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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
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.
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.....
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
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.
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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.
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...
"It was the dumbest business model of Andy Dufresne's career..."
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.
Almost by definition, Internet pr0n never gets out of hand....
"I am an Adept of Tantric VAX."