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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 ...
... 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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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...
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!
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.
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