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."

Comments

Working Clicky

[eldavojohn]

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.

Re:Working Clicky

[Mirksar]

Honestly, I guess I don't want Michael Eisner in my living room or a device that phones home to him.

Well, actually Eisner is not at Disney anymore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Eisner

It isn't new to the UK

[Don_dumb]

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?

Re:It isn't new to the UK

[thelonestranger]

It's not for the updates, I know this for a fact because my box hasn't been plugged into the telephone line for 2 years and I've had no problems. I even got the changes they made to the user interface about 6 months ago. I think its only used for outgoing information as all other info could come down the dish. So what else could be going out apart from the info when you request a boxoffice movie?

Re:It isn't new to the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

The Sky Boxes aren't infallible either. I've heard of dodgy methods to get free channels before, although admittedly not for a year or so.
Oh, the telephone line is only a contractual requirement for the first year of the Sky Box, after that it's yours to do with as you please.

Re:It isn't new to the UK

[jd678]

It's a bug for those morons who beleive the crackpots who tell them that entering 123 as a dialling prefix gives them free movies. The box then dials that prefix just as it's been told to, and once the exchange gets as far as the 3 it'll then connect to the clock.

For a pure, unmolested box, there's no bug.

The box office system works by having a credit on the viewing card, viewings are stored and then cleared once the box dials up everything gets added to the bill. By fooling the machine into thinking a phone line is connected (bogus prefix, or simple pp9 battery hack), you can get away with free movies up to the viewing card credit. If it's ever let to dial in though, those free movies will then not be free as it'll then have a connection to the billing, and you'll get billed.

It's possible to just 'lose' a card once you've hit the limit, but Sky will start charging for replacements if you keep on 'losing' the card.

Re:It isn't new to the UK

[B1ackDragon]

In the U.S., Dish Networks satellite set-top boxes do a similar thing. There are two different types of receivers, a single tv receiver and a dual (which allows watching independent channels on two tv's.) which use the same base price of service. They say you are supposed to have a phone line hooked up to either kind, but if fail to do it, they will actually charge you an extra $5 a month, but only if you have the dual. (Get that? No phone line and single reciever = no extra charge, no phone line and dual reciever = 5 dollar charge.) From what the service guy who exchanged my dual for a single told me, they do it so they know if you are just running the other tv wire to say an adjacent apartment, thus stealing (er, pirating?) service. But as he clearly pointed out, how would they even know if this was going on? So I think it's for stat's collection.

Anyway, my parents don't have a phone line hooked up to theirs, and they order the occasional pay-per-view by dialing a number on their cellphones and entering some codes.

As an aside, I had my dual changed to a single because a) I didn't want to pay an extra 5 a month and b) the dual receiver I had had a "software bug" in the new revision for that hardware, causing the picture to freeze up for several seconds every few minutes. D'oh. To fix this, they did offer to hook up two single receivers for the same price, but I would still have the $5 no phone line fee.

Re:It isn't new to the UK

[m0thr4]

I disconnected mine from the phone line when I switched from BT to cable about 1 month before the 12 month period was up and have never heard from them, so you might get away with doing that, but don't count on it. Sky wrote to a colleague of mine, insisting that he stump up the extra charges, as his Sky box had been unplugged for 2 months before the 12 month period expired. He tried to argue against it, but Sky's terms and conditions nail you right to the wall. He ended up paying.

Re:Fortnight??

[skurk]

I bet it's faster to google than posting (and waiting for an answer) here, but anwyay:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnight:

A fortnight is a unit of time equal to two weeks: that is 14 days, or literally 14 nights. The term is common in British English, Hiberno-English and Australian English, but rarely used in American English. It derives from the Old English feowertiene niht, meaning "fourteen nights".

This has to be the silliest headline....

[Starker_Kull]

....Perhaps, "Movies Delivered ON DEMAND Via Television Signal" might have been more descriptive and to the point?

same system as Sky TV

[abigsmurf]

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

Re:Not going to fly.

[Eivind]

It's not that hard to re-synch occasionally, and infact it's certain you'd want to do so on any carrier that can suffer from lost and/or flipped bits.

With that, errors (that persist after the error-correcting codes have done their magic) are amplified (a lot) but atleast the rest of the movie isn't fucked. If you re-synch every 10 seconds, for example, any error severe enough to get trough the error-correcting codes will result in up to 10 seconds of static.

There's (lots!) better ways. This is mentioned just as a trivial example of how to avoid totally ruining the rest of the movie due to a single non-correctible bit-flip.

Re:And PBS is getting how much?

[Ironsides]

And PBS is getting how much?

Enough to make it worth their while. This has been going on for several years at this point. Probably several thousand, if not more, per month. Enough to help offset the transmitter power bill.

Or at least, as a taxpayer I should be getting a kickback

Uh... No. PBS member stations are not run be the federal government and in only a few states are they owned by the states. They are getting this money directly into their own operating fund. Tell me which state you are in and I can tell you if the PBS stations are owned by your state or not.

Re:My time-shift right

[ajs318]

You can indeed record it ..... you can record anything which has a SCART connector. You probably will need to connect the Moviebeam receiver to a timebase corrector {which removes any artefacts in the retrace period that might fuck up the automatic gain control on most VCRs}, and the timebase corrector to the SCART on the VCR / DVD+R.

Re:Will they never learn?

[MrSquirrel]

Agreed. I don't see the economic efficiency offered to the home user. Last time I checked, I think Netflix was $30 a month... for unlimited (well, for the sake of arguement let's say one movie a day) movies out of a HUGE selection. That's $30 / 30 DVD's = $1 per movie. With the DVD you can watch it ANYWHERE that has a DVD player (i.e. computer, t.v., portable DVD player), you can make a "backup copy" (only if you own the original *wink*), and I've never seen a DVD that requires you plug it into a phoneline. So $1 per movie with GREAT features versus "buy our proprietary hardware" and "$2-$4" per movie for watching it at your T.V. out of a selection of only 100 and then hooking it up to a phoneline every 2 weeks... I don't see how it's suppossed to be so "great and new".

Re:Could it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for the company that makes the chip these boxes run on. If you are really curious look for the press release.

These chips run both Linux and WinCE here in the office and it is up to the customer which platform is choosen to run. IIRC this chip does not have the secure OS/bootloader that later chips have, so it would be possible to get "homebrew" Linux running on these processors as opposed to the newer versions.