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Movie Studios OK Download-to-Burn DVDs
fistfullast33l writes "The Associated Press is reporting that today movie studios have approved Sonic Solutions' technology Qflix, which allows people to download movies and burn them to DVDs that include CSS, the method of encryption that protects all pre-recorded DVDs sold today. According to a press release issued by Sonic Solutions, they will be demoing the technology by appointment at the Consumer Electronics Show on January 8th. Apparently the DVDs will also be subject to DRM restrictions placed by download services such as limiting the times a movie can be played back and how many times the movie can be burned. Is this the death of NetFlix as we know it? Interestingly enough, the AP article mentions burning kiosks in the future and the Sonic release mentions Walgreen's as a partner, so maybe DVD burning is coming to a drug store near you. Sonic Solutions is the owner of Roxio, which produces a well-known CD and DVD burning software suite."
A limit to the number of viewings? What the hell? Limiting the number of burns is reasonable (as far as DRM goes) if the number's around 3 or 5, but limiting the number of viewings is outright inane. If you pay for a movie, you should be able to view it as many times as you want.
Care about privacy? Read this!
I want downloadable movies, but not like this. It's still not an excuse for piracy (in case anyone gets funny ideas) but there are so many better solutions to this.
Instead of a 5,000 square foot store Blockbuster and Netflix can work out deals with Walgreens, Wal*Mart, and other retail storefronts to place a DVD-burning kiosk in their stores. All they need is power and a high speed net connection and they'll be good to go. Blockbuster could also eliminate in-store inventory altogether....bring the empty DVD case to the checkout and the clerk burns you a DVD to take home in a paper sleeve. When you're through watching the movie you toss the DVD. No shortages of the top hits, and the customer never needs to come back to return the DVD and pay a late fee.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Because we all know how well that works.
/surfing from Myth which plays DVDs, thanks Jon
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Oh look, it's DIVX all over again.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
It's still going to take 15 minutes to burn and read test the disc ... unless they want to risk sending someone home with a coaster. Throw in some time to LightScribe or print a label, too.
... they'll probably use the lowest bidder and end up with crap media. Bonus - each disc will self-destruct in a fairly short time. People will consider them disposable, so no one will complain.
Also, I doubt they'll spring for TY 8x +R media bitset to DVD-ROM
Death of Netflix? Unfortunately for some of us, (me included), The USPS has greater throughput than the only reasonably priced internet connection. So... Netflix will live on. At least for a while.
There is no way this will beat Netflix. People like my mother use Netflix simply because she doesn't like buying movies. It costs her a few dollars to see a movie through Netflix, where I doubt that these 'download' movies will be less than $12.99USD.
Riddle me this: Do you really think there are more people out there willing/able to download and burn a full-length DVD (including those who know what DRM is) than willing to hop on a website and order movies to their homes? Hell, for as fast as Netflix is in getting movies out, you could likely order one and have it delivered before your download of the same movie would be completed.
Somebody wake me when I can go online or on my TV and order any movie I want on-demand.
Oh, and the DRM scheme of limiting the number of times you can watch the movie on your computer is about the most fucking stupid thing I've heard today. This is another industry trying to ensure that you will NEVER own anything.
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If you're late, they just sell you the DVD and bill your credit-card. While this DVD-kiosk idea would certainly help them cut back on retail space, staff, stocking costs, etc. it would also completely eliminate their "sales" division.
Besides, this kiosk idea is so far removed from the traditional experience of "roaming the racks" that it would leave absolutely nothing to distinguish between downloading a movie and going to the store to rent it, except that you have to leave your comfy couch to do it and, most likely, pay a bit more. Really, only the technophobes are going to be going to rental stores in the near future, so why alienate them? Of course, the shift away from brick and mortar rental stores is definitely coming. Blockbuster et al. are most likely going to find some way to carve themselves a slice of the pie, but one can't help but wonder how long there will be actual Blockbuster corner video stores in operation.
I know people who have been downloading full DVD's for several years, now. They'll be glad to know that the RIAA has OK'ed it.
"All DVD players come equipped with a key that fits the lock and allows for playback."
This is the equivalent of leaving your front door key underneath the mat. It won't be long at all until the crack is widely available.
Wow! Yeah! Those hackers are so cunning they got a crack done 7 years ago!
But remember, this is a manufacturer trying to sell this to a studio. They probably know full well that this will be cracked within 30 minutes, but as long as those 30 minutes occur after some studio has signed a licensing deal to use this scheme, they don't care, as long as the check clears.
The first limitation is not possible, unless DIVX really won against DVD.
I don't see anything in either article that says they limit playback.
The second limitation is also not part of the DVD-Video standard, and it means that you probably need some windows program that downloads the video in Arbitrariy-proprietary-DRM-format-173, then converts they to a a non-standard DVD you can only play on windows or off-standard DVD players.
You're half right I think. My reading is that what you download isn't DVD-Video, but can then be burned to DVD, at which point it is converted to DVD-Video and will playback on any DVD player. But the number of times you can do that burn from the original file (as opposed to copying the resulting DVD) is limited. Just like the way that iTunes will let you burn AAC-encoded files to CD some limited number of times.
If you're living in America, Home of the Obese as I am, we might find that forcing people to do sit-ups before a movie would improve our declining life expectancy numbers.
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So wait... you wait hours and hours downloading a dvd sized video and then you have to burn it to a disc? Sounds awesome, maybe after we burn it to disc we can copy it to a stack of floppies. Why not put a NIC and a harddrive in an entertainment center?
This could kill Blockbuster. It might put a hamper on brick and mortar retail outlets that have branched into selling DVD's, but this could never kill NetFlix.
Have you tried downloading a full sized DVD and burning it? Come on, I don't have the time or patience required to do that via bittorrent (which maxes out my connection and prevents me from doing other things online if I want the DVD as fast as possible) and that still takes several hours. How fast would I get the DVD if I'm downloading it from one source? It'd take days if not weeks of downloading in the background. Plus, now I've got a hard drive full of 4/8 gig files which are essentially useless once they've been burnt.
The general populace might see this as an alternative to going to the store and buying a DVD and I can see people simply queuing up DVD's on a wishlist to download at their leisure, but this is no where near the sort of thing that compete with the NetFlix model of business.
Being able to download and burn DVD's at Walgreen's would be great for all the Moms and Pops who aren't computer-savvy and still have a 5-year-old E-machine as their PC. Without the DVD packaging, shipping, and cost of shelf space, they could be offered a lot cheaper too... as long as the price is right and inane DRM restrictions don't ruin it.
Simplicity is always the key to mass market.
- For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
Listen up folks, the limited viewings are not for DVD, read carefully because two seperate concepts got mangled in the summary.
What is interesting about this is that Hollywood is close to giving up on CSS. They are about to permit hardware makers to market a drive capable of writing the CSS blocks and writable media to leave a factory without the CSS blocks preburned to zeros. While I suspect they have a DRM trick up their sleeve we know it won't work in this case, as there really isn't a way to retrofit around the flaws in CSS and remian compatible with the installed base of DVD players.
Ding dong the witch is dead, but of course it has already been dead and the body is pretty smelly, enough that Hollywood couldn't ignore it anymore. I think this is a good idea actually. Not for everything and everybody, but I can imagine cases where I might actually use it.
Scenario 1: Downloads. I could see paying to download and burn vs paying to have physical media shipped. If there was a big enough price gap to make the slightly faster delivery enough better to offset the loss of the professional screen printed artwork and such. Or if it were used for obscure titles that wouldn't rate a production run and the choice is between a DVD-R and nothing.
Or try Scenario 2: Go to a website, pick the titles you want to purchase and pick up the media (which could even be dye sub printed and cased) at your friendly neighborhood retailer (the article mentions a deal in the works with Wallgreens) later the same day. Note that this scenario would even allow Hollywood to tightly control distribution of totally blank burnable media.
Democrat delenda est
This technology is a few years too early to have a serious impact on Netflix. ... Who in their right mind is going to feel good about waiting 5 hours for a movie download?
The same people who have to wait at least a day for Netflix to mail you a movie you want?
Now, this is before we even get started on the addition DRM crap they want to subject their customers to.
Which for practical purposes is no more DRM than Netflix gives you. Once you take a file you download and burn it, you have what Netflix would have sent you except on a DVD-R instead of a pressed disc. (I think the bit of the summary about limiting playback is FUD; I don't see anything in either article mentioning it, and two other posters as-of now concur. I think it's just an iTunes-like thing: you download a DRM'd file, then can burn it.)
In fact, in some sense, you can do MORE with this file because you can gave it on your computer hard drive without running the DVD through DeCSS first.
Not everyone shares your opinion. Some people have the patience even to download whole TV series as DVD ISOs (for an hour-long show, that would be about 7 discs per season).
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
This article has more information and clearly lays out that it is disks, burners, etc. "upgraded" to burn CSS
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Actually, for many years I did own a home audio CD recorder which did require "music" CD-R's. They cost negligibly more than "data" CD-R's.
What absolutely totally pissed me off beyond belief was the day I brought a CD home and it wouldn't copy, because it had some damned kind of copy protection built in that triggered the SCCS lockout in my recorder.
I kept MY end of the bargain, God damn it. I paid for every copy I made. And I was totally entitled to make those copies under the Audio Home Recording Act. And both the publishers and artists were paid for every copy.
But, noooooo, that's not good enough for the music industry. They set up a one-sided bargain and then won't even keep their side of it.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Apparently the DVDs will also be subject to DRM restrictions placed by download services such as limiting the times a movie can be played back
We're sorry. Viewing restrictions on this DVD are such that you may only watch Star Whores Episode II - Attack of the Bones between 2pm and 5pm, when your wife is at work.
More likely it will be a 2GB VC-1 file which your computer will convert to a 9GB DVD ISO image before burning - sort of like ratDVD but legitimate.
It's already hacked; they admit as much. Burn to CSS-protected DVD, use DeCSS.
I'm guessing that burned DVD's won't last as long as pressed DVD's, as is true with CD's.
is this the death of NetFlix as we know it?
Not necessarily... Whenever I burn a DVD, it takes forever, sometimes doesn't work quite right and just isn't quite the same as a nice and polished commercial DVD. Sure, if I really knew what I was doing and had awesome equipment maybe things would be different. For the average Joe downloading a movie and burning it to a DVD to watch, in most cases, once is too much of a pain in the ass. Most people would rather just pick the movies they want in a list and have the real deal sent to them.
Now video on demand however, is a spin of the downloadable content and could put NetFlix down. If these movie download websites integrate with other equipment (think TiVo or some type of set top box) that can be rented or purchased, then we might have a winner. Sitting in front of the TV and clicking "Play" with a remote and having the content stream in is pretty cool. I loved having this on my old cable network and if a third party offered something similar, it would be healthy competition, especially if the service offered popular TV show archives as well.
In other words, all the beautiful technologies we have grown to love! If you think all they are going to do is put CSS on disks you are greatly mistaken. They do seem to care about quality of disks but not your ability to archive or back them up. On a side note, this might not be that bad for kiosks, but I would rather buy a *real* DVD than wait 20 min for this thing to come out. Like I don't have better things to do.
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