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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."
Chums up, let's do this!
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 . . .
"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."
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".
$4 for new releases? Do you mean "new" as in theatrical release or "new" as in just released on home video a few weeks ago. Yeah, that's what I thought. No thanks.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yes, it's entirely possible they've done the security "right".
The problem is if they've made the encryption that secure, one little glitch, and it's all over, No one can get anything and it's not likely that they'll be able to fix it.
There's a reason most products have manufacturer's codes and backdoors built-in. It makes troubleshooting possible.
Imagine you're watching a movie you've paid good money for, and there's a one bit drop in the tranmission. (After error correction) Remember, this is a shoot and forget systems. There's no oportunity to resend a bad packet like over the internet. Just one bit dropped from a really secure, compressed stream will render it useless.
My wife and I leave closed captioning on so we don't wake the kids. We recieve TV over the air, and even when reception is good, there's often errors in the stream. "To be or not to be, that is the &%%*&%*^(*"
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
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.
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)
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.
Yep. My dad worked on it. They basically developed a new type of file system (boots in under 5 secs). Also they added tons of security to it. My dad previously had a secret clearance, and he helped with the security on this. Of course it is possible to crack, but it will be much, much harder than you think.
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