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Legal DVD Burnable Downloads Launched
rogabean writes to tell us that Hollywood studios have taken a large step into the future by launching their new program with CinemaNow which allows users to legally download and burn DVDs. While the current of offerings seems to be just the dregs, studio execs hope to expand the list quickly and offer a new way to find niche or older films that are difficult to locate.
... the reason they opted for this was supposedly having discovered a way to create a DVD that can be played in a DVD player, but cannot itself be copied. How is that even possible? TFA has no information.
The prices "start" at $9, plus I have to download a few gigabytes and then burn it myself? Plus no storage box or artwork? Thanks, but it'll be faster, cheaper, and result in a better product if I just drive to Wal-mart and buy the same DVD for $7.
Have you read my blog lately?
Nine bucks for old movies that can be found in the bargain bins for $5 - $10 already is not really going to turn a lot of heads. When they start pushing out current releases with this model, then we'll see if the studios are serious about doing something like this.
To me, it doesn't really look like a serious business strategy, so much as a pre-emptive strike by the studios against eventually being held over a barrel by Apple Computer the way the record labels are right now. They want the infrastructure for something like this in place early in the game, so they don't give up their power to make the rules.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
what?
I think this thing is just like all the other "downloadable movie"-sites. It's purposefully broken (in this case overpriced) in order to drive customers off, either to the traditional go-buy-a-disc-at-walmart or go-download-some-warez. Because most customers want convenience, they'll of course scoff at this offering and continue to download Xvids from the local bittorrent-tracker.
Hence, MPAA et al can claim that "our potential customers WANT to pirate movies, we tried but it didn't work, woe be us!" and the retarded justice system will let them continue their crusade against evolution, since the industry has "proven" that downloadable movies "don't work".
It was the same with the other sites that offered "downloadable" movies. The movies were heavily tied down with DRM (which prevented them from being burned to DVD or moved to another computer), customers were expected to provide the bandwidth for the other customers, and the movies were horribly expensive - usually twice the price of a dvd in the bargain bin, but without the flexibility of a DVD, without the extras, and with lesser audio/video quality.
*adjusts tinfoil-hat*
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
Most of the movies are avaliable in the bargin bin at WalMart. About the only thing I saw that I would consider was Firefly and even that would be cheaper to drive out and just buy the whole season on factory DVDs. I was really curious to see if anything here was even worth buying but I can't bring myself to buy any of these for $9 a pop.
There are three ways I know of making a normal audio CD impossible to pirate/play on a computer:
- Turning off autorun
- Ripping on anything that isn't a Windows OS
- Suing the shit out of Sony for abusing our computers
While the rootkit method will have the least false positives, it will also cause the most damage, and it's the easiest to circumvent.I suspect that any method which allows you to burn your own DVD, even if it'll let us use single-layer media, is going to use one of the above retarded methods for attempting to prevent copy protection. They could try using Blu-Ray, except that Blu-Ray media isn't cheap enough yet.
The real question is, will the downloads be full DVD quality, and if not, will they be DRM'd before they get to the DVD? In other words, could I download these using their software (undoubtably they'll require software), then copy them over the network and play them on my Linux box?
If not, then this will likely be used to say that people will always pirate, no matter how cheap/convenient they make it. They could take a hint from the pirates, though. You can't make it much more convenient than an un-DRM'd BitTorrent download, and it's certainly cheaper to publish that way.
Here's my conditions for using this service or a service like it:
I'd like high def with lots of extras, but that's not necessary. The above list is, though. Miss even one of those and I'll just rent them and rip them, the way I always do.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Just went to the site and had a look at their list of free movies. That's 5 minutes of my life I will never get back. Page after page of Z-list crapola and not one (NOT ONE !!!111) movie I have ever heard of. It must have taken a lot of work to come up with a list of movies this bad.
"Bad beyond all infinte possible dimensions of badness"
Enough suck to pull small planets out of orbit.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
This is just another foolish idea that the desperate community of download entrepreneurs are trying to get past the cement-heads of the MPAA. All they can get currently are cinema dregs. No one is going to want pay to download junk when they can download good quality DIVx titles from the unlicensed distributors for free. And the entrepreneurs need big profitable download numbers to get the studios to offer popular big name titles. This is another 'zombie' company; already dead and doesn't know it yet.
So why would the studios want paid downloads? They can distribute DVDs inexpensively and profitably to the video outlets that have proliferated widely in the US and developed world. And they generally get the cost of the film product covered through the initial theatre release (where 90% of the box office goes to the studio for the first few weeks of release and 50% of the viewers chose to see the new movie). What does the studio have to gain from paid downloads? Pratically nothing.
Paid downloads are good for films that don't get wide DVD or theatre release. Brilliant little foreign films, etc... But if noone knows about them, then there is no demand. No demand means no paid downloads. Eight dollars isn't cheap and three hours of download time is a high opportunity cost to pay for a bozo film. Three hours spend downloading a turkey is three hours spent that wasn't downloading a good film. It's so much easier just to go to the DVD store in the local supermarket and pick up a six month old title for much less cost in dollars and download time.
Nor could you convince foreign directors to release their films in the USA or other countries as downloads. These guys are very traditional and want their films to be seen in theaters; they don't even like DVDs. The more that the download entrepeneurs are able to pressure them to license their 'vanity' films for download, the less likelyhood that they will be pressed into DVDs. They will be limited to their local national market and whatever government subsidies that they can hussle from their local cultural ministers. Which means boring films, which means fewer people taking a chance on downloading them regardless of the reviews in specialized film magazines.
All in all this is a dumb idea. The only thing that will work is the only thing that is currently working. Which is people crafting their favorite new films into DIVx format 'illegally' and posting them for download on the P2P sites. Eventually the MPAA will have to come to terms with the P2P community, on the terms of the P2P community, and accept whatever residual fees that the P2P community considers it appropriate for the studios to have. In the same manner that the RIAA came to a partial truce with the P2P community with iTunes.
It will take a long time because these guys are exceptionally thick in the head department. Which means we have to wait for a lot of dumb zombie companies like this one to fail before any real progress gets made.
You don't need to modifiy the file itself. Assuming a user is not going to buy the same movie twice, each time you burn a disk, take a note of the movie title and/or file checksum, add it somewhere deep and dark in the registery and then run a lookup on this list each time you want to burn a new downloaded DVD. This could be bypassed by modifing the registry.
Though chances are they do use remote authentication, verifing the server via a pgp key (to avoid bypassing the server by modifing the hosts file to a fake 'yes man' server). It also serves a second purpose of giving the marketing department lots of lovley stats on useage info (like how long between downloading a buring, what percentage try to burn more than once, what time of day to people burn).