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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.
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>
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 . . .
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
"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."
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".
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 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".
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
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.
$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?
....Perhaps, "Movies Delivered ON DEMAND Via Television Signal" might have been more descriptive and to the point?
develop a box that decodes them and doesn't require you to pay extra - you can
Remember when you were a kid and you built a fort out of cardboard boxes and then slept in it?
It's one of those.
I should know. I'll never forgive myself for what the dew did to my baseball cards.
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)
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.
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.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
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
Oh, that will be a great in 2009 when stations will be required* to give up their analog spectrum an move entirely to digital. Are you sure this isn't using a portion of the the digital b/w? (I have no idea, but this would certainly be bonehead move if your $200 box turned into a doorstop in 3 years)
*required, just like they were in 2003 and 2006.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yes, its short-sighted but maybe thats why they are unloading these boxes at $50 now.
From Dotcast
"dNTSC® allows broadcasters to cost-effectively and reliably distribute large volumes of digital data using existing commercial television broadcasting infrastructures. Dotcast uses its technology to insert a broadband digital data signal inside the analog television broadcast signal and transmit it in a manner that is invisible to the television viewer."