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Internet Movies Before DVD
alfrin writes "Actor Morgan Freeman and Intel are starting a company that will sell movies over the Internet before they are released to DVD. "We're going to bypass what the music industry had to come up with, and that's to get ahead of the whole piracy thing," Freeman told reporters at Sun Valley after making his presentation, which was closed to the press. Wouldn't this just make it easier to pirate movies?"
I wonder if the first movie sold on the Internet will be Rendezvous with Rama. I just hope Freeman works a little faster on this idea...
"Wouldn't this just make it easier to pirate movies?" SHHH!!!! Don't tell them!
Sincerely,
Andrew Allen
Kind of strange for an actor to be pushing this...
Did anyone else hear Morgan's voice in your head when reading the quote, as if it was a line from "Shawshank Redemption" or "Million Dollar Baby"? Spooky!
Ruby on Rails Screencast
Three words: It's about time.
Actually, the movie industry has done a reasonably good job of keeping ahead of the market forces that drive piracy. Depsite all the complaints about movies getting on the Internet early (as if the problem didn't exist with bootlegs prior to the Internet), I haven't seen any evidence that it has been a widespread issue. Your average person seems happy enough to go to the theater, buy a DVD, or sign up with Netflix.
The ones who should really be worried is television. The DVD rehashes of shows have helped, as have PVRs like TIVO. But the general populace is starting to get pretty annoyed about being told when they can and can't watch television. If TV doesn't reinvent itself as an internet business soon, the reprocussions could be of Napster proportions!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Interesting definition of "get ahead" of. My impression is that movie downloading illictly on the Internet has been "no big deal" for the masses for quite some time. When my clueless barely point-and-grunt literate co-worker offered me a DVD copy of the latest Star Wars 4 days after it opened I realized it had already hit the mainstream. Sorry guys, to little, to late.
I dunno. The presentation was closed. I don't know anything about the specifics. If they use hard core DRM, it's possible it wouldn't be cracked. I suppose their first move should be to hire "DVD Jon" and then send him on a permanent vacation with no net access.
Is this guy versatile or what?
If they find the right price and the right movies to sell. They might create an 'itunes' effect, except in the movie genre. Most people would buy it if it was readily available and cheap.
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive." - C.S. Lewis
"before they're available on DVD" isn't quite going to cut it. Most movies are available via torrents before, or while, they're still out at the cinema. Sure, they're inferior, pirated copies, but for most people that seems to be good enough.
The mysterious step 2 is solved.
Get with Apple, do a (probably relatively minor) code revision to iTunes for the selection/shopping engine and DRM (face it, its gonna have it in some fashion) and add video support, maybe do some more work to use distributed downloading like bittorrent or have multiple mirrors in network-close proximity (work with cable and satellite cos?) to users, and have at it.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
If music is released on iTunes before it comes out on CD, the only ways that that music could be pirated are:
1. burn it to a CD, then rip the CD, thus losing quality
2. record the audio as you play it
3. crack the encryption.
However, with a video, #1 and #2 are out of the question. Unless, of course, you really want to hook up an S-Video/etc. out plug to a digital camera or VCR, record the playback to the camera, and transfer it back. It's just not feasible. Unless (until?) the encryption is cracked, this won't help piracy one bit.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Since when is the music industry in a real slump?
About the movies, I wish they would do this and make it as portable/open as possible, but as we all know it will be DRM'd out the ass and completely unusable except at Uncle Bob's house on Tuesday after 5pm.
Wouldn't this just make it easier to pirate movies?
Short Answer: Yes.
Long Answer: Yes.
Now sell it for half the price of a regular DVD and I would probably buy more movies.
You would have to be humor impaired to laugh at anything in Bruce Almighty besides the finger growing trick.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
This is really only news when a couple of big labels actually sign on.
There are already services that let you view movies online. If I am going to pay full price for a movie, I want the physical media that I can hold. Considering how cheap Wal-mart DVDs are, they better offer dirt cheap prices on this service if they expect to succeed.
Well, I seem to pretty clearly remember people I know swapping VCDs of "The Matrix" just days after it hit theatres. But if the movie peoples are going to embrace this 'internet' thing instead of hiding until Apple rips them bodily into the sunlight, then well, good for them.
Wouldn't this just make it easier to pirate movies?
How could it get any easier than it is? I would be willing to pay a couple of bucks for better quality.
Maybe he can save the movie companies from the pirates.
Then again, probably not.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!
The presentation was closed to the press. He told the reporters after the presentation. That seems pretty clear to me, especially seeing as how the Sun Valley is the name of the entire city.
Intel is building DRM right into their chips.
and with the help of the proprietary windows-only player, all the *nix users out there wont be able to watch the movies. either that or the movies will be all over the torrent networks.
i dont think this problem will be solved until we all have 100 mbit connections to our homes and we can stream the movies securely. they should make the movies $3.00 to watch the first time and $0.50 every time after that.
that requires IE. if you want me to buy your movie, you're going to have to provide a little more flexibility than that.
best college pickem site ever: pickem.terrbear.org
http://i.somethingawful.com/inserts/articlepics/ph otoshop/05-20-05-movies/KlenkyWah.jpg
Really depends on the pricing. As iTunes showed, there is a market for legal downloads as long as the price matches the convenience and quality. Would I pay ten bucks for a download I could get for free later? No. Would I pay two? Maybe, especially considering it would be a nice production copy rather than a crappy cam version which I find out is in Polish after I download it. As long as they keep in mind that in this case the fee is not for the movie, which will usually be available free in short order, but for the service, i.e., the fast, good quality, and of course legal download.
i think you mean james earl jones....he speaks for verizon.
The public will buy it before they steal it if:
1. Good quality
2. Readily available
3. The price is right
Most people, to this day, don't know that most DVD movies are encrypted and have the Macrovision(r) switch turned on. They just put the disc in and press play. What they care about are the three things above.
Item #3 doesn't mean free. In fact, it can't be free because if people see a price that's too low, they will think it sucks. #2 is important because from what I have seen, people download movies mostly because they aren't available on DVD yet. When the DVDs come out, they often buy'em... (or not based on whether they liked the movie...) #1 is pretty obvious, but I think it's not as important a draw as the later two. It is significant, however, as at present, in order to make video content on the internet feasable, a sacrifice in image quality will likely have to be made even with the best consumer grade broadband. So even if they capture the stream and put it on a DVD and can even play it that way, it will not likely measure up to the quality of a production DVD which would be a motivating factor to buying the DVD... not necessarily instead of downloading and not necessarily in addition to downloading either. I don't think the two are connected drives.
Or, 'Wayne Enterprises sells movies online' is what actually ran through my head first.
Need a photographic memory to remember all Morgan's roles!
Not Free SF Reader
kudos to freeman, the respect i already had for him just doubled....this just shows how out of touch the MPAA really is...
if an actor almost 70(!!) can understand the importance of new technology, why can't a "consortium" of movie companies who "supposedly" have our best interests in mind embrace digital distribution?
With some music distribution models, I can buy individual songs I like without having to pay for the entire album. I did it with 45's, single-song tapes (with a "B" side), single CD's (with 4 re-mix versions of the same song), and of course with Internet disti models.
What if instead of buying an entire movie, I could simply purchase by the chapter? I could take a movie like... Pirates of the Carribean, and buy only the scenes that I thought were cool or enjoyable. They could even bundle "action-packs" or "slow-boring-love-scene-packs" as sub-products of the movie.
This one gang kept wanting me to join cause I'm pretty good with a bo staff.
Of course this ignores the fact that SWIII was avalable worldwide for download the day of release. It also ignores the fact that this service will not be available on the standard PC, and since it will compete with iTunes, which will also likely go movies in the next year, the Intel Mac. It ignores the fact that these movies will be on PPV for a comparable cost, where they can be copied from the TiVo, at or before the time they are available from this new service. It also ignores the fact that increasingly the release of DVDs are not timed by marketing concerns, but by the time they take to master. Not to mention that the unlicensed copies in Pakistan were probably a fraction of what a studio would charge(say $20 instead of $25).
So I see this as just another in a long line of failed DRM schemes that litter the living rooms of unfortunate early adopters. A few will buy the special device and the expensive broadband neccesary to use it. A few OEM manufacuters might even build it into the computer. But at the end of the day whoever delievers directly to computer, or, as is happening now, directly to the TiVo, will previal.
Oh, one more thing. As mentioned before, the saving grace of the DVD is the added content. The additional sound tracks, the interviews, the music videos. If the studios just plan to provide a vanilla copy of the movie, that probably won t compete with the unlisenced copies.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
By this I mean actual retail DVD rips and not DVD screeners. They come out a month or two before they're released to retail video stores. In addition to this fact, it hasnt stopped the pirate scene from producing Telecine rips (some of which offer AC3 5.1 surround sound), which provide a high quality rip good enough to keep you happy until you can buy, rent or rip the DVD.
I dont see this combating piracy at all. By the time you get to download Mr Freemans rip, the DVD rip is already out. Take SW:EP3, a watchable VHS screener was out the day the movie was released, 3 weeks later a high quality DVD rip came out. In order to get ahead of the whole piracy thing, you need to release DVD quality rips the week after its released in the theater.
It seems to me that the big difference between DVD rips and the downloaded version that Mr Freeman is pitching is that one has DRM and the other doesnt. If the product is pay-pay-view, I forsee Mr Freeman & Intel losing alot of money the way Circuit City did with the DiVX DVD format. The only benefit is that they will be able to alter the copywrite protection every so often and not have to worry about invalidating the millions of DVD players out on the market.
I for one think it's about time someone figured out that people who use the internet are not all thieves. The music on itunes and other music download sites are STILL available on pirate sites, but people don't want to hassle and worry of viruses and the almighty copyright infrigments. I have bt'd movies and watched them.. but i'd be willing to pay a reasonable price to download a high quality movie even if it was dmr'd.
the difference between movies and music is.. most of the times i only need to watch a movie once (usually cause it's crap).. and if it's truely worth something then i'll fork over more cash for a dvd, and if i really needed a avi/asf of it.. i could rip the dvd.
the one thing i hope they account for is.. i don't want to "stream" movies.. cause i don't want to worry about skipping, and having to sit through a thousand commercials (like ign) to see something.
It sounds like they intend to DRM this tech heavily, but it baffles me a bit how they intend to do this. The download format will be encrypted, but if it is decrypted for display there are a lot of ways to record that stream. What do they intend to do? Put intel chips in televisions themselves? Degrade the signal so any additional lossy compression will render it as unwatchable? Junk it up with video bugs to identify the original source? Maybe they just assume that Joe User will be able to steal 3 or 4 movies, but he'll soon give up if he fills up his hard disk and decides it's just easier to stream them all the time.
Any speculation or additional articles on what this plan intends to implement?
I don't really understand why us geeks like to hoard intellectual property so much. Of those 50 movies:
1. How many do you actually watch?
2. How many do you use to buy friends with?
3. How many get thrown on a spindle and forgotten?
I know people that download almost 50 movies/TV shows/games a month. When I ask them how many they actually watch/play, it's rarely 20% at most.
I think this stems from the fact that having so much media readily available to us is still a relatively new concept. It was only 10 years ago that it took us 2 hours to download a 5 minute, low-quality movie (usually porn). I believe people are thinking "Wow !! i CAN have all these movies", not "Wow !! I want to WATCH all these movies".
I believe that when our kids grow up, they won't have this desire to accumulate all this media, because they'll be able to watch/play all this stuff when they want it.
Instead of paying $50/month of DVD, just to have the pleasure of burning and stock-piling them, why not hire 10 DVDs for $30 from your local video shop and buy some beers to drink while you watch.....
for an aging actor to get into Lori McCreary's pants. I can't blame him - she's easy on the eyes.
O'course, having seen his off-camera personality, I suspect he's more into the one he has his arm around.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
The only piracy that really hurts the movie and music industries is what comes from industry grade copying and packaging. Internet downloading and P2P don't really hurt. The quality is not truly there. Those who really want a copy will buy the retail or "legitimate" downloads. The recording industry has been advancing these arguments since the days of wire recording (cassette tapes were the devils own in their day). New tecnologies, new terminology in the rethoric. A great many artists know that people "sharing" creates greater exposure and ultimately promotes sales of the full featured top quality product. The movie industry has recognized this by putting so much into creating all the extras on DVD's. Mr. Freeman is a brilliant man, and further shows his love of craft and business accumin with his statements.
there have been rumors of Apple adding movie downloads to the iTMS for months now. They already have music video downloads and the ability for HD video playback built in. (iTunes 4.9 + Quicktime 7.0)
Lets just hope they use Real Player! ;)
For most of the people I know, the majority of the movies they download are movies that are just in theaters. I don't think its good enough for them to release it "before it comes out on DVD". Sure, it will be nice not having to go pick up the DVD but I think they're missing the "point". People don't want to have to sit in theaters with annoying brats and stale popcorn. If they can hook it up to release them when (or very shortly after) they hit theaters I think a huge majority of movie pirates would be willing to cough up the dough.
Aww, beat me to the punch.
A B A C A B B
Intel huh? Does this mean all new Intel precessors are going to have crazy DRM in them and stop working if someone disables/cracks it? Good idea I suppose. One more reason to stick with AMD. Plus there's the fact that pretty much every movie is floating around on the internet already. So this possible DRM would only work on new releases...
Sure, they're inferior, pirated copies, but for most people that seems to be good enough.
If Hollywood were capable of making films that were good enough to merit the trouble of going to a theater and paying the premium price to see it, then people wouldn't be satisfied with crappy camcorder internet bootlegs.
I know several people that spend so much time finding movies and burning DVDs that they never have time to actually watch them. Pick a random DVD out of their collection and it's almost a sure bet that they've never seen it. It's really rather sad.
ich muß mehr Kuhglocke haben
Which is why there is an incredibly low amount of movie pirating over the "internet." So low, that only 1/3 of the internet is used up by this "bittorrent" thing that most "movie pirates" use. Christ, journalism's in a sad, sad state when this crud gets past editors and printed as "fact." Films over the internet is inherently bad? No, slow transfers over the internet, yes. Big difference. Not that slashdot.org has better editing, but ...
Full disclosure: I'm a journalist.
Yes, of course it will (eventually, once the DRM is cracked) make it easier to pirate movies.
But it will also make it easier for people to legitimately buy movies.
No irritating crying children.
No people who smell bad.
No waiting.
No hassle.
No lines.
No fuss.
Given the choice, I think that most people would like to compensate the actors, directors and producers of a movie. What that price point is, remains to be seen.
If it would be computer-tethered and non-portable, I personally wouldn't shell out more than $5.00 (matinee ticket price).
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Apple has experience with the iTunes Music Store. They know how to run digital distribution models. They would be good candidates for running a video download store.
Apple also has the H.264 codec. According to their site, "H.264 delivers stunning video quality at remarkably low data rates, so you see crisp, clear video in much smaller files."
But, H.264 needs a fast processor. Now, Apple has fast enough processors, but only in their high-end lines.
Apple moves to Intel. Intel has faster processors. Now every Mac can have a fast enough processor.
What else does Intel have? Intel has DRM built into the chip. But Intel doesn't control the whole computer. They don't want to offer things to Windows users off the bat where they have to know about their processor. (Many barely know it runs Windows.) They make the store for Macs only to start. Movie studios start to relax knowing their content is protected.
Plus, if the store gets cracked, only Mac users have access. The Mac is an ideal testing ground for these things.
Just some random thoughts.
This is exactly the right direction for anyone who wants to be part of the new media industry. The fundamental way of making money off of music and movies (i.e. selling the media itself) will become obsolete, and other new ideas will take over.
This Freeman/Intel combination is a step in the right track, but it can still be pirated. The move to real free (as in speech) media will take many years and will be (is being?) fought at every turn.
-dave
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
How long has it taken the movie industry to realise what the music industry has found out?
And how long has it taken the movie industry to realise that you can mix around the Cinema -> DVD -> TV approach to satisfy customers? I've always believed that piracy flourishes due to lack of a commercial alternative and here we have someone looking at providing the movies in the period where consumers are demanding to watch the movie and are forced to go the cinema before the run is over.
This sort of approach should be to movies what iTunes was to music. All they need to do is make some deals with handheld movie player manufacturers and they could stitch it up!
I suppose I could hope that the movies will be DRM free and available all over the world, but there is no chance either will occur.
I collect original DVDs, and I buy more than I have time to see (although lately I've stopped buying them because I'm temporally living in another country). Does anybody else has the same problem?
Coz those people in hollywood earn too much. How can they? Just because they are handsome, or with big boobs? NO, they don't deserve! It's the scientists/technicians who create this beautiful world.
Nowadays, business is in a ridiculous model. Catching eyes==money==top position in the food chain. In the old days, hard work+intelligence rules.
Ok, so a watermark is added while streaming.
Would it not be difficult to eliminate, or even detect, such a watermark which gives a traceable signature back to the source?
this should get 10
I still remember Morgan dressed as a groovy 70s vampire on the Electric Company from when I was a kid. God I loved that show! Anyone else here remember that?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Thriteen Millionth Post?
So you mean to say only the humor impaired (read deranged) will find Bruce Almighty funny?
After watching it myself, I agree with that verdict.
People pirate things. They're going to pirate the DVD anwyay, and making it easier for people to buy the movie only means more people who would buy it, will buy it. Sure, piracy will be easier, and more people who would pirate it, will pirate it, but take the reduced costs into account and it'll probably all even out in the end.
This also means greater variety, since you don't have to weigh the cost of making physical media to the potential profit. For low-budget or independent films, this sounds like a dream come true.
Wouldn't this just make it easier to pirate movies?
No, not really. You'd have less interested parties in your stolen warez. Of course, this all depends on the price. If the movies are going to be $20 a pop, then yes, it will just continue to get pirated. If they were only $5, most (read: all but the cheap) people would rather own a legit copy than a pirated DVD rip. Think about it this way:
If you could get an entire album of music for $5 that you had full rights to (i.e. able to play it on any device you owned and able to make a backup as well), it has been proven time and time again that people are more willing to pay for something rather than steal it (which nobody can really argue, downloading albums without permission is illegal, whether moral or not).
It should be interesting to see what price structure this thing will have, as that's about the only thing that will make it worth anyone's while. Otherwise, it will just aid piracy. As Eisner said in one of his few moments of wisdom, Price and availability are the only real combatants to piracy. The question here is whether it will be a step in the right direction, not whether it will make piracy easier. Piracy is already far from difficult.
This forum Sig is licensed under the LGPL.
Though it doesn't seem likely, I could get interested in this if they offered 720p and 1080p transfers. Simple 480i source rips, not so much.
I own a widescreen TV which I watch HDTV channels on, and 5.1 surround sound, while I have just a 17" monitor and 2.1 speakers for my computer.
I'd rather watch movies on the widescreen TV with 5.1 surround sound, thank you very much.
Bad movies, on the other hand, have a hard time drumming up rentals if they really bombed in the theater. ("Catwoman" is a great example. I personally thought it wasn't half as bad as people made it out to be -- but are you going to spend your money on it?)
I've heard it from more than one Hollywood type: Movies have the glamor, but TV is where the real money is. (Though maybe that depends which side of the camera you're on.)
Breakfast served all day!
1. Pricing is sane: If the vid costs any more than 30% of the price for a brand new retail DVD, forget it.
2. Delivery is sane: No funky P2P implementation. I'll be damned if I pay for a movie and have to use my own connection to help the publishers distribute it. Better cough up the bucks for the fat pipes, cause you're gonna need them.
3. Timing is sane: Say, really really soon after a movie premieres? Maybe 5 working days? If not, cheap bastards like me will just score it off ***net. It's not just about the quality, it's about the timeliness too.
4. DRM is sane: I'd better be able to shift the vid around, or view it without being connected to the mothership. Or better yet, forget DRM, because
we'll just film it off the monitor if we can't crack the copy protection. Have you seen high quality telecines? They're free, and they look real decent. You can't compete with that.
5. Selection is sane: Don't just limit the choice of movies to the latest corporate trash. Some of us like the weird obscure unseen shit. Donnie Darko would have been a worldwide smash if the publishers had the brains to properly promote it.
6. Quality is sane: The vids had better not be the size of a postage stamp. And perhaps, offer the viewer the vids in a variety of formats and codecs.
In the past, when people have asked me if I pirate movies and music online, my response has always been his line as Red from Shawshank Redemption...
"Yeah, I'm known to locate certain things from time to time."
Good news everyone! There's no longer a need to download your torrents of The Electric Company ;-)
Oh crap. Electric Company, The - TV Guide: DVDs coming later this year
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
download a 5 minute, low-quality movie (usually porn)
:)
who's got the torrent?
13000000th post?
Perhaps piracy would technically be easier with this system, but you have to remember that most people really don't like stealing. The iTunes Music Store is blossoming for this very reason. Freeman's point is a good one: If a system like the iTunes Music Store (but for movies) precedes possible rampant piracy (which is certainly growing in the movie industry), the problem will be corrected before it grows. As is the case with music at the moment, you will then start seeing a lot of people legally downloading movies, and there will be no piracy mess to clean up (as has been the case with music). I certainly believe that this system would thwart far more piracy than it would encourage.
"Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." -Archimedes
You see the problem here? You are saying if we dont think you are funny, then we must have no sense of humor.
Now, that also means you regard yourself a pretty funny guy.
Telling everyone you think you are a pretty funny guy usually wont impress the oh-so-finiky moderators.
Just thought I'd let you know, in case you were wondering why everyone on slashdot had become "humor impaired"
lol
I felt kinda like this back in 97 when I first got on the internet. Downloading and printing crap every spare moment... probably took me a year or so to realize that "THE INTERNET WILL STILL BE THERE IN THE MORNING!!" ha ha ha.
I still have tons of old programs and games I'll never use. I must have about 5 or 6 gigs of windows 95 drivers still too.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
I'd love a service where I got unlimited viewing rights (which I get with a DVD) on unlimited players (which I sort of get from a DVD), for a single price (which I get from a DVD) without the plastic disc (which I... ah, you get it).
Right now, I use DVDs (I pay for) to build a library (on an HD) so that I have what I want, in a very cost controlled way. The "per view" fee is appropriate for some stuff.
For instance, when i was in school there came a time when 5 1/4" floppies fell below a dollar a per disc, in bulk. At this point it became extremely reasonable to make a copy of every single program that anyone had. A floppy, though a neat little utility called disk muncher, could be spread throughout the school in a day or two. It did not matter what the program did, or if you would use it, just that you had it. Students left high school with hundreds of floppies.
So i don't think it is because access to conent is new. I thinkmany people like to hoard, and if one takes the time to download, one might as well burn it to a $.20 CD. I agree that taking the time to rip a movie a every movie one gets to DVD might indicate additional concerns, but the concept is the same.
Also, I think this is one of the places where piracy is a term best not used. The content owners really need to focus their defenses on the firms that utilize stolen software for administration of profit. I mean once i got some cash, and grew up, the piracy went way down.
Can we get a fancy signed note with a shiny gold sticker to give to our ISP when they cap/cut off our service us for breaking their unpublished usage limits? I almost feel sorry for the poor college students living in their dorms with very restricted network usage, maybe 2GB a week or 20KB/s. Going by MovieWeb's avgs of 700MB for "normal" or 1.4GB for "high quality" that's one or two a week, not enough for a slow weekend.
These movie services may force some ISPs to upgrade their service and increase their usage caps if enough customers want to use a legal paid service(not pay for kazaa/bit torrent/other), especially if there's ever an unlimited use monthly subscription.
It would have be very high quality, far enough before the dvd release and cheap enough for me to cancel my Blockbuster Online membership, $15/mo 3 at at time and 2 coupons for free in-store rentals.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
Let me guess... whatever they do will not be available to us Linux users. It'll have a windows specific executable and ring-0 driver or something.
I am currently trying to overcome this addiction, by only downloading shit I actually want/will watch/play but... it's just not working out that way.
:(
I see my unused bandwidth and it just seems like such a waste
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty, to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
Does this have anything to do with Apple's migration to Intel hardware, Intel's plans to release hardware DRM in next year's CPUs, and the new h.264 compression scheme that's in Quicktime 7 that's supposed to make visually-high-quality downloadable movies more of a reality? Sounds like an aweful coincidence if you ask me.
Damien
I keep hearing the same complaint over and over.
The interesting movies/TV shows/records/content never get made because they aren't going to be block-busters and the studio system has gotten so bloated and expensive with the hangers-on.
We need a distribution channel (like an IMDB with iTunes-like media distribution) for movies that aren't and will never be block-busters but that are good anyway.
The studios used to produce quite a few a month but that got too expensive. Then came the indies but the studion and distribution companies own all the distribution channels, ergo, I don't get to see any interesting films.
The theater chains and the multiplexes can never run the movies long enough for me. By the time that I'm ready to see them, they're already gone.
But if I could pick 'em up off the net, legally, when I want to see them, I would.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Why do so many people think it is right to be able to copy movies and music for free? I do believe in fair use rights, but things are getting to a point where people almost expect all movies and music to be free. What is wrong with protecting something that costs money to make? If "they" do not want to use the internet to distribute, why does that beget the acceptance of copying the content without paying? Yes, as I sit here thinking about music and movies, I want to watch what I buy, wherever I want to watch it, but if SOME restriction meant the system as a whole would work better, and I could get movies over the internet, I am all for it. Think of the iTunes store...
Hello
I believe this comment's parent has a point. A bad implementation could make piracy easier.
OTOH, I wish that entreprenuers could gloss over concerns of encouraging piraacy.
Isn't that the argument so many pirates use to rationalize their actions? IE, "If only the RIAA had offered music online for my convenience and pleasure, I wouldn't have to use Kazaa!"
At every turn, the **AAs (and those who fund the production of media)oppose most any digital content distribution system because of fears of piracy. I say that creators of convenient digital content distribution systems should flat dismiss such fears of piracy. Piracy will always occur, partly because of the hacker desire to grok most anything that's interesting or a challenge. The consumption of such readily available digital content would far outpace any ancillary piracy. The success of legitimate online music stores is a good example. Despite the continued easy availability of pirated content, millions of people prefer to purchase and receive their music through their choice of many competing online music stores.
Producers need to push piracy out of their mind. When companies make quality content conveniently available, people will gladly pay, and such revenue should outstrip any "missed" (not "lost revenue", IMHO, b/c would a pirate buy the content anyway? Maybe, maybe not)revenue.
PS: A good implementation would discourage piracy. For example, AFAIK, the only way to strip WMA 10 audio files of their DRM is to record them in real time, in analog. This means that the same could be true for video; that pirates could only rip movies in real time, which is a pain in the ass. I think that's an acceptable detterent.
Wow. That was terrible. You're done.
13,000,000!!!!!
Sadly enough, I find myself in this situation, to the point that there is a torrent or two running at all times on my machine at home. However, most of the time the download is in lieu of actually watching TV to the point that I almost watch TV shows exclusively on my computer. Lately I've also been burning DVDs of TV shows and distributing them around to friends who haven't managed to see them yet.
I think some of it is one giant pissing contest as to who can have the most movies, sometimes it's the "I'll get around to watching it later" syndrome, and sometimes it's just to have something to watch that you've never seen before available at all times. Sort of like saying "I've only seen this Simpsons 20 times before, so maybe I'll just finish watching Cowboy Bebop instead". And sometimes, it's because we remember waiting three days to download the first half of Blade in crap Telesync before realizing that the actual movie came out the next day. Even with the slowness, being (most likely) the first people in the community to have a movie from the 'internets' was a pretty big thing back then. Maybe some people just haven't gotten over it.
But you're right. It could get way out of hand...
Unless we're talking about Pr0n. Then it will likely never get out of hand.
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
It's all about the perception of scarcity. If you dangle the threat that someday, access to commodity X will be restricted (ie, made more expensive) or taken away, it creates an incentive to hoard. Whether it be guns, alcohol, rare paintings, media, etc., if you have the reasonable belief that what you can get today for $5, you cannot get tommorrow for $5, you will get as much as you can, while you can.
For example, there are people who archive useful websites, because sometimes, these websites change (become less useful) or disappear completely. You and I would probably not devote much time to this, because we know that we can usually rely on the Internet Archive or Google's cache to make snapshots (not always, but that's the risk we're taking). However, if it was information that had a reasonable chance of not being preserved due to external influence (ie, internal Diebold memo on how to fix elections for the highest bidder), then people would hoard it just for the sake for hoarding it, due to its potential value in scarcity. Ironically, because of that potential value, it would probably be less scarce than if it was a run of the mill technical document.
Given the movie/music industry's more or less stated goal of converting all of their "property" into licensable forms, preferably forms that expire on you (remember Divx - not DivX;), but the DVD you could rent to view for 24, then throw away?), hoarding what you can get, while you can still get it, isn't as crazy an idea as you might think. Of course, there's always the other explanation of hoarding specific items - some people are just natural-born packrats.
I call it the Pokemon Phenomenon (or effect)... it's the same mentality that makes you want to "catch 'em all".
It's a nice feeling when you have a "complete" set. Like hockey cards, coins, stamps, TV episodes (back when you had to try to record reruns to get em all). Or even reconciling your credit card bill with receipts and having everything match up...
Perhaps they should have got the domain name first.. http://www.clickstar.com/
You have a sick, twisted mind. Please subscribe me to your newsletter.
i thought alanis was god, or maybe this is him , or was it george? one tricky deity.
always mosh clockwise
What the heck does he know? Seriously.
Just because he was in "The Matrix" with Tom Cruise, now he thinks he knows about the Internet and stuff?
Freeman told reporters at Sun Valley after making his presentation, which was closed to the press.
You're overreacting.
How about finishing Rendevouz with RAMA first? /love your acting, though.
"remember Divx - not DivX;), but the DVD you could rent to view for 24, then throw away?"
You mean Divix?
I buy most of my DVDs used from CD warehouse.
Mostly, I scan the bargain bins and pick out
one or two that look interesting based on a few
seconds evaluation. When I want to watch something
at home, I look through my collection. The best is
finding a decent movie I didn't know I had.
My collection is diverse and full of lots of surprises (and duds).
This bittorrent thing looks good too though,
as soon as I upgrade my 486, I'm going to have
to try that out.
WRT netflix, I don't think that's it at all. Certainly that's one of the reasons, but I'd venture a guess that the predominant reason is convenience. Netflix takes at least three days turnaround, more if it's over a weekend. That means no impulse movies and no big super-trilogy marathons or whole series marathons or what have you. People building up netflix libraries are planning a bit further ahead so later on they can say, "hey i'm in the mood for x" and watch it right away rather put it in the queue and wait a week. In fact, that's the same reason people buy movies at all!
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
of them also letting you download the print to put on the DVD and the one to put in a Box to hold the DVD? I would be very interested in this if I could just buy some empty boxes, print out the lable and box cover and do the whole thing myself.
Nah. Just DRM the hell out of it. It's what we've done with everything else!
-This message brought to you by Intel Corporation.
I don't know why everyone gets so up in a huff about all this:
Consider the basic principle of the whole thing:
If I can watch the media (audio/video) I can copy it. It's just a fact. I have no idea why the record execs spend so much $ on this.
(Yes the quality, blah, blah...)
You just gave a nearly inerrant description of my girlfriend's brother. How amusing.
Of course, you failed to mention that whenever their internet connection fails, he wanders around downstairs until it is fixed saying "I could be killing people right now. Think of how many people I would have killed if the internet were working". How could you have missed this detail?
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Mod Parent Funny!!!
My Sysadmin Blog
Whoops, knew I missed an "i" in there. For that matter, it should have said "24 hours" instead of just "24".
Yeah, I saw that later. Bummer.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
The MPAA will hardly have any motivation to come up with a distribution system. They could but then they'd loose all theatre revenue. Theatre is distribution.
Of course you're probably wondering why I'm splitting hairs? Distribution is already available by newsgroups, and distribution lacks one thing that most p2p networks usually have. A distribution system doesn't insure that a release will be available for an extended time period. Even the most pristine newsgroup servers only provide 45 days binary hosting, and an average ISP is 4 days.
The MPAA needs to do something different to be competetive and to avoid killing theatre revenues (too much politics) so they will likely go for a middle of the road approach where a low quality DRM release is available before a DVD but after theatres.
The MPAA is against you, so they will only pretend to help you. More overall revenue is their goal and by introducing an irrelevant solution they get more revenue.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
A friend of mine who did production design for several motion pictures (e.g. Back to the Future, Star Trek) said in an interview, of the pre-production process, that he who gets the project last wins.
He was referring to how a concept would go from the production designer to the concept arist then to the model makers and then the vfx team... getting tweaks all along the way. And he's right, he who gets the project last wins... by then, it's too late for anyone else to weigh in their opinion on the changes.
Well, in marketing it works the other way around... He who gets there first wins. The truth is, Morgan Freeman understands, clearly, as does any reasonable individual in the motion picture industry, that piracy is never going to be completely eliminated... nor is it likely to decrease in proportion to an ever-increasing number of theatrical releases. This is especially true if the current trend of quantity over quality continues... where filmgoers are reluctant to pay upwards of $10 a pop to see a crappy movie every week.
The reason that the delay to DVD release has been shortened is largely to stem losses from piracy. The reasoning is that most individuals are less inclined to go through the relatively cumbersome act of fishing P2P networks for a film (much less a [b]decent[/b] copy) if they don't have to wait very long for a $15 DVD with extra content that won't be attached to a P2P file.
Same logic here... iTunes already proved that people will pay a premium (i.e. more than "free") for music downloads if there's justification for it. iTunes offers things no pirate P2P network does... in terms of their library, the fidelity of MPEG-4, and the ease of use facilitated by smart interface design... not to mention the most insanely brilliant global load balancing I've ever seen (and I work for a company that shares global load balancing for giants like Sony and Ebay).
So, the logic is this...
Release nothing on the internet, and get lots of piracy.
Release something IMMEDIATELY on the internet, and get somewhat less piracy than you would have.
You're going to get piracy either way... so all you can do is try to make a buck while you can.
Why do you think, in the business of theatrical releases, every single motion picture studio in the universe bets the farm on that first weekend?
It's all about availability. I despise going to movie theaters: No pp-room pause, no smoking, no horizontal watching, idiotic advertising, junk food... I don't care if I have to wait a few months to confortably watch a movie at home. Except, sometimes a movie comes along that I really want to watch. It doesn't matter if I am willing to pay double theater price to watch it at home, it is just not legally available. Hello P2P:)...
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
Its easy now. What is hard has been getting legitimate media with the same convenience. I've got cash like I'm sure most people here do, I just don't have a lot of time or patience. Add it up.
Quack, quack.
Here's my solution.
I figure that's good use of my upload bandwidth.
"It is exactly this kind of illegal downloading that would go away if they offered reasonably priced legitimate copies."
I got a $100, that says that's at best wishful thinking. At worst it's outright deceptive.
Everyone like's to have a scapegoat, as for why they can't "help themselves", and "I just can say no". Yeah, yeah. If you had the ethics to get into the situation? You're not going to suddenly develop the ethics to get out of it.
Just another "It's all your fault I'm the way I am","we can get you the money you're entitled to","were's my welfare check","the man's trying to keep me down" victimhood/entitlement mentality that's infected the past couple decades.
Wouldn't this just make it easier to pirate movies?
It's already sufficiently easy to pirate.
What this could do, if they play it right, is to provide service and convenience that is worth paying for. Like iTunes. Though they could do even better.
Cheers.
It's simple-- someone is threatening your rights, you exercise those rights as much as possible.
In this case, it's the US Gov't and various corporations threatening our right to share information.
Luke-Jr
If you make the legal method easier than pirating, you eliminate the need for said pirating methods. iTunes got this right (sorta), and made the RIAA blush. If this goes well, it will be the kick in the arse that the MIAA needs to realize what they are doing is wrong. Then again, the RIAA is still being stupid.
~Armchair Technocrat
"The only piracy that really hurts the movie and music industries is what comes from industry grade copying and packaging. Internet downloading and P2P don't really hurt."
[Illegal disc copying]
Content----distribution via massive copying----customer.
[illegal P2P copying]
Content----distribution via massive copying----customer.
Gee you know what? The end-effect is the same. People are getting something without compensation, or permission.*
*In fact I'd argue that having an invisible middle-man makes P2P more harmful because there's less risk for all concerned, and hence a greater number can engage in it. How many can afford to become a physical-mass pirate?
How could it conceivably be any easier than it already is to distribute movies without authorization of the copyrightholders? I don't think a webstore is going to make fiber-to-the-premises ubiquitous, after all.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
unuassually insightful
I'm the same way about games.
I used to download, burn and spindle every game that ever game out, in thoughts that "I'll want to play it some day". Now I barely play games at all, and I have 7 spindles of games from 5+ years ago that are collecting dust.
What a useless obsession...
- shazow
I feel the same way - although I guess I never really thought about it.
Hey, what if I need that program some day? What if they stop Bittorrent and all the other stuff by requiring ISP's to only allow cached web traffic? What if?
It could happen, and in the current climate of technology things, it seems likely. In the meantime, I'm downloading everything I can get because in the future I might not be able to.
Of course, I wouldn't bother if this shit wasn't so expensive. $25 for a movie? $60 for a game? $500 for Photoshop? If movies were $5, games were $15, and Photoshop was $30, I wouldn't bother pirating any software or media.
However, I do buy DVD's occationally, because I know I can get that movie off the disc any time I wanted. I probably won't ever copy it or send it over the Internet, but I *could.*
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
This makes me really wonder why (more?) people don't hoard gasoline. It makes perfect sense. It's a fungible, storable commodity, yet its price varies like crazy because the supply-demand curve is locked so tightly together. If people could, say, stock up a year's supply of gasoline when prices were below $1 during the Asian financial crisis (ah, those were fun days), do you think the oil industry could really get away with charging so much now? The thing is, consumers don't store gasoline, and it'd probably be dangerous for them to homebrew a solution, but you could probably make a sophisticated business out of it. Just one of those things, I guess.
No, you absolutely did not. The AC is wrong. DIVX was Circuit City's DRM-disc format. Wikipedia has never heard of "DIVIX", nor has Everything2, nor any other reputable site I can find. The only reference to "DIVIX" that I can find is on random forums on Google where clueless people are mispelling the name of DivX (the codec)
Random and weird software I've written.
Here, Here.
This is the main reason why I choose not to buy any more hard drive space. You simply collect crap to fill the space you're in.
Having recently helped my folks move house after 20 years I can safely say this also applies to houses.
Maybe it's the "packrat mentality" we humans seem to be wired to have.
If someone could find the packrat/hoarding gene, then maybe the only companies and distributed movies and displayed products would be of those which actually make anything useful, find an audience, or have repeat volume users.
If only stores would be less cluttered, and ads less full of junk aimed at subconsciously making kids torment mommy and daddy for some gizmo Micky D's or whomever is bundling or some tennis that are selling like hotcakes over the branding of some celeb, then maybe, just maybe economies will be shaken up and made to produce and sell REAL things.
As for movies, all to many of them are shit anyway. Films, OTOH, deserve to be called film (even tho movies are also on mylar/whatever film or disk or mylar/digital medium) when they are not some harebrained, investor-covered shit that should not have been financed anyway.
Maybe they ought to stop selling movies on disk and just put them on silver screen. Encode them with encryption and some new, non-playable format to work against employees who send bootleg copies outside the studio...
Gas rots after a certain amount of time.
You can only store it for so long before it begins to break down in to a bunch of crap you don't want running through your engine
I wonder if you could stockpile diesel though? Probably cheaper (and less hazardous) just to buy a forward contract though.
AMD is gonna get Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier to create a faster and cheaper service! You just watch...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Almost by definition, Internet pr0n never gets out of hand....
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."
I don't really understand why us geeks like to hoard intellectual property so much.
Because it wants to be free?
I don't think you have a right to watch movies. Watching movies, listening to music, playing games, and various other forms of entertainment are not something you are entitled to.
Hopefully this won't be a U.S. only service, most large media services (one notable exception being iTunes) are U.S. only which won't affect piracy all that much in the end. :-/
After all, a lot of piracy is due to the near impossibility of paying for the same content in a decently timely manner in the rest of the world.
People in Europe need to pirate or wait for months (sometimes years) for the "hottest movies" to be released on DVD or the next episode of our favourite series to show up on the worst time slots on TV
Sorry, but as of May 2, 2005, Movielink no longer supports Windows 98 and ME operating systems.
Movielink also does not support Mac or Linux.
In order to enjoy the Movielink service, you must use Windows 2000 or XP,
which support certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies.
If its anything like this it will never work. I would rather stick to torrents, and it has nothing to do with the the price.
It's simple really. Just imagin moviename.com offering a download of the movie after its cinema release. Something in the way of a bittorrant that requires some sorta user authentication that charges per download. You then have a quick and easy form of ditribution. If you send the torrent file to someone else it will either charge your account fo the new download or a new authentication is created. What do you all think of it?
I am downloading software and movies I don't intend to use in the coming 6 months, but I will likely be interested in it later - because if these P2P crackdowns actually succeed, then it won't be available anymore - so I'd rather have them stored in my pile of CD's where nothing can take them away anymore.
Of course, there's always the other explanation of hoarding specific items - some people are just natural-born packrats.
Your post will go great in my large collection of posts about consumption. Never know when it will come in handy, and some day Slashdot may not be around...
RIAA/MPAA/Etc should flood the torrentsites with exellent genuine warez and noone would have time to actually listen and watch the stuff. They would be buisy downloading!-->PROFIT!.
I currently pay @70 USD per month for my sat TV service (Sky in the UK) . Yet when a show airs Ive normally seen it because Ive downloaded the torrent - and why shouldnt I when I am usually paying for something that Sky have licensed but dont want to let me watch yet because they want it for their spring/autumn/winter season (this is the UK...we dont have summers). Personally Id much prefer to ditch sat TV altogether and subscribe to an internet based service...
As for movies...I gave up downloading them years ago. Quality is VERY hit and miss afair, the number of mislabeled or subbed titles is very high...it just wasnt worth the hassle. But nor do I go to the movies because the appeal of sitting in a theater where 1/2 the time someones head is in the way of the screen, not being able to go and take a leak when I want...well it just isnt there anymore.
So anyways yes, gimme a service where I spend $70-$100 USD per month for cinema AND TV releases that I get to see WHEN they are released or aired and Ill be first in the queue!!
Oh wait...
1. Netflix DVDs come straight to you, so you don't have to go out to the video shop. This is very convenient, especially if there isn't a video shop near you, or more to the point there isn't one that stocks anything but blockbusters.
2. It can also be very good value* on a per-rental basis compared to store rentals, depending on how many you rent in a month. *Note: not 'a' good value.
3. However, you have no way of knowing what you are going to get on any particular day, it can come from pretty much any position on your list (at least with our local Netflix-type service.) Hence you may not be in the mood for a particular film when it arrives, and you lose 'I think I'd like to watch X tonight.'
4. Copying a DVD is quick and easy. If you only tend to watch a film once, what you are doing here is basically equivalent to video time-shifting.
5. Voila, you now have a selection conveniently near to you that you can select from to watch at will.
The more observant types will note that the position described in (5) would also be completely satisfied with a good movie-on-demand service. Even more than satisfied as it would do away with the hassle of having to copy and keep the damn things. Especially with movies, which most people do tend to watch only once, I think this type of piracy could be annihilated overnight simply by providing a better service...
However due to the pig-headedness of the studios and the prevalence of DRM impeding easy use of the end product, I don't see this becoming mainstream in less than ten years. Hence refer back to 1-5 above.
The answer is simple: he is God!
Signatures are for stupids.
I don't really understand why us geeks like to hoard intellectual property so much. Of those 50 movies:
1. How many do you actually watch?
2. How many do you use to buy friends with?
3. How many get thrown on a spindle and forgotten?
What kind of advantage do you have if you don't download 50 movies/month?
Hoarding is rife in all digital areas: People hoard ebooks, which makes some sense, all that knowledge seems to make your computer heavier, has a reference use. I know someone who collected XYZ# of O'Reilly books, I thought he was a twat anyway.
/. about property value, and that guy stabbing his (ex)friend for selling his virtual artifact, hilarious, in a morbid way.
Google is the ultimate hoard. Its all there for us to access, although, I think yesterday something happened with google, some searches I do frequently to find certain pages stopped working, and not just the 8 week reshuffle I think google has changed fundemantally yesterday, and it'll be a while for all the hyperventillating bloggers to latch onto it, and claim the discovery.
Anyway, back on track, from MUDS to MMORPGS, people hoard lint, dead skin, orc bones, empty vials, epired credit cards, anything really.
From UO to WoW this happens. I read a great srticle linked from
Status online is seeping into our offline world. But with music and film, and books, it is slightly different.
I would like to lookup any play on my TV, using a bluetooth remote, flick through it, link to a video of that play, so watch Merchant of Venice, or Romeo and Juliet, and have the text on a PDA in front of me. Convenience, and added functionality.
We want convenient, 'when I want' access to all this media, and right now, the only way to do this, is to hoard it painstakingly.
When we have this easy free flowing google like access, then we would gladly micropay for it, in leiu of actually hoarding it.
The first time I played GTA, I went out, stole all the fancy cars, and drove them back to my compound, and marvelled at them. I envisaged an online world where you could mod you cars and show them off, and have the biggest collection of cars.
Virtual material items are no longer immaterial, look at the 'rarity' values of items in games. In neopets (I had to try it) items are given rarity ratings. This is like an economy.
About 15 years ago I thought online we would all have out own 3d room, furnished (ideas taken from habitat) and be able to transmit our own tv stations to other people virtual homes, which could project into their real living room, onto their real tv... now the technoogy is there... and we are all our killing slugs and monsters to get bones to make a shield, to buy a horse...
Always suffix your post with you 7 letter automated human test word.
MRAMBOT
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
put me on that list.
max out 2 8mb connections and spend tons of time burning the images to dvd, but really i just like keeping track of these things.
how many good or even decent movies, or songs from 25 years ago just disappeared? how much culture is lost? looking back sure you can get a megahit album from the beatles or bob dylan, but most of the mediocre stuff that just fills the airwaves is lost. Most people would say "good riddance" but we are defined by the crap as well as the art. It will be sad if people 50 years on look back and don't realize along with the decent music we had our britney spears and nsync, because i think that horrible crap actually defines us as a real, breathing culture more than any timeless classics we produce. how much would you know about the victorian age if all you ever heard about was the works of shakespeare and such.
this seems like such a pessimistic argument, but in school when you heard all those folk songs in music class didn't they convey a greater understanding of the people vs a symphony or the national anthem. losing culture is a crime, less so for the crap, but hey, one persons ricky martin is another persons bach.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
cause hey i'll hack something for that.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
also, i've noticed the more hd space i have the more i just have to keep it filled with movies, programs, crap i have stuff i downloaded, failed to sort and never got back to taking up hundreds of gigs at this point.
my main server has 2tb online right now, the download barrier for me is very low. if i see something online and had any interest in it at some point, click, boop, its queued. unlimited bandwith coupled with near unlimited storage capacity (like 5 dvd burners around) mean you get everything, and if the impulse comes by someday to check it out, meh. its a packrat mentality, but when the cost of acquisition and storage get that low expect everyone to have a few tb media library. the old paradigm of "buy what you really like cause you can't keep that much" is breaking down all over, and we should be happy. seriously, besides a few outmoded economic concerns what's to stop everyone from having either a copy or easy access to every movie made in the last 5 years, or every tv show. on demand is working on this, but it's terribly clunky as an interface, and has too small of a selection.
seriously, tv distribution is a model that evolved from the limitations of video broadcast. those kinda don't exist anymore, at least not the same "1 vhf channel per show per timeslot" kind of way. media is still profiting off the artificial scarcity, but that won't last forever. the first company that says "hey we sponsor tv shows for online download subscription" once broadband becomes really ubiquitous is going to be huge.
video killed the radio star, and then the net fired back.
should be fun to watch.
the revolution will not be televised... it will be a distributed torrent-cast.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
Is there not a movie quote on the Internet that is properly replicated?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
How about using some of that internet connection to learn some real history? Shakespeare was long before the victorian age.
Involves tugging on the heart strings, saying that we're going to be putting the average john does like the boom operator, the cameraman etc. out of work by downloading these films and not watching them at an over price cinema. So why are actors still paid millions for their performance whilst these people are made redudent? Something that gives me little sympathy for the Film industry.
Nothing costs nothing
elizabethan, victorian, both are chicks who didn't bathe cept once a year.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
so his dad gets him a pc for college, tells him he has $1500 bucks to build one if he does it himself. so he gets about 180 gig of storage space, a 3ghz p4, 1g ram, crap video, a 15" crt....and he just downloads. he watches maybe a couple of movies a week, never plays the games, and never uses the software....$1500 so he can watch 2 or 3 movies a week tops for free.
go fucking figure.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
If you've got some good legal reps, you could always go with the, 'tha boy's not right' defense.
... case. But only you choose the right representation.
Rep: "He's just like that Crazy Cat Lady"
Jurors (nod up and down)
Rep: "Yep, his momma kept Bower Birds as pets"
Jurors (blank stares)
Rep (points to movie screen): "This is a Bower Bird" , naturalist monologue (droning); "...the bower bird is a compulsive hoarder. this little fellow has built a large enough collection to attract overflow climbers from K2"
Jurors (vigourous up and down nodding)
Rep: "I should also mention that he has 17 computers, three motorbikes, two pet turtles, a dog, 33 cases of Jolt(tm) cola, and 17 bags of potatoe chips in his 8 x 10 room."
Jurors (murmuring growing to shouts): "i believe he innocent, yep he innocent, innicent Innocent INNOCENT, AMEN AMEN SET THIS POOR BOY FREE!"
The above scenario might play out in your 'piracy', porn, marijuana,
Piracy will not be resolved if they ignore the rest of the world. Clearly, internet = arbitrage. Word speads if country A can download at a different price than country B, and that is the bane of the sales droids.
While this is targeted for North America only, the rest of world are denied access - like Canadians who have to jump hoops to get satTV.
Sure, laws get passed to ensure practices are legal (orderly market and all that) - but the outcome for such distortions are clear.
Good luck to the dude, because hiring DVD's is cheap enough, and the established players DO have buying clout. Downloads are worthless without subtitles, and released DVD's are not meeting requirements. Hearing Impaired 8%, Mexican 12%, thats 20% of the market lost there and then.
Now I have broadband, I delete most things shortly after downloading them. By the time I want to re-install an app, there's usually a newer version out, so I have to download that instead anyway, so it makes no sense to have (for example) copies of Winamp lying around in my downloads folder.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I agree. I used to burn all my tools and utilities to CD way back when. Now if I need it, I just download it instead. It can be faster than looking for it.
Do you really think he is doing this for the "greater good" of the world? C'mon, you have to be kidding me.
In reality, what probably happened is that some company with the idea (maybe Intel, I didn't RTFA) came to him and is using him as a spokesman. Think George Foreman and his grill. Did he invent it, or just promote it?
sounds like they'd have been ideal for you then!
We want convenient, 'when I want' access to all this media, and right now, the only way to do this, is to hoard it painstakingly.
I wish't I'd hoarded the content from mp3.com from 5 years ago.
Did you miss the part where DRM is bad?
1. If you're unhappy with the movie industry, stealing the movies is not the answer. All this does is make you a criminal, ruins your moral integrity, and hurts the industry.
2. So yer disgruntled about the pay scales in the movie industry? Well, aside from your belief that the guy pushing the camera dolly around should get paid the same as everyone else, that scale is something to be considered. If your "underpaid minion" is only getting X-percent out of the final budget, the less money a movie makes, the less money there is in X. So when you steal that movie, not only are you doing nothing to solve the problem, but you are hurting the "underpaid minon" by decreasing the amount of profit going into his X salary.
3. So you tell yourself "It's just one movie. One stolen DVD is nothing compared to the millions." Now multiply that one DVD by the thousands of others thinking the same way, and do the math.
4. There is no end to the number of people who will complain about having to pay for things. If they can steal it, they will, because they have some screwed-up belief that they have the right not to be charged for a service. Nowhere, anywhere, does it say that the movie industry doesn't have the right to charge the consumer whatever the hell they want. They could charge us $500 to buy a DVD if they wanted to. Wouldn't do their sales very good, but they could. If they sell a movie for $20, that is the price of the movie. You can either buy the entertainment, or don't get it. Your ability or willingness to buy the DVD is irrelevant. A thousand years ago, if you wanted a barrel, the price was two chickens. No chickens, no barrel. That's just the way it was. Nothing's changed. If you want the DVD, you pay 20 bucks. Don't have 20 bucks, you don't get the movie. Bitching and moaning about it is your right. Stealing it is not. If you don't like it, you can use your democratic powers and try to have things changed.
He's just trying to live up to his namesake. Cos, y'know, everything on the Internet is, like, free, man!
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Netflex doesn't deliver to the barren icy landscapes of Ontario Canada, so I use Zip.ca which is the same kinda deal. Awesome selection, no late fees, movies up the wazoo, highly recommended.
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Strange to read that, cos I bought a TiVo for us a couple of years ago, and that means that we never watch anything unless we actually want to. We used to watch so much crap waiting for something decent that was on in half an hour. Now we watch everything a day late (at least), but never, ever, watch a Simpsons we've seen 20 times before.
Same with downloads. I only d/l stuff I've either missed, or can't get. I really can't be bothered d/ling stuff on the off chance I'll want some filler later - I've got my life back off the telly, and I'm keeping it that way.
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
It's called Oil Futures. Just buy a bunch of oil on the market ahead of time, then save money (or make money by reselling).
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Unfortunately, I've come to realize that hoarding media is just as much an addiction as drinking or drugs can be. It is a psychological one. And I realized I get slightly anxious at the fact that I have all this stuff to watch, but not enough time to watch it (some of us have jobs that consume a lot of our free time), and then new episodes come out for example, and I might miss those, and that makes me even more anxious. Its the same thing when I am away from the internet for a while and there's a huge backlog of Slashdot articles I need to catch up on.
Its the fear of missing out on something important, and it is one that I'd REALLY like to get help with, but unfortunately I lack much information about it. If anybody here can be of any help, I'd greatly appreciate it.
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Apple Computer will pants them before they develop the first design concept. http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1164 My money is on apple to develop the best online movie experience. I wonder if this is going to cause some friction between Apple and Intel?
To this I must heartily admit and agree. At one point, I was weeks and months catching up to the music and movies that I downloaded. I used to download about 200-250 songs a day, and about 4-5 movies a night. Obviously, I had a little time on my hands, but I couldn't nearly keep up with the influx of media information in time to watch and listen to everything.
Putting my playlist on random always held up a pleasant surprise, with new songs that I hadn't heard before, though. And I set up a distribution server on the school network for my collection of DivX's, so a lot of other people got to benefit from that.
If someone could explain that awful drive and addiction that comes from media hoarding, I would be grateful in releasing my demons.
Read the only personal Runyon page out there.
I used to do this too. Had a "drivers" folder where I built my own personal driver-archive, etc etc. After I got my first DSL in 2001 (now on Ethernet) I gave up on this habit since it no longer served any purpose.
I do have a friend though, he still does this. has like 20 versions of Winamp, etc.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
I don't think its needed at all. For one thing I don't believe all the piracy hype. It's made up smoke and mirrors. Now bypass TV by providing tv shows without commercials, the day after they air instead of waiting for dvd collections and they may be onto something.
But I hear ya. Due to LARGE hard drives, I've never needed to clean up my downloads directory either, or atleast nothing more than sorting by size and getting rid of anything above 30MB
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
The men with very large rifles pointing at your head when you wake up in the morning may disagree.
The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum. - O'Toole's Corollary
Amen to that! I also wouldn't mind browsing the old (FASTER) format of allmusic.com either.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
Well I'd say the reason that people hoard so much stuff is simple. It's what a good consumer is supposed to do, get themselves as much product for as little money as possible. It's the guiding philosophy of the age. And if the shits free then keep eating/drinking/watching until you pop (no matter how bad it makes you feel) ! To do otherwise is "weird" "antisocial" and "unpatriotic".
:)
After all most media related items rely on artificial scarcity to drive demand. Ooh look... "Limited edition", "digitally remastered", "now with the missing 20 seconds" (you get the idea).
Personally I think it's a good thing as there's a good chance that copies of obscure stuff will survive (issues regarding the lifespan of current optical media notwithstanding) After all who knows what our descendants will find fascinating about our century ? and what cultural artifacts they will treasure ? For all I know it could be the little plastic toys you get in Kinder eggs
It'll also get round the situation where the fuckwits at the BBC destroy a whole load of early Derek & Clive tapes (etc.) so they have more room on their storage shelves for more episodes of fucking boring, shite Panorama.
It would be nice if the archiving was done on a professional large scale but then you'd only end up with the situation above with some small minded dimwit throwing stuff out 'cause it's not flavour de jour.
So hoard, hoard away people ! You're preserving the past for purposes as yet unknown !
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
I don't remember allmusic.com. I'll wayback it to see what I missed.
My original point was that there was a lot of content on mp3.com that I thought was going to be available perpetuity only to have it gobbled up and destroyed (if memory serves) by the music industry. I.E. Get em while you can, boys, because the man's plan is to end the bread and circuses.
Of course, Shakespeare wrote during the Victorian and early Jacobean eras, in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, while the Victorian era was in the late 19th century. You're off by more years than the US has existed:-)
There is a certain penalty for getting caught pirating material, and there is also a risk (chance) of getting caught.
Combined together, these two values form the "value" that a person is spending on their action of piracy (or any illegal act for that matter).
If you make movie downloads online cost less than this value, the person will purchase the movie instead.
Reducing the value of the movie download (such as loading it up with DRM crud, or making it only viewable for one day, or making the quality really low) means you will have to further reduce the price. Current online movie rental services hideously bog down their users with unnecessary crud and thus do not have a very high level of success. This is to be expected, as not very many people place a $7 value on having 24 hour viewing privileges for a movie on their 17 inch screen.
Compare this to services like iTunes in which the sheer convenience of the service adds to the value already present in rather reasonable prices. iTunes and other services like it enjoy success because they place legal downloads at a price lower than the users threshold for piracy.
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Hoarding is defined as "A hidden fund or supply stored for future use; a cache." Which fits the netflix/"timeshifting" model described above.
However, I tend to think of hoarding in terms of scarcity. With Netflix being available to anyone who is willing to pay the monthly fee, these DVDs are not scarce. By me 'hoarding' a personal copy of them, the only one harmed is me in the form of lost data storage and optical media.
Plus, I may be the only one doing this, but often times I'll really use this method for timeshifting and convenience of viewing the movies/shows and delete them after watching for the sake of HD space. I will "hoard" up some movies and TV shows during the week, then watch some over the weekend or when I have time.
:D
Yeah at first it looks appealing, but why are DVDs not released at the same time as the movies hits the big screen ? Isn't it because a lot more people wouldn't bother going to a theater and a lot would have to close their doors ? So, is releasing movies on the net earlier than DVD really neutral for theater, I'm not sure. At least here in France DVDs can't be released before a six month period after the theatrical release because theaters' lobby asked for this protection. I'm sure Intel doesn't care but as a producer I would worry.
It's simply fulfilling a psychological need for security. When you let the entertainment giants force-feed you their garbage, what they want, when they want, you feel as if you're being controlled by a faceless, uncaring master, and it causes insecurity and anxiety.
When you download your own movies, and pirate them in this way, you feel as if you've taken your own destiny into your own hands. You have a choice, and nobody else can stop you. And the fact that it's digital data makes it even better, because you're not really hurting anybody, you're not depriving anyone else of property (no matter what the IP moralists tell you).
I'm not saying it's right. I'm not saying it's wrong. But in our hearts, we all have a fierce need for security, either to trust an authority for that security, or to be empowered to provide it for ourselves.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
When you want to say YOU ARE, use YOU'RE. When you want to talk about the movie I just downloaded say YOUR MOVIE. When you want to talk about BBS's, use back in the days of YORE!
That is just the typical 'warezer' mentality. Most people that trade movies or software in any measurable quantity collect stuff just for bragging rights. They'll end up with terabytes of movies they'll never watch and games they'll never play.
It's a dubious line to cross when you consider people like this hurting any industry. What's the harm in collectors when they don't actually view/listen/play the media they have stolen? Sadly, when that 16 year old kid down the street has his door kicked in by the RIAA SWAT team, he'll get an enormous fine for all this stuff, and his parents will end up paying through the nose. It's not really fair that anyone is considering people like this as a loss to their sales. Kids like this one never would have bought anything to begin with, they just got it 'because it was there'.
Try this sometime. Get a big box full of some useless junk (like a Free Willy armband or something) and hand it out on the corner. Because it's free, you'll end up with swarms of people grabbing one or more just for the hell of it. By the end of the day your box will be emptied out. It was useless junk right? So why did it seem so popular? A. because it was readily available and B. because it was free.
Current online movie rental services hideously bog down their users with unnecessary crud and thus do not have a very high level of success. This is to be expected, as not very many people place a $7 value on having 24 hour viewing privileges for a movie on their 17 inch screen.
At the very least, I disagree. More importantly, you are misinformed about a few things. First, I am an avid Movielink.com user, and movies are only $2.99 for a 24-viewing priod (time starts upon first viewing). Second, the DRM is transparent on the Movielink services. It works for me on four different windows XP computers, and the picture quality is better than vhs, even comparable to good quality DVD transfers. Third, I frequently and easily hook up either of two laptops (brother-in-laws or mine) to different televisions and watch Movielink movies with no problems at all.
Movielink is an overall fantastic service that has with excellent value IMHO. My only gripe is the limited selection.
And that is my point: I believe conumer demand is there, at the current price and feature set, but the limited selection (because of studio piracy apprehension) is the major limiting factor of the service's success!
I need you to read your post again.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
I don't really understand why us I don't really understand why us geeks like to hoard intellectual property so much..
Geeks hoard 'intellectual property' because they have a deep respect for it and reasonable distrust of corporate interests to the protect it.
Entertainment corps are only interested in money. When the individual product stops selling above a certain number, it will be simply removed from the market by the corps because the cost of supporting it will be greater than the profit resulting from its sale. In reasonable times, the product would have passed into public domain by this point.
But since the entertainment corps stole the public domain, and since they plan to add unbreakable DRM to the product, the work of art will disappear from the earth should the corps decide to stop selling it.
By 'pirating' it, geeks are protecting current works of film and music not only for their own amusement but also for generations hundreds of years from now.
As you say, It's what a good consumer is supposed to do.
A hoarder I know rarely watches the stuff he downloads, although I sometimes hear him talking about playing a new game he grabbed.
He routinely makes copies of stuff for me, two other friends, his brothers, his parents, and his girlfriend (yes, he has one). Many of these people in turn make copies for their neighbors, best friends, etc. When he downloads something popular, say The Incredibles dvdscr, he usually burns at least six copies. I'd say that gets turned into at least a dozen copies.
So my hoarder friend never has time to watch movies, and often he manages to give away all the copies he makes and is left with gaps in his own collection. Meanwhile, all his friends and family are enjoying first-run movies and new games for free with little legal risk.
I have pointed this out to him, but he insists he is happy to be enriching his friends' lives. He figures that someday when he's retired, all that stuff will fit onto one unit of media and he'll be free to browse and watch it at his leisure.
Personally, I think he's reacting naturally to the cultural forces that tell him "having new stuff is good." A culture that constantly dangles "the latest thing you need" in front of the masses that really need no such thing should not be surprised that the masses will hoard those useless goods when they can get them for free.
Yes, DVD movies are useless goods. How much would it hurt not to have them? Funny though, the industry isn't really losing any money on him, just his friends.
how much would you know about the victorian age if all you ever heard about was the works of shakespeare and such.
Sorry to nitpick, but the answer is "very little".
You're about 250 years off.
Cheers,
Carlos Cesar
Hey you can look down that girl's shirt in the picture. w00t. Err... brb.
Gee, you don't think the victim mentality that pervades nowadays has anything to do with the fact that wealth has been increasingly consolidated in the past few decades, do you?
Our society is set up to reinforce consumerism. After years of being marketed to, sooner or later, the poor will feel that they, too, are entitled to all the great shiny things that cost money. I'm not saying they are right to feel entitled. Hell, none of us should want any of this crap. But, yes, we made them that way.
If you tease an animal, don't be surpised when it bites.
Sharing information, however, is. And that is exactly what so-called "piracy" is being used to refer to.
Luke-Jr
That first 'Victorian' in my post should, of course, be 'Elizabethan.' Sigh--see me make the same mistake, although no doubt for different reasons. Double sigh.
Now we have BitTorrent watching TV/movies for you, saving you from actually having to do so. Many geeks, however develop a fault, and start downloading all sorts of silly things they won't watch.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Thanks Mr.2001 for your cogent argument against intellectual property rights. Not only are your points well-backed, but you argue without resorting to the snideness that tends to pervade Slashdot (I've been guilty, too).
Read the parent post, y'all.
It does sound like prices have decreased a bit since last time I looked into things.
Sounds like a nice deal, though the 24hr viewing period is kind of weird, I figure a 72hour or something deal would be better, the cost to them would be nil, unless the studios are acting weird about things.
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Dear recording and movie industries:
Welcome to July 2005. Any venture taken at selling movies or music over the internet will result in higher piracy. You're a day late, and a dollar short. The ship has sailed, the fat lady has sung. It's now too easy and too ingrained into most people's minds that it's free on p2p anyway, and they can watch it in their normal player. They're used to it. Sure, you'll have buyers, but you're not making pirates go away.
Let's see:
Domain Name: VCDQUALITY.COM
Created on: 19-Jun-01
Bad news, Morgan.
There is some suggestion that due to an increase in the popularity of online music sales, music pirating is on the downturn. I have to agree that if you can easily find music content, and the prices isn't too steep, I would prefer to buy the song and download it legally, rather then find some copy on a P2P network, and download it illegally.
It makes sense to offer movies for download for the same trend to happen.
The problem is, while digital music players are all the rage, video players have been slow to catch on, many people simply don't want to watch their movie on a 4" or smaller screen.
I think that video on demand, like offered on many digital cable networks, is the best way to offer movies, as it beams directly to your TV and home theater, devices actually designed for video content.
All I have to add to this is that there should always be a pay-once, watch-often mentality, whereby you own the rights to watch the movie as many times as you want (wherever you are, home or on the road), rather then paying for each time you want to view it. DIVX (the original) failed because of this concept, and ANYONE attempting to offer a system whereby you pay-per-view of online distributed movies, will fail as well.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I'm curious: Why would a person need 72 hours to finish a movie after the initial press of the play button?
I could guess the most probable interruption as "kids," and then there are any number of possible interruptions each less likely than kids to interrupt a person's viewing.
But how disruptive could these interruptions be? I myself usually am determined to watch a rental in one sitting, though this isn't very hard to accomplish. A 72 hour viewing period is a red herring, at least for me. Selection, price, conevenience matter to me.
Or perhaps you mean 72 hours after download? Because customers have typically 30 days after download to watch the movie. Plus, movies can be streamed after about 2-5 minutes of buffering.
In summary, I am genuinely curious. Thanks!