Slashdot Mirror
Leaked Screenshots Show Netflix Downloads
Mike1024 writes "US DVDs-by-post company Netflix appears to be planning a service that will let users download movies over the internet. Hackingnetflix.com has some accidentally-revealed screenshots, and the Netflix jobs page includes a product manager position, saying "The Electronic Delivery Service (EDS) will augment Netflix's current DVD delivery model with high quality movies delivered to consumers' home TVs through the Internet, on a subscription basis". Apple's iTunes demonstrated many people are willing to live with some DRM and hardware/vendor lock-in."
As long as it's better than http://www.cinemanow.com/ Nothing worse than watching bad movies AND having to buffer every 5 minutes.
It's a screenshot of a login box. Exciting stuff.
This really shouldn't come as much of a surprise to anyone, since it was announced last fall that Tivo and Netflix had worked out some sort of agreement for downloadable movies...
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.
The problem with efforts like this is that they tend to be overzealous with the copyright efforts to make sure nothing is copied. Ultimately their efforts sabotage the product and no one buys.
What is interesting is that they are claiming internet downloads to be watched on TV - which is quite different than internet downloads to be watched on a computer.
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Downloading movies seems like a lot of bits to push over the average consumer's pipe. Tie in a pre-constructed box for it (and who exactly wants to buy yet another home appliance when the computer will do?) and it sounds like an infrastructure mess.
I wonder if consumers will be happy waiting for hours while their movie is delivered? Especially if the Blockbuster is just around the corner. Of course, it beats going out, but at what price? Something about the business model just doesn't add up to me.
Night Of The Living Parrots
Someone is going to post : matter of days before it get cracked but it's not really relevant. If you crack it let's say you're able to send it over the internet for free... guess what it's already there anyway. So what's the point of DRMing it anyway ? Obtain agreements to sale online probably... their protection being cracked is the best thing that can happen to them.
\u262D = \u5350
This reminds me of that Canadian Harry Potter injuntion: until the book has been "published", you can't do stuff with it. So a Canadian court issued an injunction to those who got it early, saying they can't copy/sell or talk about the contents --- until it gets "published" --- 4-real, in a few days.
How is the unintentional "leaking" of information via a website any different? Can Netflix say they haven't "published" anything yet, and then have the DOJ beat you down for Copyright violations?
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
The idea of downloading movies over the net is certainly intriguing, and for many people who are unable or unwilling to leave the house to see a movie at the theater it seems to be a real boon. However, I wonder what sort of bandwidth is necessary to make the download of a movie bearable. Even the most rudimentary calculations reveal that most current bandwidth levels require an overnight download.
On the other hand, with sufficient bandwidth there is a major market for online movies, I think. With modern computers and video cards surpassing the video output ability of standard televisions, using the home PC as a video player is one possible evolutionary path for PC operating systems.
I certainly don't have enough bandwidth here that would make net downloads feasible, but I'm sure that the market exists.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Ìt's good to see businesses actually try and use the advantages of the internet for content distribution, instead of trying to litigate to preserve an ancient business model.
As the poster suggested, with the huge sales of iTunes it seems that DRM isn't something that a lot of consumers care about too much. Interesting as a lot of slashdotters seem to feel the opposite.
Apple's iTunes demonstrated many people are willing to live with some DRM and hardware/vendor lock-in.
People don't mind this as long as the DRM allows the consumer to do what they want with the media. As long as I can listen to my music when and where I want it's no problem. When the DRM is used to limit where and when I use what I purchased, that's when people get upset.
It will be interesting if netflix learned this. If I pay a fee and can only watch the movies when, where, and on what netflix decides, they won't get my money. We'll see.
How do we know this isn't a Photoshop hack?
And you can garuntee that the population will accept it because the consumer population will have no choice but to accept CSS and Macrovision and other forms of DRM.
They won't allow the viewing public to use the 1080i resolution unless they can lock in down as much as they can. However ethically repugnant and offensive it may be to someone informed.
Because its convienent, becausee its easy.
the mail is what keeps me from using netflix. i know it sounds lazy but having to wait for the movies to arrive and then send them back is such a hassle.
.99 per song thing.
ideally i'd like to get movies through itunes, pay something reasonable like $4.99 for _just_ the movie no special stuff. IMO that would be as good a deal as the
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
I subscribe to Greencine, and the little tear-off flier that you remove to convert the receiving mailer into the sending mailer has a little inset image of a DVD player with a "DivX Video" logo on it with the captions:
"IF YOU OWNED A DivX® Certified DVD PLAYER, YOU COULD HAVE WATCHED THIS MOVIE YESTERDAY!
"Download, burn, and enjoy GreenCine movies in hours with DivX VOD.
"FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT VOD.DIVX.COM/HOW"
Of course, when I try to go to that URL, it times out, so who knows?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
http://economist.com/people/displayStory.cfm?story _id=4149765
What makes your idea any different than pay per view on cable/sat? Netflix's is putting out a pay per view. They will have to offer the user something over the traditional PPV in order to thrive. Be it a price break, or something else..
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I reluctantly dropped Tivo a month ago to switch to the cable company's offering. My new DVR can record two HDTV channels simultaneously, while the Tivo hadn't seen significant updates since 2001. (Besides their HEAVILY DRMed copy to PC. You need to enter in a password everytime you watch a show.)
Hopefully someone will provide an inexpensive way to show these movies. Perhaps a small set-top device provided by netflix in exchange for a service contract that can download a movie or two for later viewing.
So they are working on delivering movies encumbered with DRM, and lock people to their platform. And this is progress? I feel like we are moving back in time here...
We as consumers need to really put our food down on this DRM crap...
I'm teminally incoherent
Movielink has been doing downloadable Hollywood films for a long time now. Not sure why everyone overlooks them when talking about the iTunes Movie Store and NetFlix, but they've been in this game for a while.
This was reported in last weeks economist. Can't find the link, and its subscription anyway, but its old news.
soon we won't have to leave the house for anything. we can see our "loved ones" over webcams and teleconferencing. we can download our movies, music, news, software. we can do our banking, checking our mail, pay our bills. we can even play mortal kombat against a friend in vietnam. but is this really raising our quality of life? alienating us from each other and making us even more of a social mess.
DVD Jon will ride in on a white horse. I still think they need a shirt that says "DVD Jon cracked my a**" Imagine the hilarity and the obscurity.
-Xen
As much as DRM irks me, I don't think we can expect to live without it. With technologies like Bittorrent out there, content providers can't claim to have an exclusive on high-speed downloads, and the studios are never going to sign on if they're going to be willingly providing source material for unlimited transfer and reproduction.
Now frankly I'm a bit of an anarchist. I don't like the big studios or the big record companies, and I think the quality of our entertainment would be improved a great deal if they were to all go out of business as a result of massive piracy. However, I'll admit that that opinion isn't terribly valid.
What we need to be arguing for is reasonable DRM from big content providers, and no built-in DRM on hardware, which endangers the freedom of content created outside of the system. In the case of Netflix, I can't imagine we have much to argue for; It's never been kosher to make a "backup" of a rented movie. But if they start *selling* movies online, then the right to make a DVD playable on standard players from the file should be fought for.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
I've noticed MovieLink being advertised with $1 movie downloads
You know, this service really could benefit by using BitTorrent technology ;)
If cost is king to the operation, they would love nothing more than to have hundreds or thousands of people across the country downloading the movies from one another. Think about it.. Friday night, movie night.. parents still at work login and request a movie.. kids get home from school and kick off a download right on the TiVO. It'll be ready by movie time. Netflix doesn't get killed with bandwidth bills and passes the savings on to the consumer. (cue the "yeah right!" posts)
I'd sure like to see Torrentocracy (and the similar idea described herein) ported to my hacked series 1 standalone. I, too, have one of those dual-tuner HDTV Comcast DVRs, and my trusty ole' S1SA is on the chopping block. Something like that just may save it.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Wish I had mod points today.
The problem with blockbuster is they force their focus on the family values on me by editing their movies. If I can order an unedited movie and have it delivered right to me, great.
Recently I've had a rash of Netflix DVD's stolen in the mail, both coming and going (and I mail the out bound ones at work). Netflix is close to cutting me off. I assume this is because the DVDs are so obviously packaged, and DVD players are common now.
or will they cut their noses off to spite their faces? (i.e. or spend loads of money on the extra bandwidth they need).
Rob http://scullyshouse.tblog.com
"Apple's iTunes demonstrated many people are willing to live with some DRM and hardware/vendor lock-in."
Huh?? iTunes lets you burn your songs off to a standard CD-R. How could this be remotely interpretted as vendor lockin? Yes, you are locked into using a CD player?!?!
Is this news? Didn't various Netflix corporate leaders make open comments about download plans several months ago?
The screen capture also has the name of the new device: Netflix Player.
Mikek / http://www.hackingnetflix.com/
The post says how people accept the iTunes DRM and lockin, but there is no way for Netflix to similarly lock people in because you won't own any of the films. I could easily switch to Netflix copycat A and start renting downloads from them since I wouldn't have a library of Netflix stuff since one doesn't keep rentals. DRM lockin only works when you own something.
> Apple's iTunes demonstrated many people are willing
> to live with some DRM and hardware/vendor lock-in."
Or are willing to pay for their music and then liberate it using Jhymn.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Netflix plans were also discussed in the economists this weeks issue. Here is a link to the an excerpt of the article :
d =S'(X((RA'%25%20P%224%0A&tranMode=none/
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_i
I download movies from Starz Ticket on RealOne all the time. They don't have the latest or the greatest, but at any given time there are over 300 movies (plus all the extras you get on DVDs), and that's more than enough to choose from. A typical (500-600MB) movie takes about 25 minutes to download on my 10Mbps OptimumOnline connection. I play them on my PC, turn off the monitor and switch to the TV out display. Plus I can watch a live Stream of Starz (the channel) with more latest movies that aren't available on demand. I pay only $13 bucks a month for that.
So now, if Blockbuster can make it this simple for me without asking me to shell out more bucks for Tivo service, I'd jump ship... otherwise I'm happy with next day home delivery of DVDs with all those deleted scenes.
Mozilla stole tabs from NetCaptor. So what? Right?
This isn't entirely on-topic, but I'd be interested to find out how well the MovieBeam service is doing... I haven't heard much about it for a while. It's really not the same thing other than movies being gradually downloaded into your home... If I understand their service correctly, their player is more or less constantly receiving movies from an RF broadcast, which is probably usually a slow process, except that it's constantly running, so after a few days you'd have several movies.
The big difference here would be that MovieBeam gives you a bunch of movies (or maybe just several) that you don't choose, then you pay for each of those that you actually want to watch. After a few days of being stored, movies are replaced with newly downloaded ones, so the selection is always rotating. Has anyone here used MovieBeam, or ever really heard about how well it works?
This could be good for Netflix customers, if they work out the techical and structure issues.
Personally, I want to be able to download certain shows and get the rest in standard DVD format. For example, if I rent an MST3K show then I don't care where I watch it - computer or TV - chances are good that I will only watch it once. A movie like Million Dollar Baby I want to watch on the large screen TV with the whole audio setup.
If they let me specify what shows to download vs. mailed DVDs then I will be very happy with the service. Otherwise I'll just stick to mailed DVDs that I can watch wherever I want.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Um I get this feature from my basic cable, its called on demand and and I can go look at a list of movies and play them anytime I want for a fee or because I have some subscription movie channels I can watch any of the movies on those channels anytime I want for no extra charge. This seems to little to late too me.
Not a glitch, its actually called "free advertising disguised as a technical glitch so news-starved tech sites will give us free exposure." Oldest trick in the book and slahsdot fell for it. Again.
I love Netflix, it makes winter a little more bearable up here. I thought of an online business model that cement their hold on the movies-to-home market.
The first step is a new, DIVX related codec that allows for two viewing resolutions for a movie. The files are distributed by BitTorrent or similiar, the more common the P2P format the better. The user can download any movie from the Netflix library/Torrent, and watch it at some low resolution (say 240x180 or 320x240) for free. If you want to watch the HD resolution version of the movie, put it in your Netflix queue and wait for the HD components of the file to download, then watch. This would kill, absolutely kill, the market for downloading illegal movie content. At the same time it provides an outlet for the end user to experience lo-rez versions of all their favorite movies and gives Netflix an almost-out-of-the-box Internet delivery solution.
I hope someone from Netflix reads Slashdot, because this could give Blockbuster, Amazon, etc, a serious run for da money.
Josh
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
VOD.DIVX.COM/HOW is borked because it redirects to a bogus destination. Fortunately going straight to the SSL version https://vod.divx.com/how/ works.
Alternatively, you can go to http://vod.divx.com/ and click the How It Works button and you'll get to the right page.
I noticed this address too my my DVD player. How it's supposed to work (as far as I can tell):
You download the content on your Windows PC, then use your DivX player (which presumably has some sort of disc burning functionality) to create the disc. The DivX player authorises you and burns a personalised disc which will ONLY play on the player tied to your account (or, if you have multiple players, which ever player you select to burn it for). You can own multiple players (or buy a new one when when the old one breaks) and still watch movies you've purchased on them, but you have to burn a new disc each time you want to play it on a new system.
The obvious disadvantages are, it's a hassle to burn the CD's - and for longer movies, DVD's - and keeping track of multiple sets if you have more than one player (e.g. if as I do, you have one in the bedroom as well as one in the living room, and of course many people have them in cars these days for the kids some have multiple living rooms, etc). You also have to be careful because of differing DivX versions, some movies won't play on some players. And of course, you can't watch them at a friends house, loan the videos, or expect to sell them on once your done.
This is not helped by the very limited video selection currently available.
I would have thought it would be much easier just to download the movies and stream it to your PC with some sort of wireless streaming solution (so you skip the time consuming and costly burning process all together). I believe this sort of network enabled player (often combined with a regular DVD/VCD player) are what vendors like AOL are looking at.
I'd be willing to put up with some trade offs (compared to DVD's) stemming from a system where I could easily stream the videos from a shared network drive (especially as consumer NAS units are really starting to take off) but I can't see many people who'd be comfortable burning and ripping CD's and DVD's thinking something where you have to burn a unique disc per player as being worth the hassle.
Apple's iTunes demonstrated many people are willing to live with some DRM and hardware/vendor lock-in.
Dang. And those folks who point out that Apple is some sort of proxy for "the man" get modded down around here.
Apple fanbois, do your stuff !!!!
.. so that this thing does not do an IP geographical check?
Netflix is fine but it isn't "global" in the sense that you rely on physical transport. Netflix even has to setup local warehouses for faster deliveries.
However this on-demand download is truly global.
Sure they will require US credit card, fine I can do around that.
However, Imagine being able to download movies from your living room here in Europe *before* they usually hit the theaters? All this semi-legally (no p2p but you might be infringing EULA).
Movielink or whatever that was called did IP checks, hope NetFlix "forgets"...
Now, I need to talk my buddies in the US into sending me a Tivo box.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
You are still able to buy the Movies on DVDs. Of course, it will almost certainly cost more. Likewise, you are able to rent DVDs.
This device allows you to download a digital movie and then view it. Of course, it will be erased, but how is that any different than the Digital movies that are provided on comcast VOD? Same thing.
Personally, I am fine with this device. Of course, I will still keep on buying DVDs. I have a library of about 400 (been collecting for a decade now).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If Netflix and TiVO work this out correctly, this is going to jam a sharp stick in the eye of pay-per-view AND Blockbuster. It may not seem convenient to you at a quick glance, but I'm guessing you haven't re-organized your TV usage through a Tivo or Netflix subscription. I'm not criticizing you, but pointing out that this makes sense to people who have.
Sure, downloading a movie is annoying to satisfy an immediate whim craving for a film. That's where the local video store cannot be beat. The TiVO-Netflix partnership trounces the local video store in new releases, however. Blockbuster may carry 100 copies of Batman when it's eventually released on DVD and make a big promise about availability. But Blockbuster doesn't do this for the smaller movies that you and every other film nerd in your neighborhood want to see. It'll stock two copies that'll be perpetually checked out.
Online Netflix means that you'll be able to create wish lists prior to the release of movies on DVD so that you'll be assured of getting them the day of their release. When you turn on your TiVO, you'll be greeted with a list of movies that have already downloaded, so it's not some deal where you have to actively select an online movie and wait for it to be transmitted. Besides, with Fiber-to-the-home looming in the future as well as IP-over-electric lines, our bandwidth future will speed up the download process for that scenario.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I have previously used movielink.com but it requires IE and alot of windows voodoo. The actual service I was quite impressed with, other than the slightly high prices.
I would definitely be interested in this if it was more open, etc. (I realize that it's impossible to have them ship the *.vob files, but I would like some usability in the files. I want *my* definition of fair use, not Valenti's).
Now that you've posted this, it's probably fixed.
Luke-Jr
Id be more interested if you could play back movies via a DVD player supporting mpeg4. I really dont see myself buying a tivo just to play movies.
See here for more info. Or read on.
Movies to go Jul 7th 2005 From The Economist print edition
Can Netflix's Reed Hastings succeed in the battle to deliver movies online?
LATER this year, Netflix will launch a new service for downloading movies from the internet. "It will be underwhelming," promises Reed Hastings, chief executive of America's leading online DVD-rental company. Despite a recent ruling by America's Supreme Court that gives entertainment companies more ammunition to fight against illegal file-sharing, movie studios are likely to remain extremely cautious about what films they make available for a fee on the web.
For now, that suits Netflix. Mr Hastings believes that the humble DVD--and, eventually, high-definition versions of it--will remain popular for some time, not least because that is what the movie industry wants: sales of DVDs and fees from rentals are an essential source of the studios' profits from new releases. But Mr Hastings is also betting that by the time movie-download technology becomes more mature and online titles more widely available, his subscriber base for DVD rentals will be big enough to put Netflix in a strong position to prosper in the online marketplace--where he is likely to face new competitors such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, the studios themselves and, no doubt, many start-up firms offering rival download services.
Changes in technology encourage start-ups with innovative ideas to enter markets, just as Netflix did in 1999 when--having been stung with a $40 late-payment from a Blockbuster video-rental store--Mr Hastings launched its subscription service. He was already a successful entrepreneur, having built up a software company before he started Netflix. For its most popular service, Netflix charges users $17.99 a month for an unlimited number of DVD rentals. Titles are ordered via the company's website and dispatched overnight. Customers mail them back in a pre-paid envelope, which releases the next movie on a personalised list of films to see. Subscribers can have up to three DVDs out at any time. Needless to say, there are no late fees.
The Netflix business model has proved to be such a simple and highly effective combination of the online and offline worlds that it has spawned imitators in Britain, France, Germany, Australia and Japan. Netflix, which is based in Los Gatos, California, was about to launch in Britain last year when it decided it had better withdraw from going international, for now, in order to concentrate on a life-threatening war on its home front. The all-conquering retailer, Wal-Mart, and Blockbuster, the world's biggest chain of video-rental shops, both decided to offer online DVD rental at lower prices. Amazon has since started to experiment with a DVD-rental service in Britain--but has not yet launched a similar service in America, and some suspect it may instead team up with an existing competitor.
Certainly, the cost of entering the market has gone up. Netflix has slashed its own prices and launched a one DVD out at a time service for just $9.99 a month. In the past year its share price tumbled as investors saw profits being pumped into an aggressive marketing campaign (costing nearly 20% of its revenues). The company expects to make a net loss of $5m-15m this year. Nevertheless, Mr Hastings says Netflix has $175m in cash and no debt. "We can sustain this for a very long time," he adds. Indeed, Netflix is showing signs that it is getting the upper hand. In May, Wal-Mart pulled out, awarding its online DVD-rental business to Netflix. Yet, tempting as it might be, Mr Hastings declines to trumpet that Netflix beat the world's biggest retailer. Indeed, Wal-Mart's bosses say they merely took a strategic decision to focus on selling DVDs rather than renting them. Netflix and Wal-Mart will now promote each other's products.
Meanwhile, Blockbuster, which lost $1.2 billion last year, hopes
Someone, somewhere will find a way to hack it. They always do. Proof that it is mathematically impossible to achieve copy-prevention for movies would be a device with a connector exactly the same as the back end of a cathode ray tube. Now you can get the red, green and blue video components directly from the three grid drive signals, and the timing information from the scan coil signals. And that's all you need to recreate the picture. The sound is easy.
If you really want to stop people copying what you're selling, you have to make the original cheap enough not to be worth the effort to copy. The free CDs and DVDs they give away with newspapers, for instance -- copying a CD or DVD takes time, ties up my computer, I'd rather just buy another copy of the paper already. Come to think of it, there's the paper itself. Even if I could be bothered to walk the extra couple of kilometres to find a newsagent with a photocopier in-store, it isn't worth it to photocopy even just the stories I want. My phone has a 2MPx camera and more memory than I know what to do with, but it's still highly inconvenient for photographing newspapers. You can achieve the same effect by providing some real added value collectable items with the CD / DVD -- tilt-it-and-watch-it-change pictures, brass Rizla holders, maps, posters, or the like.
Unfortunately, I don't see a good way to apply either of these models to this system. Sending video over broadband internet will take the same amount of time for an "original" as for a copy, and you can't send collectable items down the wires!
Analogue quality loss is really a non-issue -- at least, not so much of an issue as it ever was in the days of walkman cassettes. If you take the best digital copy you can from an analogue output, it isn't going to get any worse because all future copies will be made digitally, and hence every bit as good as the "original". The only critical stage is making that first, digital copy.
For the record, my own experiments show that EP mode {4 hours on a single-layer DVD+RW} is barely distinguible from digital broadcast on a 51cm. TV and EP+ {6 hours} is still tolerable. Even an analogue copy -- made from a cheap portable player with no RGB output, just composite video via a 3.5mm jack plug and a metre of cable of a grade I wouldn't use for speech -- is fine in EP.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
DRM only becomes a problem when it inhibits the actual use of the product. ITunes and the IPod have been wildly successful because the average person is almost totally unaware that there's DRM involved. They download music, it plays on their computer and it plays on their IPod so what do they care.
The most recent effort I saw for this was a service where you could download a movie file for a fee but could only play it within 30 days and once played it would only remain playable for like 24 hours. That's problematic. In this case though, I should think the downloads would be consistent with the NetFlix style of movie watching where you can have so many movies available at a time but for an unlimited time. If that's the case it will be far more viable.
My ideal would be if I could take a netflix downloaded rental and play it on my TiVo. If I have to hook up a computer to my TV, it's a bit more of a hassle. I haven't been a NetFlix member for a while now because I got tired of discs piling up that I never got around to watching, but if I can download a movie in a few hours I may resubscribe.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Netflix is successful mostly because they have over 40,000 titles on tap. That's more than Blockbuster. Their queueing system allows you to add a movie to your rental queue when you hear about it ... instead of wandering into the store, wondering what's good, and trying to remember what your friend mentioned 4 weeks ago. Oh: and you get to browse reviews by other people who have watched the movie. They have over a million movie reviews from customers in their database!
How often have you picked up a box in Blockbuster and thought, "Hmph. Pretty pictures. I wonder if it's any good?"
Anyway, Netflix recently announced (http://ir.netflix.com/, listen to Webcast "Morgan Stanley Small Cap Conference") that they no longer felt download was a viable approach in the short term, and they were investing their time in other directions.
As mentioned elsewhere here, DRM is a big issue with downloads. Yes, you can rip DVDs, but it's the STUDIO EXECS that you have to convince about the "safety" of downloading. If they won't sign on for letting their movies be downloaded from Netflix, then it's not gonna happen. End of story.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there's a big difference.
As the poster suggested, with the huge sales of iTunes it seems that DRM isn't something that a lot of consumers care about too much.
Wrong. People do not know what DRM is; they do know when something they want to do (and assume they can do because they have done it in the past) does not work.
ITMS users never see the DRM in action, because primarily they just play the music on an iPod or the computer or burn a CD. To those people there is no DRM.
DVD's were the same way. In the US people never saw the DRM, because for the vast majority of people they put a disc in and it played. Just about any movie most people cared to see was released first in the US.
But in places like Europe which did not get DVD's as quickly or as cheaply as the US, consumers ran hard into region coding. That's why now you can easily buy region unlocked players in the UK and australia, and Amazon UK even gives instructions (thanks to jimicus for that link) to unlock region codes in your player.
This means that the success of Netflix online movie rentals depends on how closley the DRM matches what people can do already with the service. I could in fact even see a restriction like "only allowed to have four movies at a time" being accepted because people are used to it. I can't see people being accpeting of any kind of time limit on watching the media though.
I also wonder how much people will want just movies vs. the extras that come with DVD's. Some movies I wouldn't care about extras, but even being able to download I'd probably still get the DVD's for a lot of movies just to see what extras there might be.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Once someone understands DRM they dislike it, but very few people ever get to that point because it is a hard concept to grasp and as most americans know... thinking is hard.
I don't think that's a fair way to put it. I think the difficulty of understanding for most people comes in part from not having the absolute background in the abilities of technology that most people here have (the ability of a device to play something somewhere where a seemingly identical device elsewhere will not play the thing), topped by the sheer (literally mind-boggling) stupidity of DRM. I think people have trouble understanding why a company would do something like DRM when they cannot imagine why a company would do something so stupid. People are used to companies doing stupid things, but people are not yet used to companies doing things so stupid they activley drive off customers. I am sure that will change, in a way I am almost sad to see the broadcast flag being defeated because that would have woken people up really quickly. Even so I think over the next decade the mass market will gain a much deeper understanding of what is going on, especially when online music companies start folding and people get that DRM music hangover of not having music anymore that they thought they have. I am sure right now, there is someone out there who has deleted all thier illict MP3's because Napster gives them unlimited songs and they do not understand they do not really own any of them. But someday, either they'll quit or Napster will and then they will understand quite well what DRM is. And they are going to be PISSED.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
While I do think that it is not such a problem for people to go out and rent movies, where I live there are very few poorly stocked movie rental stores and they don't carry the type of movies I enjoy watching. With an online movie store my selection widens greatly.
Small towns aren't the only places where video stores have bad selection. My local video store has a TERRIBLE selection. It's called Blockbuster. If the movie didn't come out in the last year, they probably don't have it. This is odd, since about ten years ago they used to have just about everything. The ultimate insult they thrust upon you is that their entire non-"New Release" section is composed of crappy sequels to movies they don't have the original of. I can get "Police Academy: Mission to Moscow," but where is good old "Police Academy"? I can also get the almost worthless "Cube 2: Hypercube," but "Cube" is nowhere to be found. I could go on, but I might get teary-eyed when I talk about how they used to have a copy of "Evil Dead" during the loooooong period of time it was out of print, but then they got rid of it to make room for more copies of the same 5 New Releases. It's too late... I promised myself I wouldn't cry...
It's a very good strategy to 'accidentally' leak some info before launch of a new product/service.
It creates attention and if you're lucky... hype.
I think with the advent of internet-ready televisions and faster bandwith to the home like FIOS, and something like this is only inevitable. Netflix is positioning itself to reap the benefits of the next step when home entertainment begins to converge.
In the future, video on demand will be instant, go straight to your tv, and you'll be able to create a DVD copy that's yours to keep as if you bought it from a store. I think it will also eventually be done at the same time with new theatrical releases. The same amount of profit from later rentals and purchases could be made at the time of release, so why not allow home users to purchase/download for the price of a ticket? This would essentially kill the video store market, but likely it will happen as technology moves forward.
I prefer what these guys offer: NotNetFlix.com
The overwhelming majority of iTunes users don't even know Jhymn even exists, and they likely don't care, either. I can use iTunes music on up to five computers, plus every iPod I own. Until someone can come out with a portable MP3 player that beats the snot out of the iPod, people will continue to find the iTunes DRM acceptable.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I wonder if there'll be support for Windows Media Center Edition? That would be awesome!
No surprise herre, the 7/9-7/15 issue of The Economist has an article on Reed Hastings and his effort to launch a new service for downloading movies.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Redundant, are you serious? It was posted ONE MINUTE after another similar post. WTF am I supposed to do?
Netflix ---> DVDDecrypter ---> DVDShrink ---> Nero Burning ROM ---> shelf full of DVDs that are all yours. Forever.
/cough
Except for breaking CSS encryption, it's arguably legal (since you aren't making or distributing an exact digital copy (there is a loss of quality when DVDShrink compresses it), it could be compared with taping off of Pay Per View). Not that I'd ever do this with a copyrighted DVD...
harmonious design
Hopefully, they make it compatible with the PS3 and Xbox 360. I already have a dvr from my cable company, and I'm not going to get a tivo.