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Google Video Store Announced
acid06 writes "Engadget and BusinessWeek covers Larry Page's talk at CES regarding the much anticipated Google Video Store. The rumours proved to be true and they're really going online with CBS to sell commercial-free episodes of their series. Deals with NBA, Sony BMG and Greencine.com were also announced." From the BusinessWeek article: "The video providers have the option of offering content on a download-to-own or download-to-rent basis. In a sign that content owners will likely pursue different approaches through Google Video, the National Basketball Association will sell broadcasts of its games one day after the event for $3.95. Meanwhile, public television staple Charlie Rose will post his interviews the day after a broadcast, allowing a free streaming for the first 24 hours then making it downloadable afterward for 99 cents each. Meanwhile, CBS is selling episodes of its popular 'CSI' and 'Survivor' series at the standard iTunes price of $1.99 per download."
Welcome to the REAL cable a-la-carte, where I don't even need a connection to watch my favorite shows, just download them for 2 bucks a pop. If you normally watch 5 or 6 shows with any regularity, over a full 22 episode season, that comes out to 264 bucks a year. How much are you paying for cable yearly?
Info here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/
Can people please stop linking to the front page of weblogs? It makes the link useless after a day or two, when the next article is posted on the weblog. See that link that says "Permalink"? It's a fundamental part of weblogs. That's what you link to. It stops linkrot.
"Surprised no one is complaining about the variable pricing. Now the greedy music/movie industry can rip us off with variable pricing and they now have a competitor to threaten Apple with. Hope things don't go that way!"
Variable pricing makes sense. Why should a company like Apple or Google have the power to decide what a video or a song is worth? The content provider owns the material. That person has the exclusive right to charge what he thinks a song or video is worth. The ditributor only has the right to tack on his fee in addition to the content cost. Apple claiming that every song is worth $0.99 is the essentially price fixing. They're leveraging their monopoly in the online music distribution market to dictate the value of songs they didn't even create.
Vote for Pedro
If anyone can possibly make a good and fair DRM system, it's Google.
I don't know if they'll end up screwing this one up and end up just playing along the content providers game but there's a chance that a new breed of fair DRM will emerge from Google.
I think that the DRM concept isn't necessarily the problem. The problem lies in its current implementations.
Well, at least, most of them.
It comes to me that a very nicely implemented sorta DRM system is Valve's Steam. It actually adds value, IMHO. I don't know its innards but it seems to provide some kind of developer platform which abstracts content loading, so that it can be downloaded on demand. A direct consequence of this is that I don't ever need to worry about losing the game disks of a Steam powered game. I can always download them again. I find this pretty neat.