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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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It is simply good business sense to move into this largely untapped market, especially if you already have a platform for charging for and delivering digital content. Though they aren't the first; MovieLink and CinemaNow are already offering movies for legal download.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Considering how much I dislike watching movies on a monitor, I doubt there are many people out there interested in downloading movies instead of renting or buying.
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).
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I wonder if the speed will compare to Bittorrent.
...not that I've ever used that for movies...
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Hey this sucks, it started out like The Matrix but 3 minutes in, it just loops continously.
If you think
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.
Hey this sucks, it started out like The Matrix but 3 minutes in, it just loops continously.
Then it must have been "Matrix Revolutions" that you saw..
After people watch the movie, they want to talk about it with their friends. How much fun is watching a movie by yourself?
The only exception is pornography. Unless Napster intends that its service will be predominantly for pornography downloads, Napster will not achieve much market penetration (pun intended).
Perhaps, Napster should offer a special deal: After 10 downloads, you receive a free jar of vaseline. <chuckle>
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.
"Original music download heavyweight Napster is considering remaking itself as a movie download site too."
So let's see... no business plan, no decisions on DRM or encoding format or anything remotely technical, just the statement that it's being "considered..."
Should this really be considered news? I mean, a lot of groups are looking at doing movie downloads...
I thought the average age of gamers nowadays was 29.
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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Perhaps I am wrong on this, but I would say tha statistic given in the article (not really backed by the link) that one in four people online have downloaded a film sounds rather high.
I know it is spreading in popularilty, but even so I know very few people at work (for example) that even know what Bittorrent is, much less have downloaded a film!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Since iTunes came out, I started paying for my music. I don't mind doing so, but it's easier to obtain from iTunes rather than hunting down files on news or torrent. But, downloading movies is a completely different realm.
* Are there any decent portable movie players?
* Can we burn our movies to DVD like we can burn our music to CD?
* I have a Mac & PC, but for everyone here who lives on *nix, will there be cross-platform software?
* Are we going to be downloading 4.6GB DVD's or compressed divx-like files? Also, how are you going to pay for all that bandwidth without killing your customers with additional charges?
* Finally, what will be the selling point to downloading movies to your computer. Why not just go out and rent, or even yet, rent online through NetFlix or Blockbuster?
These are all very valid points that need to be addressed before anyone tackles this. Napster has yet to do this and I see them headed for a bust.
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Some people like watching movies on their laptops, yes, but I would hardly call it a vast market. However, earlier commenters are correct: internet delivery of movies will eventually become mainstream.
So what's the catch? I don't want to sit around for a few hours while my laptop downloads a movie, only to have to burn it to a DVD to watch it on my TV (or plug my laptop in to the TV, making it useless for anything else). What *I* want is the ability to browse, order, download and view movies from my TV.
I think this is where TiVo, or perhaps and Apple/TiVo partership, would kick ass. Being able to buy and download a movie through my TiVo, and when it's ready, I can watch it all I want on the TV... or burn a DVD right there on the device. Or copy it to my laptop if I really want to watch it there.
THAT'S the way to go.
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
They are aiming particularly to tap the younger video-game generation.
Is this some marketing term for the young kidz who like totally radical xtreme eye popping special fx at the touch of a button?!?!?!
Are "video games" the mark of the young generation? Are these a target group for downloading movies? Right now, the generation that "grew up" with video games would be anyone 35 and under. So is the main feature of everyone under 35 that they like video games?
What does any of this mean?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Whoa. Déja vu.
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Ultimately the cable companies will be the winners here. They have a high speed digital cable running into a box which is attached to your TV.
What more can you possibly say?
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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.
I think you're giving "torrent users" too much credit. All it takes is clicking the mouse and a download starts. I've heard a lot of people talking about napster, morpheus, kazaa, etc... that couldn't tell you what a zipped file was. Heck, I know people that use bittorrent and still refer to their monitor as their computer. People that downloaded music in Napster's golden days were made up of a pretty broad spectrum too.
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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.
They get ONE chance to win our trust and our praise on this, and one chance only. They screw it up, and they will have paved the road for Apple to do it right, which they inevitably will.
Napster needs to offer no DRM, fast downloads, no annoying and invasive advertising in the middle of the movies or anything, and a wide selection. If they can't do it, someone else will. Frankly though, I don't have much hope for them doing the right thing.
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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.
The only thing that I see as a requirement would be instant viewing of the movie. People download music from iTMS b/c they get instant gratification. Less than two minutes and you have whatever song you want. In order for an online movie buying business to work, they are goign to have to be able to play the movie well before it finishes downloading, and with decent quality on their TV. Otherwise, people will just rather spend the 3 hrs goign out to a rental place and purchasing a movie, or just get Netflix.
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i don't get it.. the CEO said that they are "considering" and that there "could be" a role for napster. did anyone RTA?
why does this mean that napster is definitely going into the movie distribution business? lots of companies are considering lots of things - this is not news. and the headline "Napster to Offer Movie Downloads"? wildly inaccurate.
If the mac mini is designed as the machine that we hook up to our HDTVs (I currently have a modded G4 cube doing that for now.)
And assuming (this might be a stretch) that the "Asteroid" box is really a HD video box (Jobs said it's the year of HD) and that my iPod Photo has the hardware already to play movies then Apple will have a perfect set of distribution/watch on HDTV/carry on iPod. A formidable concept.
Apple is putting into place the exact pieces to create the iTunes store for movies. With Steves experience in the film business (Pixar) he already has more connections than he did with the record companies and now he has a track record, no, he has written the book on legal downloading.
Napster is talking abut dilly-dallying around with the concepts that Apple is preparing the major groundwork for.
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.
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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