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Movies Delivered Via Television Signal
valdean writes "Disney, Intel and Cisco have teamed up to launch Moviebeam, a $200 set-top box connected to your TV set that offers 100 movies at a time, with 7-8 new films replacing the 7-8 oldest each week. Movies cost $4 for new releases and $2 for old ones, with each payment granting 24 hours of access to that movie. There is no subscription fee and no monthly minimum. The nifty part? MovieBeam's movies are encoded in the broadcast signal of PBS stations across the United States, so you don't need a computer or an Internet connection. The bad part? The Moviebeam player also requires a connection to a phone jack -- every fortnight the box dials a toll-free number in the middle of the night to tally how much you've spent on movies so far, for the benefit of your monthly statement."
If you hate registering, here's the link to the NYTimes article. I know this is off topic, but let me just briefly plead with the Slashdot editors to use the RSS feed links when linking to newspapers. Please, for the love of god, I don't want to have to karma whore anymore! Go to the XML page and merely pick out your link! There's no trick to this.
Also note that prices seem to be dropping for the MovieBeam box. Quite a bit actually, the latter article states that you can get them for $49 now--$200 is the debut MSRP.
I've read a lot of luke-warm reviews on this thing and people say now that the system needs refinement. What I'm wondering is whether or not you can substitute a broadband (RJ-45) connection with the phone line connection. I don't have a land line at my home because four people in my family own cell phones. It just doesn't make sense to pay for long distance accross a land line. Is there an alternative to people like me for phoning home and notifying the company of my movie watchage?
Honestly, I guess I don't want Michael Eisner in my living room or a device that phones home to him.
My work here is dung.
Isn't that called "Television"? :)
No, I didn't RTFA.
Movies on TV - now thats an invention!
That's a new one!
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
The audacity of this innovation is just stunning.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
So.. they trust the client box to report which movies the user has paid for?
<sarcasm>Yeah I don't think this is going to be cracked.</sarcasm>
Chums up, let's do this!
The bad part? The Moviebeam player also requires a connection to a phone jack
Hmm, the obvious alternative would seem to be prepaid cards, sold over the counter. If I was them, though, I'd build in a system like this just because people will probably try to hack the cards or system; I'd really want some way to know if hackers had been successful, so I could update the firmware.
If they want users to pay by credit card or similar, the need for a phone connection is obvious....
Just my $0.02,
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Here in Britain our Sky Digital set top boxes, that are (the only) satellite television decoders, have to be plugged into the phone line, according to the contract anyway.
The given reason is that it is to allow for pay-per-view broadcasting, but I cant help thinking there is other uses to having the box plugged in 24/7. However, to give fair credit, the equipment, UI and service is excellent and they cant have much personal information other than your viewing habits. Can they?
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Ahh yes. I remember the good old days of hacked cable boxes. Everyone gathered at a friends house to watch the fight on free pay-per-view (free-per view?). If this technology gets launched, I wonder how long it will be before we see an outcry against hacked boxes . . .
Sounds cool but I'm wanting to know what is a fortnight?
A fortnight = 2 weeks, just in case you were wondering...
Let's see:
Oh yeah, now we have replaced DVDs with a cable. Anyway, it won't work.
Rediculous is ridiculous!
Isn't this just another, slightly more convenient form of Circuit City's disastrous DiVX idea?
First lay out $200 for their proprietary player, then pay for a phone line for the damn thing, all for the pleasure of paying $2 - $4 a movie.
I'm still waiting for Apple and Netflix to make a move.
Movies over a TV signal? Now i've seen everything
Surely such a system is flawed in that it requires access to a phone line to send the tally of the movies you've already purchased -- whats to stop people from unplugging it of a night and not having to pay, or developing a system that tricks the device into thinking it's sent the balance details when it actually hasnt.
Free movies sound good *nods enthusiastically*
"MovieBeam's movies are encoded in the broadcast signal of PBS stations across the country. You're actually receiving MovieBeam's movies at this very moment -- but they're invisible unless you have the MovieBeam box."
:)
This sounds like a fun PVR project.
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Movies have been 'delivered' by TV signal since before I was born.
WTF is going on around here?
INTERNET MOVIE-DOWNLOAD SITES Oh, forget it. It takes forever to download a movie, the quality isn't great, and you need a computer that's connected to your TV.
I must be on the wrong internet
It's also only a matter of time before someone figures out the protocol for it to get authorization from the server over dialup and writes code to let a dial-up modem talk to the set-top box and say "account is good, authorized for another 2 weeks".
Also, is there HD available?
If you read the comment but hate to read tfa:
"MovieBeam could also play an important role in the new era of high-definition movies -- once it gets its act together. Each month, about four of its movies are offered in high definition (for an additional $1 each), which you can enjoy on any HDTV set that has -- stand back for oncoming jargon -- either an HDMI jack or a DVI connector with HDCP"
Is the bad part that you have to pay ? I think it sounds great to have another option, legal at that. And with a nice home theater system in the range of hundreds if not thousands, $4 isn't much for new releases. I'm sure this would fit perfectly for many Hollywood movie lovers.
I can't say that *I* would be thrilled to have yet another box in my living room though, and I'm sure tehre are plenty of points of failures in the system. And I woldn't dream of paying a dime for allowing them to stream films to it. And if they're sending on PBS frequencies... which I pay for... shouldn't I get something back ?
Oh, I can't help quoting you because everything that you said rings true
Or at least, as a taxpayer I should be getting a kickback. They are, of course, using both bandwidth and power that should be going to the PBS broadcasts. I know, the power is used anyway, but do you get to ride on a bus for free 'cause they were going to be driving around anyway? Of course not.
Yes, I read TFA the last time it was posted, and I clicked over to make sure it was the same (type) of service - I didn't see a "dollars back intot he public coffer" section on the front page.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
I'm sure that it will be a matter of few months before someone finds a way to extract common keys for the movies ( I assume they will be transmitted encrypted), Then, all one needs to watch the aired stuff will be a PC and an aerial.
Lone Gunmen crew.
It's also likely that the phoneline will be required to download new decryption keys to the box on a regular basis. Each movie is probably encrypted with its own key.
Hell, even the protocol is probably going to be encrypted up the wazoo. Man-in-the-middle attacks are likely to be challenging on this.
Hundreds of movies on a subaudible or non-visible carrier? The bandwidth must be miniscule!? What are they using, VIVO (you know the 1990's era video technology where you get a postage stamp sized video?)
And, three times a year, your movie selection will be replaced by Wayne Dyer, Robert Kyosaki, Roy Orbison (Ok, that's not so bad), and some special that endlessly plays music by artists that you thought were dead but the Baby Boomers (they're the ones with all the money to give) love, so that the PBS station can stay solvent and remind you that you really don't need a fucking TV.
Yes, it's pledge drive time in Atlanta - AGAIN.
....Perhaps, "Movies Delivered ON DEMAND Via Television Signal" might have been more descriptive and to the point?
I'd throw a dagger that would fetch me the latest releases from blockbuster.
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
So I suppose it'll be just an instant after these hit shelves and get to houses, and then BAM! Someone posts the Captain Crunch(tm) hack for that dial-up billing, so that you get free movies. Why don't they just send you a flat-rate bill, and limit the number of movies you can swap out internally to the device? Seems much less risky for them.
stuff |
The only question is : can I record it ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
The phone line idea is not new. If you have a DirecTV box, it also requires a phone by contract. However, if you purchase movies and never hook up your phone line, the box does not have a chance to dial in therefore you do not get charged. This may be a design flaw in the DirecTV box. I wouldn't be surprised if this box works similary since most companies all borrow from the same fundamental circuitry. Why recreate the wheel? I cancelled my DirecTV service last October and never received a bill for the three movies I purchased because I never hooked it up to a phone line.
So, it's only a matter of time before somebody works out how to dump all the films off of the device. As a side effect, storing locally means they're limited to a ceiling of 100 titles* (which will drop if they want to expand HD offerings). Cable VOD, on the other hand, already offers hundeds of titles (I count 606 for that service).
* Obvious exceptions, like selling people a new unit every other year with a bigger drive, noted.
really pan out. This one we will lay to rest right next to DIVX (the Best Buy / Circuit City PayPerView player).
Didn't Win98 have a downloadable content app over PBS signals? Ah yes, WavePhore's WaveTop. Since all the links on that page now go to parking "search pages", I guess that one didn't work out very well.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Its cheaper and they have more than 100 movies at a time. This makes no sense to me. At least Netflix has a ton of movies and its subscription based so (when they aren't throttling you too badly) you can do well.
More and more folks are turning FTA because quite frankly cable, satellite and stuff like Netflix have been ripping people off... (that's why Netflix now is trying to appeal to those they've ripped off before by offering almost half price of what they used to offer the same people). Guess this idea is to replace the Disney idea of a dvd that will chemically kill itself after 24 hours or whatever that they came up with a year or so ago. Pretty dumb, especially since it rellies on an outdated phone system that more and more folks are turning away from in exchange for cell phones, etc. (DSL being the only thing that keeps me and a lot of other folks having a POTS line - Pretty soon that need will dissappear as more and more city-wide wifi projects start up nationwide).
DSL prices recently went down, so give me DSL + FTA for now for entertainment.
If you don't know what Free-To-Air is, it's basically using a satellite dish to pick up unencrypted satellite signals - of which there are quite a few around the world... you don't have to pay a subscription for it, just the up front cost to get a dish, receiver, and possibly a motor to move the dish from satellite to satellite... No big time movie channels like HBO, etc. since those are encrypted, but there's still plenty up there... Visit http://www.satelliteguys.us/ and http://www.lyngsat.com/ for more info on FTA. (Sorry for the fta hype in this post - but I just got my system up and running about 48 hours ago, and it's still pretty dang exciting)
the latter article states that you can get them for $49 now
$49 for how big a hard drive and a bunch of other parts? If it can store 8 movies, that average 1.5 hours, that's 12 hours. Assuming the high quality mode of Tivo, that about a 40 gig drive. Not that great a price, I'll wait for these boatanchors to be unloaded at yard sales and ebay to strip them. I wonder if the processor can run Linux? Sounds like they have a HD tuner inside, so they could be cool to hack.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
In the UK Sky who provide satelite TV send all your viewing information along the telephone line every night. Partially to get pay per view info, partially to sell your viewing info to advertisers. If you aren't connected to a phone line or they can't get through, you get fined
You will need one of these handy little gadgets plugged into your PC, a copy of Asterisk, and you're almost good to go. Just convince the Moviebeam player that your PC is the Moviebeam central office. It'll phone through and report your usage. But your PC isn't the Moviebeam central office, so no bill will be generated. You may also have to get your PC to call the real Moviebeam central office and report no usage.
Old-timers will have heard of various coloured boxes in connection with the phone system: Black Box {free incoming calls}, Blue Box {in-band signalling generator}, Red Box {payphone coin-insertion signal generator}, Beige Box {croc-clips to phone socket adaptor} and so on. More esoteric ones included the Jade {timer to avoid itemised bill threshhold}, Primrose {phone-line powered battery charger} and Violet {line holding circuit, defeats money-run-out on some subscriber-owned payphones} Boxes {all the good colours were already taken by the time they were invented}. But this setup truly is the fabled "sky blue pink box with yellow spots on"!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
So my tax money is being spent to subsidize more Disney profits?
It's bad enough tax money subsidizes the immensely profitable Sesame Street and Barney corporations. Oh, but NooooOOOoooo, Disney has to get their cut too.
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
I have heard the commercial... and I'm not impressed with the whole concept. It just seems like a poor means of getting movies in that it also seems very limited in the choices it can give you. I have cable TV and I don't bother with having movie channels because I'd rather go to Blockbuster and rent and watch something when I feel like it and not when it happens to be on.
The tech info page has a Linksys logo on it. As others have pointed out, however, the MovieBeam box only connects over dialup. So what's the deal with the Linksys logo?
This guy's the limit!
Hey! My dad helped make the MovieBeam, and I wanted to expound some info. ;-)
:)
He helped develop a new type of file system so it would have optimum speed. Basically, it can boot within 5 seconds and do anything else within 2. Way faster than TiVo: that was their goal. (He helped with TiVo too)
They develop a method to prevent people from recording it, so I suspect you won't be able to record with with many recording devices.
Of course it is possible to crack the security, but believe me, it will be a lot harder than you think. They put a lot of work into it. (My dad had a secret clearance, so if that gives you any idea...)
All in all, it's an excellent product, and the hardware is a considerable feat of engineering. (Try booting Windows, or even TiVo, in under 5 secs)
This brings back memories of when people would hack machines to call toll numbers and jack peoples phone bills. Anyone that doesn't have something like this: http://www.twacomm.com/catalog/model_TR-1.htm?sid= 796A44FD5AF852C3D29DFC365FE51B76 could find themselves in phone bill hell.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
1) RadTV -- this company piggybacks over regular FM radio signals to deliver movies. You simply connect 5 household FM radios to 5 different local stations and pipe them all into a RadTV digital box. The box must also be connected to your cable or DSL connection for billing purposes.
2) MicroWaveTV -- is a specially designed LCD monitor that replaces your current microwave door. The device makes use of your microwave's magnetron antenna to recieve digital signals from MicroWaveTV vans which will soon be slowly cruising the streets of your community. These vans will double as broadcast centers and POS locations. To purchase a movie, you must buy a special MicroWaveTV frozen dinner (or popcorn) which contain the single-use digital key needed to unlock the signal.
3) CordlessPhoneTV -- You'll need eight standard 2.4 GHz cordless phone handsets. Set each handset to a different channel and place each handset in the corresponding cradle atop the CordlessPhoneTV digial box.
4) CableJockey -- not exactly legit, but this company provides a 976 number you can dial to arrange for a CableJockey to come to your neighborhood and temporarily re-arrange cable connections so you can watch the movies YOU WANT using your neighbor's connection. Billing is a simple as dialing.
and so on...
Is this sig nificant?
I'm tired of movies.
No, you believe me. It'll be cracked faster than you imagine.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I have a the DirecTV integrated TiVo. I can already receive a huge number of movies, watch them on demand, and pause/rewind/etc.
The difference is that this takes a little bit of planning. Recently DirecTV had a free everything weekend, in which we got everyone of their non-PPV channels for free for the entire weekend. That weekend, my TiVo recorded pretty much non-stop on HBO, Starz, Cinemax & Showtime. I've gotten through a few of those movies that I recorded. By the time I get through all of them, it'll be time for another free weekend.
But if I get impatient, I can order a PPV and record it and watch it whenever I want, as many times as I want, until I delete it.
There are pros/cons to Moviebeam. For example, they have a much better selection. But that's countered by the fact that what I do record, I can keep until my hard drive dies.
Doesn't seem like a service that I really want/need.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
http://www.pvrblog.com/pvr/2005/04/moviebeam_pulle .html
How fuckign old is this slashdot article anyway. This service was cancelled a year ago.
Talk about breaking news.....
The available bandwidth on digital TV signals is pretty limited.. 19.3Mbps. That may seem like a lot, but when trying to do a 1080i HD broadcast, it becomes pretty precious. Especially when, like PBS, you are splitting the pipe into sub-channels and doing an SD broadcast along with the HD broadcast. The quality of the HD signal suffers, leading to macro blocking and loss of detail.
This already happens quite a bit on PBS signals I have seen, and carving out more of the pipe for data transmission of Disney movies will stress the limitations even more.
It's kind of odd that Disney partnered with PBS, and not ABC to do this.. Since ABC is owned by Disney and all. Maybe ABC cares more about their video quality than PBS, even though ABC uses the more efficient 720p broadcast which leaves more room for other data.
You can't get cable or satellite a la carte service yet, you must pop for the whole bundle, then new movies, extra, etc. Plus, a lot of people might be in the OTA signal range of a PBS station, but not have any broadband capability, so they usually have just POTS lines with dialup connections, which means no movie downloading.
Near as I can see it, this service is an alternative to running to blockbuster for people where every trip is a long drive, suburbanites and rural people.
There were very few movies on the list I would watch for free. They aren't worth the time.
How is this new? I've been hearing commercials for this product for the past 3-4 months!
... apparently they've found a way of using phone lines to carry voice calls...
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
How about the bad part where Americans subsidize those 3 of America's most profitable corporations by giving them access to the PBS bandwidth? So they can charge us to watch movies the copyright should have expired on years ago, so we could keep them and share them with the rest of our American folk?
--
make install -not war
I truly don't get it. $200 for a very limited selection of movies... an order of magnitude or so less than the local video rental store and two or more orders of magnitude less than Netflix... on very comparable terms and conditions? True, TFA has responses to these two very questions... but the responses are utterly unconvincing.
"No late fees?" Netflix doesn't have them. The policy of my local Blockbuster is that they leave messages on your phone if you're past the "due date" and that if you keep it _a month_ you need to pay the purchase price... I regard that as a late fee but it's not one that any reasonable person would ever actually need to pay (unlike the bad old days).
Inconvenience of driving to a video store? We're talking about a limited selection of only 100 videos. Half the supermarkets, at least around here, rent videos and have about that many titles. So do many convenience stores. My guess is that if you live more than a mile from a supermarket, the chances that you're within line-of-sight of a PBS station antenna aren't so good, either. Of course, you can get PBS on your cable or satellite, but if you have cable or satellite, how is this much better than what they offer?
TFA doesn't talk about the disadvantages of adding yet another box to the stack of them currently teetering precariously on top of your TV (where DO people with flat screens put them?), jamming yet another remote to the gaggle of them bursting the seams of that organizer you bought for them last year, jerry-rigging yet another ABC switch or figuring out how to control yet another video passthrough feature in the box, teaching the other folks who live under your roof how it all works, and yelling at them when you want to watch a movie and can't find the remote.
The niche served by this product is really very, very narrow.
The only obvious plus I can see to this service would be for people who want to rent titles they would be embarrassed to rent at a brick-and-mortar video store. I wonder whether PBS will be transmitting that kind of material over their airwaves?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
In the late 80s / early 90s there was a system called X*PRESS that broadcast a stream of data at 9600 baud over cable TV. See Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X*Press_X*Change. It is of my favorite "before its time" technologies. I bought mine for about $120 in the late 80s. Cable in, serial out. No additional charge for the base level of data! They also offered a $20/month service to get 15-minute-delayed stock quotes, which required regular reactivation pinging of a cartridge that plugged in the back.
It was remarkable for its time. 9600 baud continuous and uncompressed was quite delightful in the days of 2400 baud modems. Megabytes a day! They had a packeted proprietary protocol. In the stream, you'd get various second-rate wire-service news stories and syndicated columns. They could also send files - you'd see a menu of files that were going to be sent over the next 24 hours, and select which you wanted, and it would grab them and store to your hard disk.
There were message boards, but the uplink was done by long-distance call to an incredibly lame BBS system running on a mainframe. I think they were aiming it at the educational market as well as stock market players. I remember late-night TV commercials for it.
They missed the boat. With better software, they could've made lots of money selling these boxes to all the people who were using BBSes at the time. Instead of a sole national head-end, city or regional co-adminstration would've made it much more interesting.
Today, I think it still makes sense for all sorts of data. Isn't this one of the issues at the core of the argument about a tiered Internet? They want to shuffle the big one-way files (like movies) into an extra tier because they're clogging the regular Internet.
There are plenty of large files you'd be willing to wait for, no? You already wait an indefinite amount of time for a large file to be delivered. What if you could go to a web site, select a big file you'd like to receive, and know that by tomorrow it would be delivered to your hard disk? Yes, that sounds exactly like FTP/torrent/whatever. You don't care how the file is delivered. You just want to know you'll get it soon. Or, like X*PRESS, the web could show a list of all the files scheduled to come down the pike, and you could choose to grab one when they go by.
Imagine if your existing cable modem not only handled your bidirectional interactive Internet connection but also one of these separate one-way data streams. You'd get more data from your existing connection. Arguably, I'd say this scheme consumes far less of the cable company's resources. It's one-way broadcast. With today's technology, how many gigs per day could you squeeze into one digital or analog channel on a cable system?
Curator of the Jefferson Computer Museum http://www.threedee.com/jcm
... didn't I see this being advertised about 18 months ago in Canada?
When Sky Digital Satellite TV arrived here in the UK some years ago, I wondered the same thing about their Pay Per View service (since it uses the phone line to request events). I later found out that communication via the phone was only one-way, the authorisation was sent via the satellite signal, in a reserved part of the stream. This reserved section has quite high-bandwidth, but the authorisation commands are very short, which means literally millions can be sent out every second; the commands are also sent several times incase your Set Top Box misses it. This made spoofing a phone connection useless, and spoofing a high-bandwidth satellite signal would require some specialist equipment. It sounds however like this STB simply rings up the server every two weeks and says "these are the movies I've watched" which sounds like a bad idea to me. The mind-reading capcha for this post is 'decieve'.
Let's see... no bugmenot required, just link to a different newspaper. Google shows 12 results not including the NYT or /. (14 counting them).
/. editors to stop linking to places like GameSpot, as my employer (and likely lots of others) have firewalled it off.
I'd also like the
And since many sites get slashdotted quickly, a link to the coral cache wouldn't hurt, either.
This has been avalible in the Salt Lake City Market for a few years now, I haven't seen any cracks for it yet. I Just can't wait for my Over the Air Television Provider (USDTV) gets movies on demand.
Somewhere out there (No, it doesn't have to be a parallel universe), someone out there just looked at the same list you've just read, and is getting a hard-on.
Are you sure you were looking a the right list, not the PBS TV schedule? *ducks*
Details at http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/37300 (German).
Through the phone line? My God, that's like back to the nineties. Here in Belgium the set-top-box connects with ethernet to a cablemodem (just like my LAN router) and gets a (private range) IP address to communicate those administrativa.
Serge
Lots of negatives I can see.
1) Need a working phone jack. I don't have one, I use a cell phone for the phone and cable for my internet connection. I couldn't even use the service!
2) Price. Four bucks for a new release and two for an old movie? I can rent a new DVD at Family Video for two, or an old movie for a buck. They have a brick and mortor with overhead (rent, utilities, the actual DVDs themselves) yet these greedmeisters want twice that with minimal overhead? WTF is wrong with them for asking, WTF is wrong with you dimwits for going along with it?
3) It's carried on an over the air signal. Damn it, those airwaves are supposed to be a public resource. Why should I have to pay for what I already own?
4) PBS? I'm already paying for it with my taxes!
5) Disney is involved. This is DivX without the plastic.
6) Pay Per View is four bucks (I don't use, see #2) and I can record it on my VCR. I doubt I can with this.
Lots of negatives, someone please tell me how this could possibly be a good thing for anyone but the scheme's promoters?
next, they'll offer telephony over phone lines...
Anyone else annoyed when an article like this is written? Its effectively a late-night infomercial for this service. In some cases, this can be appropriate. However, I don't think you can claim the rehashing of an old idea (piggy-backing a signal on another signal) to deliver movies is exactly newsworthy.
For one, its clearly a sideline technology. Its not as if multiple companies are going to branch out using similar techniques. Its a deadend. Broadcast television signals are certainly not the future for data delivery. Its a relatively small portion of the population who even use those signals anymore (as opposed to cable/dish television).
For another, its already a step behind. Video On-Demand is already here in many places. I can watch a couple score of movies for free on Comcast On-Demand at high quality with no connection to my phone line or antenna sticking out my window. Its clearly a superior service and one with a more significant future than the one in this advertisement disguised as an article.
The portion of the article particularly galling is the ending in which it compares the service with other popular methods. Dismissing means much more popular, and frankly superior in many aspects, as if he was one of those payola film critics that declare Heathcliff as the best movie EVAH(!), is sophomoric and discredits the entire article. The tone is just off and it reduces the 'neat' factor that should have been the focus and is the only justification of an article on this fairly obscure company.
I can see how this service might be useful to the casual movie viewer who mostly watches just the big hollywood releases.
It most cirtainly is not for me however, or for anyone who watches any amount of classic, foriegn or limited release movies. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd be willing to bet that a push service like this just won't have a place for even new indie or limited release films, nevermind smaller films from 5, 10 or 20 years ago.
I live in a smaller community so DVD is often the only chance I ever have to watch films that never came to my theaters. I'm willing to bet that less than 10% of the movies in my Netflix queue would ever be available in Moviebeam.
So I can't help but laugh when a service like Moviebeam touts selection.
This is the wrong business model entirely. They should require a flat-price subscription, and give you a free DVR that always 100 movies on it. You can watch any movie you want, any time you want.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I read an article about this about two months ago where a Disney/Moviebeam exec mentioned that they want to convince other studios to allow burning the movies to disc. Now this is a truely good idea. Disney could bypass the whole HD media battle. Allow the user to purchase the movie through the Moviebeam service and burn it to whatever media they want.
Are there any specifics available about how this works? How they keep it from interfering with the video and audio of the PBS station's transmission? If there's all this free bandwidth in the VHF/UHF spectrum, why don't we just resell the gaps and keep broadcasting analog TV rather than move to new spectrum and HDTV? (3.9-19 MB/s/station of resellable bandwidth at VHF/UHF frequencies must be worth something! You just have to use clever radio design to avoid interference with TV broadcasts.) Or, on the data side of things, how they handle graceful degredation? I know that reception where I am is very poor. Since you can't prompt for retransmission, you're stuck with whatever errors you get.
Also, any reason why they're specifically partnering with PBS stations? If there's free cash to be had, I'd think that any TV station would be interested.
I have been watching movies via television signal for over 30 years.
Intelligent Design
Coincidentally, I posted a video overview of the interface today. Also worth noting is a blogosphere special bringing the hardware price down to just 49 bucks. 200 is too much, but if you hate the device 49 covers the 160GB hard drive you can cannibalize. http://www.zatznotfunny.com/2006-06/moviebeam-revi ew-with-video/
Movies? On the TELEVISION? Who knew you could broadcast movies the same way as plain ol' TV?
wow. Never heard of such a thing.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
You don't need to pay for a separate phone line for the thing. All you need is an extra jack.
Mmmm.. Donuts
why I itunes or equivalent can't offer movie downloads? The already have the technology. I just want to download a movie (mpeg-4 is fine) and watch it once. I don't want a STB, Directv movie selection is abysmal, and netflix requires several days advance planning.
"The bad part? The Moviebeam player also requires a connection to a phone jack -- every fortnight the box dials a toll-free number in the middle of the night to tally how much you've spent on movies so far, for the benefit of your monthly statement.""
first, that's not bad, thats how they make there money.
That said, it would take about a day for someone to figure out the signal, and send bogus information to the computer.
Or crack the box so it works without need ing to talk to the main system.
In short, I hope these are hugely succesfull so I can get free movies.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How is this diferent from when i saw this advertised here (spokane) YEARS ago? Still 100 movies at $2-4. Did it just take them this long to decide to launch country wide? I thought they canned it all actually.
:/
Don't know anyone who tried it, so no idea how good it was.
Only 100 to choose from i doubt i would find more than a few to watch, my taste isnt really very mainstream.
Netflix here for selection, no cable til i can get the handful of stations i want for less than $70
Look, I have bad karma already for making these kinds of posts, but geez, this is really really old news, like 3+ months. http://www.hdbeat.com/2006/03/15/moviebeam-review/
HDBeat reviewed it, and we've been talking about it on AVSforums since January or February. This wasn't "just announced".
Is it April 1st already?
TiVo should do this! THey are already setup as my DVR, they work over the Internet, so they can download movies un-attended. I think this would be a perfect fit for Tivo; Only if they can pull it off...
Another article I read about this service a couple of months ago said that Disney was trying to convince other studios to allow them to send the movie through Moviebeam and allow the user to purchase and save the movie to disc. It seems to me that Disney could get around the media war by allowing the customer to choose the media they want to use. I wish slashdot allowed me to pull up the article I submitted so I could provide the link to the comment by the Moviebeam/Disney exec.
From this link:
"Most custom clients would probably want a purchase option. Crabill says future plans call for a possible rent-to-own model in which consumers could burn movies to a DVD after paying a purchase fee. Digital rights management issues currently prevent that option, but company officials see future applications in which the MovieBeam box connects to a DVD recorder or Media Center PC for recording."
The box has an Ethernet on it. I saw another article that mentioned that Disney wants to convince the other studios to allow customers to save the movie to disc. Think about it. They's just talking DVD right now, but what about the future? This is Disney trying to kill future media wars. HD movies that you could save to Blu-ray or HD-DVD? Sounds good to me.
I can't remember exactly how far back this goes, but it might be as old as the late 1970s, certainly in the very early 1980s. I remeber friends who's parents paid for BOTH, On TV and Select TV, and that wasn't cheap! They had to have a seperate box (receiver/descrambler) for each; there was only one channel each; you watched movies on their schedule. If you had a friend with one of these, you were lucky. If you had one of these, you were styling. If you had BOTH, you were HOT!
Nowadays, with cable/sat, Netflix, Blockbuster, DVR, etc, why would we want to go back to this garbage? Also, am I the only one here old enough to remeber On and Select TV??
Does it require Cable or Satellite TV? Or do I have to put up an antenna? It's a neat idea, and I'd like to try it out, but I don't see how they're going to get a decent signal without either piggybacking on existing cable/satellite service (which I don't subscribe to), or by having me install an ugly antenna.
Comment of the year
I think this is an improvement over DiVX. DiVX required you to make some effort to find and buy the discs. This is in some ways like a Tivo programmed to record pay per view movies as Tivo Suggestions, since all you have to do is sit down, find a movie and watch it. No discs to find, buy, store, etc.
Netflix might be cheaper (and you can rip the discs..), but it's still effort. The disc has to be kept track of, returned, and your selection at any one point in time is going to be whatever 3 movies you have on hand, vs. potentially hundreds, and when you're done watching, you're done. No envelopes, no mailing, no effort.
It's clearly an advantage over most renting for "popular" movies.
The weakness is that it's pay per view (a rights-weak model), which hasn't been an overwhelming success where it has survived (cable, satellite). Adding new equipment costs to the mix doesn't seem like it will improve anything.
obSimpsons:
Jasper: Moon pie. What a time to be alive.
-- Boycott Shell
Lower the cost to about $20 and .10 per viewing and maybe it will be worth having.
I remember back in the day when I had a 486 SX computer (we didn't have the money for the almighty DX). I would of killed for a 200MHz computer with 160GBs of space You Insensitive Clod!
-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+ *** http://www.mountainfort.com *** +-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-=-+-
This sounds like something that my parents and grandparents would like. It's easy to use, and at $200, the unit will probably be $50 in a year or three.
No, I will not work for your startup
I'm guessing the early-adopter-tech-savvy demographic that would buy this gadget probably push the number into double-digits. Too bad. Sounds like it actually could be promising and at a decent rate, until you add the cost of a landline/VOIP service. And running a phone cable to the TV. Then we're back in the NetFlix/Blockbuster price/convenience range.