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

Re:Working Clicky

[Spasemunki]

I have a funny feeling that this is not nearly as aimed at 'tech savvy' people as you think. It would be a much more likely seller in smaller and rural communities where broadband penetration- and even the cable company- are not a significant presence. A 'tech savvy' person in a wired, urban area already has a lot of other viewing options: Netflix, local DVD rental shops, TiVO, digital cable, broadband media content (streaming video, audio downloads, pirated movies), etc. This sort of a product would more be in competition with satelite TV in low-density populations, where everyone has a POTS line and very few people have broadband. While some urbanites are ditching their land lines for cell-only, POTS is still ubiquitous and plenty of people outside of major urban centers continue to use it for their only Internet access.

If the product is a success with the target market, it will be dead simple to bring out an Ethernet or wireless capable version that can run over broadband, but there's no reason to be wading into already thickly infested waters for a product launch.

Movies via TV?

[Per Wigren]

That's a new one!

Movies? Via Television?

[imsabbel]

The audacity of this innovation is just stunning.

Trusting the client?

[Anonymous Coward]

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>

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?

Will they never learn?

[xpeeblix]

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.

Imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

Movies over a TV signal? Now i've seen everything

Bad??

[novus ordo]

"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. :)

from tfa

[Dance_Dance_Karnov]

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

Phone line tricks

[tomhudson]

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".

And PBS is getting how much?

[Overzeetop]

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.

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: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".

Not going to fly.

[Dr_Barnowl]

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.

Re:Not going to fly.

[Maximum Prophet]

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 &%%*&%*^(*"

Could it run Linux?

[Maximum Prophet]

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.

Man in the Middle attack

[ajs318]

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.

Am I the only person who thinks this is going to be spectacularly easy to hack?

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"!

Been there, done that in the 80s: X*PRESS

[jfoust2]

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?