back in the Win 3.x days but since then it has bloated into, quite possibly, the ugliest media player I have ever seen.
Show me a service that works with WinAmp (and on other non-MS platforms too) and I would gladly open up my wallet. Seriously.
600Kbps is what is needed. Little 'b' makes a big difference. In Cincy, a $25 a month DSL connection would do nicely.
Of course if you can't wait there is Road Runner Premium. 6Mbs dl, so you can hit 600KB/s. $75 a month.
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
another reason for people not to leave their PC. That blood clot disease, DVT, scares the crap out of me. While I think services like this may add value in some ways, I cringe at the thought of having another reason to spend time in front of the computer.
Right now, work, personal chatting/websurfing, coding and now movies. The point of sitting in front of a computer 20 hours a day(justified) is slowly becoming a reality.
Music is mobile. Movies are sedentary. lose
Well, I signed up for the free trial and am downloading 'Night of the Living Dead' and 'Welcome to Sarajavo.'
Anyone know what the quality is? I notice that Night of the Living dead is around 450 megs or so. I realize it's black and white and not the greatest quality to begin with -- so I expect that to be small. But I'm curious if the newer films -- 'Punch Drunk Love' for example -- will have DD51 soundtracks. Doubt it. But we'll see.
I'm a obsessive movie-watcher, so this -- combined with Netflix for the more obscure stuff -- really interests me. And, yes, Real is evil, but I noticed that their newest player just installed with a minimum of fuss and intrusiveness. So maybe they're trying to redeem themselves.
Dunno. We'll see.
yeah, they told me 5149kbps is too slow too =p
Someone can't tell the difference between Greater-Than and Less-Than in their code, looks like...
Divx/Xvid looks better since it is usually encoded at a higher bitrate (about 0.2bits per pixel or 1200 Kbps) versus a typical real clip encoded at 128kbps. Obviously it is going to look like crap
If you follow video compression (look at the forums in doom9.org (http://forum.doom9.org) and you will realize that real is quite comparable with any other MPEG4 compression.
I have quite a few of my home videos compressed with DIVX and later with Real (since it is more common) at 400kbps and it looks fantastic on regular TV
Real trying (successfully too) to monopolize my machine, is another story. but there are ways around that if you know where to look.
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
If you use User Agent Switcher you can convince the website that you're running IE on Windows. Has anyone used this technique, and then tried the demo service on Linux?
I am concerned about any program, any piece of hardware, any treaty, any law that treats me as a consumer, not a citizen
Duh, that's grammer, you idiute!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
> 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 --
and they are turning away potential business because of it.
I just went to their Starz! Ticket site to check it out, and was informed by Real, "sorry, but you can subscribe to our service, you don't have a minimum of 600k of bandwidth". Then it shows me a box that says I have 300k of bandwidth.
Problem is, I've got a 3000k leased connection, so it looks like they are making a math error somewhere. Their scripting errors are going to cost them just the sort of customers they are trying to attract: people with fat net pipes and disposable income.
What a galacticly stupid idea, putting a hokey bandwidth meter on your website to sort out your ideal customers from the unwashed masses. How typically Real.
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
OK, I had many "flamebaited" posts defending real against windows media but this one isn't the case.
To purchase, you must
Reside in the United States (OK, its MPAA guys, got it but still stupid)
Have Windows 98 or newer (?!!? How hard is it to develop cross platform while RealMedia SDK IS crossplatform)
Have a Broadband connection rate of at least 600 Kbps (What happens if a guy uses 300 kbit and wait 2x? isn't it his/her choice?)
Also, DivX AC3 capability, yes I know. The 5.1 surround thing can be done with ac3 divx'es but its HARD for average user to find files over p2p and install necessary stuff. The point I want to make is... If you compete with "pirates", give users a plus thing. Realone has 5.1 capability for 3 years now! Yes, including Mac version. Give them 5.1 stuff if they want.
Funny about those services not offered for macs... Let me speak straight. Mac users has more money than average user and they have tradition to PAY for stuff they use/watch. So you open a drive in theater and you don't allow Mercedes or BMW cars in. Simple as that, if it sounds spoiled its your choice to understand as that. If any Realnetworks people read this post (I am sure they do) check the percent of Mac users vs. Win32 users for paid services. You won't see traditional 5% figure I bet.