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.

Comments

So, according to TFA...

[Anonymous Coward]

... 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.

Clueless as usual...

[14erCleaner]

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.

Re:Clueless as usual...

[MrFebtober]

Even if they did bring the prices down to a competitive level (cheaper than buying the DVD in a store), they are pretty vague on the format. Would this be a ready-to-burn .ISO file? Would it be sized small enough to fit on a single-layer DVD-R (which likely means viewer extras, languages, etc) or would it be a duel-layer .ISO file requiring a dual-layer burner? Technical questions, yes, but these are the things that would make or break this idea in my mind. well...assuming the even did become competitive price-wise.

Re:Clueless as usual...

[kimvette]

WalMart offers many movies at $4.50 each (I just picked up Lethal Weapon 2 and 4 for $4.50 each last week). The studios need to do at least that well and post them as ISO images in order to make this worthwhile (Hello. MPAA? BitTorrent is the ideal mechanism to make distribution cheap, just charge for the "subscription" to the password for the tracker).

There are a LOT of old movies (and even freely-available stuff we're encouraged by the producers to bootleg, e.g., all the MST3K episodes) I'd buy from a service such as this. Lots of the old sci-fi movies from the '50s I've never seen, stuff that WLVI 56 in Boston used to air in their saturday "Creature double feature" run in the late 70s/early 80s (you know, stuff like Godzilla, Gamera, etc.), lots of dead TV shows that aren't in sydnication (I'd pay a few dollars for all the episodes of, say, Good Grief, Parker Lewis Can't Lose, Alf, Tracy Ullman, ALL the muppet show episodes, The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, etc. - dig up a LOT of stuff that Generation X caught the tail end of or missed out completely on). If you want to plug commercials in to subsidize the "cost" of distribution (e.g., to offer it at such a cheap price) then go right ahead- it's a fair tradeoff and I'll sit through the commercials to get legal downloads of stuff which isn't "legally" otherwise available. In other words, make it cheap enough, I'll buy lots of shows that aren't worth paying full price on a DVD on, but would be fun to watch if for no other reason to figure out exactly why I liked the show when I was 10 yrs old to begin with. :D

Will this stuff get pirated? Inevitably, yes, however if you sell, say, 1,000 units of each season of, say, the Ed Sullivan show, and the content would otherwise be rotting away in a vault somewhere, what's the harm? Hell, you'll get a viral marketing effect. Today's Jr. High kids might download Ed Sullivan and rediscover the Beatles, the Doors, Elvis, and a bunch of other old acts that have a cult following but doesn't otherwise attract new customers. Heck, I'd pay $15 for the Top of the Pops episode where Pink Floyd made an appearance. You're a lot better off selling SOME content, even knowing it's going to be pirated, than to make zero sales on it.

In other words, it's a great idea and not only should you jump on it, but take the maximum advantage you can by not being so closed-fisted and short-sighted. You may be surprised at what opening up your vaults to what the customers want may lead to increased revenues, rather than being so closed-fisted that if you can't lock it down with DRM every step of the way, you kill off any customer interest. HD-DVD is stillborn, don't do the same with this idea.

$9

[Golias]

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.

Two Words: Intentionally Broken

[isecore]

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*

"Relatively new anti-piracy"?

[SanityInAnarchy]

There are three ways I know of making a normal audio CD impossible to pirate/play on a computer:

1. Mess with the Table of Contents. I believe this is an example of a ToC that has somehow been changed so that computers don't see it as an audio CD. Unfortunately, it would also probably affect mp3 cd players and other, similar devices which are not computers, cannot possibly enable piracy, but still read the ToC and the data areas so they can find mp3 files.
2. Mess with the audio data. There have been some clever attempts at changing the audio such that it sounds normal on a normal CD player, but it has annoying pops and hisses when played on a computer, or ripped to mp3. Unfortunately, this also has the same problems -- devices could always have the same problem reading the disc as computers.
3. Install a rootkit or other evilness in the autorun. This can be countered by one or more of the following:
   • 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:

• Saturate my connection, whether you use BitTorrent or HTTP.
• Use a standard protocol -- BitTorrent or HTTP. Please don't use FTP.
• Charge a reasonable amount (I think they're doing that now).
• Let the files themselves be un-DRM'd and in a standard format -- I'd love h.264 in an avi, mkv, even mov. Note that h.264 != high def.
• If you give me subtitles, let them be soft subtitles.
• If I must download commentary and special features, they should be no more than 20% of the total download size.

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.