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Napster to Offer Movie Downloads
sebFlyte writes "silicon.com is reporting that Napster is going to move into legal movie downloads. They are aiming particularly to tap the younger video-game generation."
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Frankly, I can't see a major online content vendor not delivering video in the future. Napster and iTunes and all better be prepared to enter the movie market once the technology is ready (bandwith).
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
I wonder if the speed will compare to Bittorrent.
...not that I've ever used that for movies...
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Does this mean that they're going to be selling Tron, Cloak and Dagger, and The Wiz?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Yes, but they can then be easily burned to standard MPEG DVD format. And many people have LCD screens or TV connected directly to their PC's.
The next step however, would be to have the equivelant of a DVD ISO because I'd want the "extras" too... that's kind of one of the big points about purchasing/renting a DVD.
Or so the Apple rumor mill says.
But I wonder what encoding they will use?
Will it be usable if say I have a media PC? Would it look decent if I downloaded a movie and hooked my computer up to a TV?
If they can do that, and make download decent... it's got a good shot.
Unlike Kazaa, Napster is clean of viruses, trojans, and other garbage infecting files in hopes of getting a loophole in your buggy media player.
I thought the average age of gamers nowadays was 29.
There are now DVD, DivX players that support video on demand files... You download the movie, burn it and play it on you Digital projector to a big wall in the living room, turn up the volume in your home theater system... It is certainly cheaper than having to go out in the cold to rent a movie that is not yet in the satellite or cable channels. You download the movie, make a few snacks, burn it ro DVD while you get your cute neightborg (that cute chick always smilng at you) and BAM!!! It is somewhat the future of movies so to speak. We are already isolating ourselves from the world by using our "capsules" called cars to go pretty much anywhere so why not move to the next step and stay home isolated from everything. Have a good one.
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I didn't see television mentioned in the article. $2.99 for a movie...how much for a TV show? Maybe they could charge by season. If we're going for video on demand, I'd like to see some of the older shows. They can keep the reality TV for themselves.
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My computer is probably what I watch movies on most-- and thats not to say I have a bad home entertainment system. I find myself watching my rented Netflix while on the go, flights, road trips, and even at the library in between classes (I study sometimes too ;]).
As soon as someone rolls out a decent service with all of the titles I'm looking for I will probably cancel my netflix account and move to something like thus.
Peep that
I am not saying this will never be a valid medium for movie distribution, but right now I just don't see the market being that large.
It's a chicken and egg thing. There are portable media players that will play the movies, but they won't be popular until there are plenty of easy and cheap ways to get the content legally.
portable music devices are a huge market, and CD burners are nearly ubiquitous in computers these days, plus you talking about the difference between a couple minutes and a few hours worth of downloading
1) the mp3 player market didn't spring up over night out of nothing.
2) DVD burners are becoming a lot more common, and will probably displace CD burners. Besides, other than capacity, are they all that different? Both utilize Shiny Disc technology.
3) It can take many many hours to DL an unauthorized copy of a movie on the file sharing networks, but people do it (often to find that what they downloaded is not what they wanted). Some people will happily pay a few bucks to guarantee that their getting the movie they want, that they can find it easily, and that it will download in a reasonable amount of time.
Anyway, these things just don't happen by themselves. A company has to actually try and deliver a product or service, or there is no market.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
untapped or non-existent?
i'm not convinced at all that a download video market exists. i don't see compelling reasons why downloading would be any more convenient or cost effective than something like netflix. and if they think they can charge more for movies than music, then forget about it because you can buy DVDs cheaper than CDs at most stores. also, there's no compelling reason to split up the movie contents - while ability to sell ind. songs definitely helped with the popularity of online music distribution.
distributing movies online will cost more storage, time, bandwidth than music distribution. most users will buy a lot less movies than songs and impulse buys will be far rarer. if napster hasn't taken off selling music, i don't see why selling movies would be more profittable.
Or you could read between the lines:
"Original music download heavyweight Napster is considering throwing in the towel and conceding victory to Apple's iTunes Music Store. Napster CEO Chris Gorog said the company is currently examining ways to bail out of this mess, and was looking at distributing movies online, selling pet supplies, or creating a search engine to help the company out of its present plight."
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
One application of this I'd be interested in is perhaps the opportunity to buy music videos in addition to songs. I almost never buy songs; I believe $1 is overpriced when I can get the whole CD used for $7 if I drive a couple miles to my local independent record shop in Pacific Beach. Since there really isn't a place to buy music videos unless the band released a DVD (in which case there's likely multiple videos -- the majority of which I likely don't want), this would be a product which I couldn't buy anywhere else and I can somewhat justify a dollar or two.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
I just don't see the demand right now.
The demand is there, otherwise we wouldn't see such a huge black market dealing in unauthorized copies.
Until downloading movies saves you both time and money, and is easy to use, I don't see the service becoming too popular.
I mostly agree with you, but it needn't save both time and money. Change your statement to "time or money", and I totally agree with you. Consider this: I want to watch some very obscure movie or TV show, and my local Blockbuster doesn't have it. Now, I can buy it on Amazon for retail + shipping + wait time, or I can purchase a single viewing download for $2.99, with the option of burning to DVD for another $10.
Whoever can execute this scheme the most successfully will make a good deal of money, and will be hailed as the movie equivalent of iTMS. Unless it's Apple, in which case we'll criticize the proprietary nature of their product/service combo, the DRM, and the pricing. =)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Yeah i think its a great idea!
If it has a huge list of movies and a no wait download or any waiting time, i would personally watch them.
Instead of waiting on that hard to find movie coming from amazon that you ordered weeks ago, paying for postage and packaging , why not load up your napster client hit in your search for that movie and up it comes , sit back relax and watch the movie you cant find in the shops, or a new movie in the cinema maybe.
But how far will they go , will warez groups have the ability to rip them or will they have some kind of software that magically overlays the stream.
Whatever they decided to do, i hope for a price they let you fully buy and have the legal right to burn a copy for your DVD player.
Napster have had there ups and downs and we should all support and look forward to seeing what the future brings for them.
I am a senior programmer for a fortune 500. Over the last 4 weeks I have been looking at our login stats. For the last two years, 96%+ of _all_ of our 140,000+ home employees have used IE. However, something _very_ strange has happend over the last 6 months to our web stats. I was taking weekly snap-shots, and I saw the IE market share continued to drop. The current IE share is now 88%! That is a _huge_ drop from pervious versions.
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it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
if they think they can charge more for movies than music, then forget about it because you can buy DVDs cheaper than CDs at most stores.
In Malaysia they charge a hell of a lot for DVD's. around 70-80 ringgit for a "hot" title. A music CD is only 40-45 ringgit. And it's way too expensive to buy, especially when most of it is crap. 1 ringgit is 3.8 USD, but to put things into an "afforability" perspective, a meal at a fast food chain (say McDonald's) cost around 8 ringgit for a burger, a drink and some fries. Would you be willing to pay 10 times as what you currently pay for a lunch, for a single crappy movie?
As an effort to crack down on piracy (which thrives - a pirated DVD costs only 8 ringgit), we have cheaper copies of the movie on VCD (lower res, fewer colours). But that's just wrong. VCD's and DVD's cost the same to manufacture. It's the same as "crippleware" (like Windows Starter Edition). Stupid market segmentation bullshit.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Let me guess: massive Digital Restriction management, viewable only n times, no possibility of a backup, low resolution, Windows only, and about $5 per downloaded movie (which will cost me the download as well, depending onmy ISP).
I like my way better: there's a robot DVD shop around the corner. Open 24h. Costs me just one buck to rent a film for three hours (more if I keep it longer, of course).
Plenty time to view it and decide if I want to maxe an Xvid of it.
Anonymously. No restrictions. For a dollar. In any resolution. On any OS.
Could be too late for offering movies to download.
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