Movie Burning Kiosks Coming To Retailers

Vitaly Friedman writes "The motion picture industry is in talks with some major retailers about installing DVD burning kiosks in stores. It's an interesting idea, but one that almost entirely misses the point. Hollywood's movie distribution system is in dire need of a fix - very few will dispute that. Movie attendance has been suffering, DVD sales are slumping, and all the industry has managed to do is come up with a half-baked, unpopular download service and a scant handful of simultaneous releases. In another attempt to sort of give consumers what they want, the motion picture industry is thinking about allowing retailers to set up in-store kiosks for distribution."

Comments

Why would I buy...

[Anonymous Coward]

...something that:

* Will last much less time than a standard DVD before failing
* Not play in all of my DVD players
* Mean I have to wait around for it to finish burning
* Probably cost as much, or more than, a regular DVD

I won't, that's the answer to that. Get with it Hollywood, you need to offer movies to download at a significantly discounted price, or with no DRM. Offering me less for more, which is what you try to do at every step, doesn't make me want to give you my hard-earned cash.

Re:Why would I buy...

[Kasis]

I agree, I dislike having to wait five minutes for my passport photos to be developed, I wonder how long this would take exactly?? In my personal home kiosk, it takes anywhere from half an hour to several hours to download a movie, then another quarter of an hour to decompress and burn it. And it's free...

If I'm standing in a retailers and I feel that a movie is worth paying for, I'll pick up a ready-pressed DVD from the shelf in a glossy box, pay for it and leave.

What exactly is the benefit of this service? Yes I did rtfa but I still can't see any advantage.

DVD+-R archival lifetime isn't so great

[Anonymous Coward]

Hollywood found out they can sell you a product that self destructs.

Adaptation

[suv4x4]

FTFA: Retailers are concerned that digital downloads might spell an end to the sale of DVDs, and see the download-to-burn kiosks as a way to keep them in the DVD business.

If only could they realize they gotta adapt instead of run hacks to keep the good ol' days.
There weren't plenty of typing machine manifacturers that started making keybaords and mice as well I think. They just tried to keep the old ways and ceased to exist.

Movie burning?

[MadFarmAnimalz]

For a second, I thought this had something to do with the proper disposal of movies like Battlefield Earth...

Let them know what you think!

[babbling]

Now that Skype offers free calls to US numbers until the end of the year, why not drop the MPAA a line and let them know what's on your mind? Maybe we can all check in on them daily and thank them for their efforts!

Oh, and if you'd be so kind, could you also let them know that The Pirate Bay is back up? They seem to still be under the impression that it's down... (PDF link)

Oh. You might need their numbers:
Washington: (202) 293-1966
LA: (818) 995-6600
New York (listed as their "anti-piracy office"): (914) 378-0800

I have one already...

[AudioEfex]

I already have a movie-burning kiosk in my home.

It's called BitTorrent. :)

AE

Re:I have one already...

[Xugumad]

*sigh* /.'s attitude of "It's okay to copy anything I want" is really, really getting tiring.

Look, yes, the movie companies are almostly solely producing overpriced undifferentiated mush. However, it's clearly mush a lot of you want. As such, is it so crazy to suggest you either pay for it, or if you genuinely feel it's over priced, make a stand by neither buying nor copying? All you're doing by copying movies/music/games/etc. is saying to the producers "I want your product, but don't want to pay for it".

The MPAA/RIAA are both fairly clearly evil incarnate, I agree. However, copying everything you want is not actually going to help, it's just going to give them more legal leverage. If you actually feel things need to change, stop buying, and stop copying. Go read a book or something :)

Re:I have one already...

[pla]

/.'s attitude of "It's okay to copy anything I want" is really, really getting tiring.

While I somewhat agree, you need to realize that (unlike most geek-oriented issues), that attitude reflects what the majority of humans feel.

People do not, and did not ever, respect the concept of copyright as more than a good idea in theory if not in implementation. But until very recently (historically speaking), individuals didn't have the option of violating copyrights on any significant scale, so the system remained basically intact.

Even prior to last 50 years, "piracy" still occurred (how many hand-painted copies of the Mona Lisa exist? I recall reading a number in the thousands recently). It just took much longer, and the resources necessary to pull it off on a large scale almost guaranteed detection.

But from moment photocopiers gained widepread availability, college students have photocopied textbooks. The introduction of the cassette tape also saw the introduction of massive music sharing - likewise for the VCR. As soon as software-compatible PCs appeared, everyone swapped software among friends. When CD burners appeared on the scene, they just replaced the cassette tape, and likewise for DVD burners.

And when the internet made piracy ever so much easier, people flocked to using it for exactly that purpose. When P2P made finding and downloading copyrighted content as close to trivial as any user-initiated action can get, the P2P networks turned into nothing short of massively distributed digital radio stations with the users as the program directors.


So why do I write the above? For perspective. You say that in-your-face piracy as a form of civil disobedience won't work for swaying minds - But no one's mind needs swaying. Society has seen the idea of copyright, and rejected it outright whenever physically possible.

We don't need to win mindshare buy-in - The media producers need to come up with a model that allows them to make money while accepting that people will copy their work regardless of the law.



And if P2P scares the RIAA, wait until the next step. Some wireless-enabled portable music players already allow sharing songs actively, but it still takes too much effort to consider more than a quirk. When (not if) that turns into a passive action, compatible with devices just about everyone has (whether iPod-like players, or cell phones, or PDAs, or wrist watches, or some new killer toy we haven't even imagined yet) - When everyone you pass in rush-hour traffic, or on a busy sidewalk, or in a crowded mall, automatically sends you their entire music library almost instantly and without the need for you to even click "okay" - I think that really will mean the absolute death of anything similar to our modern content-selling industries. And what I just described will happen - Some portable music players already can do exactly that, they just need faster transfer rates, more storage space, and most importantly, either ubiquity or compatibility with other devices.

The RIAA and MPAA has until then to come up with a new trick. If they want to focus their energy on litigation, or even on a laughable anti-piracy PR campaign - They may as well close up shop today.

So when you see geeks saying "I will pirate it if I can, stick it to The Man!", don't bother getting annoyed - Whether or not such people know their "real" motives, they don't say anything new, or surprising, or even express an unpopular sentiment. Instead, look at them as a symptom of a badly broken system, broken from the start and finally approaching complete disintigration.

If they want better sales...

[TheDunadan]

...They should make better movies.

Sales/attendance slumping... why?

[cliffwoolley]

I guess it never occurred to the movie industry that perhaps sales/attendance are slumping because all of the movies they're coming out with these days are (a) expensive and (b) exactly the same as all the other movies for the last N years? "This story line worked before, it'll work again!"

Thanks, guys. :-P

Here's what I would buy

[TheRaven64]

I currently have a movie rental subscription. It costs £13/month, and gives me as many DVDs as I can watch, up to three at a time. This works out to about one a day. I would pay a similar amount, maybe a little more (say, £15) for the convenience of a service that offered:

1. DVD-quality downloads. 1GB of H.264-encoded movie should give 'good enough' quality.
2. No DRM; I often watch films on my laptop, and I occasionally watch them on a handheld device. Don't tie me to any particular platform.
3. Any film or TV series that's been released on DVD.
4. Up to 30 downloads a month.

Sure, some people would archive everything they've downloaded, but would the industry lose much from that? I rarely watch a film more than two or three times, and so it wouldn't make much sense; particularly when you can just re-download any film you want.

Of course, these films would also end up on peer to peer networks, but at that price it just wouldn't be worth my time and effort to get them illegally.

I don't want any more DVDs. I own fifty or so movies on DVD, but I stopped buying new ones over a year ago. They are simply not worth the money; when I can rent close to thirty for the price of buying one it's only a good investment to buy if I plan on watching it more than thirty times[1].

Sadly, I don't think the movie industry is likely to adopt such a model for quite some time.

[1] The opposite is true for music. Looking through my iTunes library, the vast majority of tracks have a play count of 50-80, making music rental services a very bad financial choice for me.

First Amendment issue:

[LiftOp]

Can I shout "fire!" in a movie burning kiosk?

Distribution Economics from an early attempt

[billstewart]

About 10 years ago I had a customer who wanted to set up movie stores like this - they'd always have the current movies in stock, and they'd always have every movie that had ever been made. (They'd done a similar model with record stores, and had some fast digital-to-VHS burning technology.) The main catch was that you needed an OC3 network connection (155 Mbps) to be able to do 5-minute downloads, which was laughably unrealistic at the time, as opposed to today when it's only fairly unrealistic. Since this was before DVDs, they also had issues with the costs of data storage for movies they had cached - 500GB was still pretty big, though there were some digital tape technologies that might work if you had a robot, or you could copy videotapes if you didn't mind the quality hit.

On-Demand downloads weren't very practical - but pre-loading movies as they're released works quite well, especially since that's what you're most likely to sell. A 1 Mbps network connection lets you download 75 GB a week, which is about 15 movies, depending on resolution, 2-disk-sets, etc. Hollywood seldom produces more than 10 movies a week, and Bollywood's pretty similar. (The pr0n industry produces a lot more.) So if you've got a cable modem or decent DSL connection, you can keep ahead of the mainstream movies and have some bandwidth available for CD-quality ad-hoc downloads. Network availability can be a problem - the obvious place to put DVD burner kiosks is in malls, but they often don't have cable, and they're usually far away from telco offices so DSL bandwidth is lower. On the other hand, grocery stores are usually in/near residential neighborhoods, so they've usually got cable nearby and often have decent DSL.