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NBC To Offer On-Demand Movies Via P2P
RX8 writes "NBC Universal has signed a deal with Wurld Media to make some of their movies available for download via a secure P2P network in 2006. There hasn't been a price released yet, but the movies include what you would get on their existing video-on-demand and pay services plus around 100 older movie titles. Once the material is downloaded, users can only view it for up to 24 hours before it expires."
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
:( HELP!!!!
Oh no, my Slashdot P2P trial has expired!
NBC...I have a phone call for you.
The year 2000 is calling, and wants its idea back.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Must see internet!! Dong...Ding...Dong
If it expires, I won't be buying it.
Entertainment is to be done at my leisure. I choose the terms, not you.
Simple as that.
Once again, a big media company comes out with an idea so they can claim to have a legitimate path for viewers to take advantage of -- but yet still totally miss what they are actually looking for.
Until these companies actually meet the demands of the people who are looking to download TV/Movies, unauthorized p2p networks will continue to own the market.
The 24 hours part is bad news, not because I'd like to keep the movies but because it means that it will only available to Windows.
Once the material is downloaded, users can only view it for up to 24 hours before it expires.
And they can only spend my money for 24h before the payment expires, ok?
You can't take the sky from me...
(white) Trash In, (tv) Trash Out
Jerry Springer and the dating shows 5th Wheel and Blind Date
That'll be worthwhile... They could probably offer only one episode of those shows and no one could tell.
Anyone think they want it to fail so they could lobby Congress to DRM all TCP/IP transmissions?
My 20 year old Toshiba VCR is looking better and better every day. I have yet to find anything it could not record when using the analog video/audio jack feeds....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
"...users can only view it for up to 24 hours before it expires."
I was expecting to read "explodes" rather than "expires". I'm glad I was wrong.
But now I worry that by posting this I might give them ideas.
All rites reversed 2010
Didn't they realize that such rental schemes would fail when consumers roundly rejected DIVX? Why do they keep trying to force a product we clearly don't like down our throats?
Socialism: A feeling of discontent and resentment caused by a desire for the possessions or qualities of another.
Why not their television programming?
If they posted the programming with advertisements intact, eventually they may be able to ask more for advertising, or treat it as a separate advertising space altogether. Plus, the torrents for their shows are going to be out there anyway. This way there is an official torrent that most people are going to want because: they can expect a certain level of quality and there is no risk to them. AND it also increases awareness and availability of their show.
Heck, if they did this I might even watch some of their shows.
NBC can barely get folks to watch its shows for free, so now they are going to charge for a version that expires? I assume this would be more aimed at the Universal Studios titles...
Everyone seems to be griping about the time limit. I know it goes squarely against the DRM-hating /. masses, but not only is it valid but people will buy into it.
They've already been doing it for years with movies On Demand, now you can do the same thing on your computer. There are time limits for On Demand and Blockbuster, now it's the limit for your authorized download.
Big whoop. Just because it gets downloaded to your computer doesn't mean you have the right to watch it as many times as you want, as often as you want, for the rest of your life.
Get over it already.
24 hours? Is that from the point of purchase, or the point of completed download? Because if the movie is of a quality worth paying for, that's a significant difference for a lot of users.
Besides, that's an awfully short period of usage. Why would anyone do that versus renting the movie? It would have to be very cheap. What about the ability to pause the movie, or watch it more than once? Is this going to be like those failed one-viewing DVDs that came out a while ago?
You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
(The Beatles)
So it looks like we are headed for a repeat of history, where Apple has a store with 80+% of the market and actually makes money, while everyone else wonders why the hell consumers are unhappy with a video solution that is worse than VHS.
Since the movie/TV industry had years and years to learn the lesson, it's especially odd that they seek marginalization with such ferver.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...except for the fact that downloading takes an unknown amount of time. It's like a pay-per-view, except you don't know when you'll receive the movie.
We don't want to rent. We want to own.
Which is, of course, why Blockbuster, Netflix, pay-per-view, and other business/services/technologies don't exist anymore. Er...waitaminute...
Seriously, most people only want to watch most shows/movies once; since rental is usually much cheaper than purchase, they rent (whatever the media). Sure we'd rather own, but seeing something a second time is far less important than seeing it once at low cost.
Of course, if they made ownership only slightly more expensive than rental (1.25x rather than >4x), they'd make more money, buyers would be happy, and most people would still rather see/buy something new than re-watch what they've seen.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
If I pay for a movie/show, I don't want to give my bandwidth for free. They should pay me for giving my bandwidth to them!
Nice try, NBC!
On the other hand, if you are willing to offer movies and programs in an unencumbered format (DiVX, MPEG, QuickTime, Ogg Theora, whatever) with no usage restrictions, and no special download clients required, then I'd be very willing to consider as much as $3.00 per show/program downloaded. I'd especially be interested in the old NBC Mystery Movies from the 1970's, including McCloud, Columbo, and McMillan and Wife.
Please correct your offerings accordingly.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
To all those who said that P2P "pirate" networks would never bring about significant changes in the business models of big *AA... want some salt with that crow?
Sure, it's restricted, and it expires, but as long as the black market is out there, the white market will slowly bring itself up to speed until the need for a black market lessens more and more. Eventually the result will be something that works for picky consumers like us and for content providers. All file-sharers everywhere should not underestimate the significance of this move.
They will never stop until somebody makes the
In this context, P2P is really meaningless, since it offers no advantage to me, the consumer. The only advantage it offers is for content providers, because they can serve more costumers because customers bear part of the bandwidth cost.
So since I'm providing bandwidth, do I get a download credit? If I keep files in my share long enough, I should be able to download more files without cost to me, since I'm providing a service to the content providers and they should be compensating me for it.
--
Innovation at play: http://www.gloryhoundz.com/
Do you demand your rental fee back when you return movies to Blockbuster? [...] Don't think of this as buying a movie, thing of it as renting.
Can they rent the movie to someone else if I don't return it?
Don't think of it as renting, because it isn't.
You can't take the sky from me...
It's good to know that I get their product for 24 hours but they get my bandwidth for 30 days. I don't mind using my bandwidth to share with my peers using P2P when it's an open torrent but if they want me to pay for the show and continue distributing it for them for 30 days, they are crazy. If we're stuck with the expiration rule, the clock should at least start when the user stops sharing it. Either that or subsidize my broadband.
i stopped reading at this "there hasn't been a price released yet..."
Copy protection is a form of product defect, and I do not purchase products I know to be defective.
Do you consider your car to be defunct? Because it employes a form of protection - a key and lock. Very similarly, the video files employ a key and a lock... the files have a DRM lock and the video player can act as a key to a legitimate user for legitimate purposes. Its not broken, it does exactly what it claims to do - it plays in the media players described for the time period advertized.
-everphilski-
With free material everyone understands that by contributing disk space, bandwidth, and electrical power (to run their computer when they're not using it) they are helping share the burden of distributing the material. Why would I want to do this if I have to pay for the material anyway? Some might argue that I'm helping to keep the price down, but in reality I'd just be padding NBC's profit margin.
Additionally, I normally turn my computer off when I'm not using it (save's power, less vulnerable etc). Now if I was participating in a free P2P community I might leave it on as my contribution to the community but I'm not going to burn extra power to support someone else's paid download. I'm sure others would act in a similar fashion, so the number of available nodes to help with your download are likely to be very limited. Seems like this would result in very slow downloads.
Also, I can only watch the movie for 24 hours, but will it stay on my harddrive taking up disk space? Seems like it has to in order for this to be a P2P service. If everyone just deletes their expired movies, than anyone purchasing the movie would have to download it from central NBC servers. It doesn't sound like a very workable P2P setup.
Finally there's the issue of the 24 viewing window. As others have stated, that's just not enough. I don't want to own the movie forever, but I'm not going to spend hours downloading a movie I paid for and then feel pressured to watch it before it expires. With current on demand services I get the movie immeadiately so it's easier to plan for my time. If I download a movie tonight to watch tomorrow, who knows what might come up. I'd be pretty pissed if I paid for and spent hours downloading a movie and then couldn't watch because it expired. They would need to make the limit at least a couple days, if not a week.
Users will be able to view the material for 24 hours once they begin playback on their computers
It's right there in TFA for all to read. Oh wait, this is slashdot.
Seems to me, though, that this is the only part they got right about this inherently flawed business model.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Look, I'm a GNU/Linux fanboy myself, but this is a market driven company.
These companies are not charities, and they do whatever they think they can get away with and make enough profit. They don't care about a minority of the market.
.Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.