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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?"
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
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
This is really only news when a couple of big labels actually sign on.
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.
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?
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.....
It is exactly this kind of illegal downloading that would go away if they offered reasonably priced legitimate copies. It's true that they will have to offer some recording capability (probably with reduced resolution) -- people feel pretty strongly about their ability to record what they see on their TV.
However, for all the grandstanding of the media companies in the US, the real "piracy" (actually, a very bad term) problem they face is in the far east. The problem is not people downloading low-resolution copies of movies (which doesn't cost them much business), but entire factories which churn out illegally copied DVDs, and people who buy the cheap fakes rather than the expensive originals.
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.
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
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.
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...