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Vudu Set-Top Box Weds Legal P2P and HD Movies
prostoalex writes "The New York Times is running a story on a Silicon Valley company that is planning to revolutionize the movie business. It's no secret that the movie-going experience has been deteriorating, while the number of HDTVs sold has been rising steadily. A company called Vudu, run by a guy who started TiVo, is now building a box for peer-to-peer download of movies straight from the studios. That could enables the movie studios to make movies securely available to viewers on the day of release, and improves on the download experience offered by other shops, like Amazon Unbox, MovieLink and others: 'DVD sales began to stagnate because studios had finally plowed through their entire backlog of movies that could be released on the shiny discs. The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners. And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.'"
Vudu seems to be a copy of Apple TV. It has a similar-sized box with a similar aesthetic, and an equally sparse remote. What it adds over the Apple TV seems to be direct download without a computer, and a composite video out. There's also no mention of podcast support, which is the real innovation from the Apple TV, in my mind.
Am I missing something? Is this really revolutionary? (Not that the Apple TV is either, but it's probably the best-known set-top box with podcast support.)
According to market analysist Nicholas Donatiello Jr quoted in the article, the ball park could be $300 for the box and between $6 adn $10 per movie. But they didn't touch on the bandwidth/data costs to the user - and as they are going with a peer-to-peer system, each customer will be donating some of their upload bandwidth too (possibly even when not watching a movie).
while the number of HDTVs sold has been rising steadily.
I see statements like that and wonder if it is truely rising or if it's just that HDTVs are comming down steadily in price and so rather than wanting a HDTV they just buy the best set of features (aka what the sales guy says) which happens to be the latest TV. This would explain why more HDTVs are slowly being sold while the interest level (as far as I can see) is very low even among people with HDTV consoles which would benefit from them.
But I suppose HDTV is much like Vista. We have no real control over the market, we have a market for both (HDTV and normal TVs/Vista and XP) until the makers decide the pull the plug and we're forced to one option even if we hate it.
I like muppets.
Their box is planning to upload HDTV vids through average people's internet connection? Most people have enough downloading, thank you. Something tells me QoS routers will get very popular if this catches on. P2P is a great way to "chip in" your bandwidth without actually setting up a central system. If you've set up a central system already, bandwidth is much cheaper and more available centrally than it is for me. With my DSL line I'm basicly capped at whatever they are able to deliver, and I hardly think I'm alone in that. The marginal price for me to have another Mbit of upload capacity is ca. infinite, or at least some ungodly expensive business connection. Easynews offers 20GB download for $10, which is about the same infrastructure Vudu would need to have. I'd easily rather pay 10$ to Vudu than upload 20GB over my connection.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
From TFA: "It has built a small Internet-ready movie box that connects to the television and allows couch potatoes to rent or buy any of the 5,000 films now in Vudu's growing collection. The box's biggest asset is raw speed: the company says the films will begin playing immediately after a customer makes a selection." Two points. One, the article also makes note of the rise in HDTV sets - if that's indeed the case, wouldn't one selling point be the opportunity to offer movies in some fairly high-definition format (at LEAST DVD-quality)? Even for folks with broadband, most won't have the bandwith to pull down a DVD-or-better quality movie quickly enough to watch in real-time. The other point is the "rent or buy" verbiage - what defines 'renting' or 'buying' (normally I'd only have to ask what defines renting, but considering how the major movie/music studios have handled DRM, one must include buying in that request)? When the article says renting, do they mean along similar lines to what you might receive from a movie store, 3 days and then it goes away? Or do they mean something like purchasing a single viewing, along the lines of what you'd get in a movie theater - if the latter's the case, why the heck would I want to "rent" a new movie for almost the same price as going to see it in theaters? Even the best home setups really just can't compare to watching a movie at the theater, especially with some films being available at IMAX theaters and the like. This brings to light the question of the pricing scheme - new movies more costly than old? More popular movies have floating costs that increment with every X number of downloads? These are things I wouldn't put it past the MPAA to try and implement, and they'd spell a DOA right out of the gate for a service that's trying to supplant internet piracy. After all, you still just can't beat $Free.99 for price.
It's no secret that the movie-going experience has been deteriorating
How so? What has changed? Are the seats less comfy? Is the pop corn less crunchy? Is the sound less ugh-please-turn-the-bass-down-or-i-am-going-to-bar fy? Or is it that the home theater experience is improving with respect to the real theater experience so it makes you say it's deteriorating?
You just got troll'd!
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
//How long is the piece of string?
;)
From one end to another...
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.
Which is crap on both fronts. Peer-to-peer has hardly "consumed" the music business, last I heard they were still in business and making money. Unless he means that P2P has consumed an unreasonable amount of attorney's fees lately. I'd agree with that.
This guy is just trying to make this appear to be a proactive solution to a problem the movie houses really aren't experiencing yet, hoping that one or more of them will jump on the bandwagon.
The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners.
No, the success of iTunes has, if anything, taught the movie industry that the very last thing it wants is content distribution run by a high-powered technology company with both the money and the balls to tell the studios "here's the deal - take it or leave it."
Both the music and the movie industries have long shown themselves to be anti-technology control freaks. Unless they can own this technology they'll never go for it, and if they did own it they'd lock it down so tightly that we would never go for it.
I can't argue that the DVD was a phenomenal success, but that was because the average user wasn't left feeling too restricted. The reason he felt that way was because he generally just played his movies on his living room TV, and never needed to rip his data to some other format. That's changing, not to the level that music reproduction has changed but it's happening, and when enough people can't legally or practically move their movies to other devices the same problems will arise.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Just as an example of some items I am unable to buy on DVD here in australia but would like to own:
Snow White (the pre-WW2 Disney classic)
The Real Ghostbusters (the 80s cartoon)
Tales Of The Gun (History Channel documentary series)
Other History Channel documentaries
Space Above And Beyond
Hey Dad (classic Aussie sitcom)
Even if you account for the fact that some of them (like some of the History Channel stuff) may in fact be available if you are willing to import from America, there are still plenty of movies and TV episodes that you just plain can't get legally on DVD or from ANY download service anywhere in the world.
This device sounds like a win for the MPAA/movie industry and a big loss for the consumer. Lets see how this device functions:
1. You have to buy an expensive box. Most services like this offer the device cheap or free. Satellite boxes, cable boxes, TIVOs, all are or can be free with service plans.
2. Peer-to-peer transfers. Sure, they say they are doing this to offer instantaneous availability of content, but it is just an excuse to shift the bandwidth cost to the end user. And, it doesn't just work exactly like BitTorrent. With BitTorrent, you are only uploading while the transfer takes place. This box uses every box as a source, all the time. If your box has a copy of a movie on it, it will upload it whenever someone else needs it. It doesn't sound like this service should be any more expensive than any other. If YouTube can afford to send me internet-quality video for the few pennies they get from my add revenues, Vudu can afford to send me DVD-quality video for the 10 bucks I'm paying them to buy their movie.
3. End-to-end DRM, vendor lock-in. This is why they're so popular with the studios. While freeing people from the "tyranny" of the computer, they simultaneously give up their best chance at circumventing draconian controls.
4. No DVD burner of any kind. This is the Achilles heel. They offer the option to "rent" or "purchase" downloads. For the 'rent' option, the file obviously deletes itself after a fixed amount of time. What about the movies I purchase? If it were on a computer I could make a backup copy on another hard drive or a DVD. With this, that option does not exist. The device's hard drive, however large, has a finite capacity. Once that fills up, whoops, what are you supposed to do? I guess you have to delete one of the movies you "bought." If they address this at all, they might let you re-download movies you delete. Regardless, it is at their discretion.
5. Bandwidth. Very few people have Ethernet jacks next to their television. For many people, this will leave wireless as their only option. With wireless, I would be skeptical of its ability to cope with the massive upload/download requirements. Even if it can cope, the necessity to either lay Ethernet cables down or configure a wireless network is completely antithetical towards the plug-and-play, instant gratification consumer they're targeting. They're trying to package a computer in a format your Luddite grandmother won't recognize as a computer, while simultaneously requiring her to configure a wireless network.
In summary, to use this system, I have to buy an expensive box, I have to pay for all the bandwidth, and I have absolutely no control over the files I download. This device is about one thing, control. Control of content and control of consumers.
As much as I would like to see no DRM, I will admit that Apple figured out how to do DRM right with iTunes. The basic principle they applied was, "we will make the new format no more restrictive than the old format." Like CDs, FairPlay lets you burn as many CD copies as you want of files. It also lets you back up your files to multiple computers. Vudu's box ties all of my purchases to the lifetime of a single piece of hardware, offering no backup solutions, total DRM, and a system that's designed to screw over the consumer at every single turn.
I hope this is not the way that the industry is going. I don't think the Vudu box will be a great success. However, they may still find enough people who want something that "just works" to find a market. Regardless, it will fall upon the usual legion, the modern fighters for freedom, the hackers and crackers to break the chains of DRM and vendor-lock in. It may be easier to crack something when it's on the computer, but being a stand-alone box hasn't saved the XBox, Playstations, and innumerable other devices from being opened in the same way.
Ultimately, the studios know this. They simply want the circumvention to be so difficult that 95% of users will not attemp
I feel that they are a bit myopic here. Nice that they are trying to innovate, but what if some family likes to watch several movies in a month. HD movies will not be small files by any means, and will be a natural progression of the service I'm sure even though the article does not specifically state that they will be offering HD content. What if you download/watch several movies which you legally paid for and then get your cable cut off by companies like Comcast for exceeding their "magical" and hidden data transfer limit.
Even if they offer regular DVD content (not HD) they will more than likely compress the files to the point to where it is degraded and is not the same quality of a DVD I can rent for $3 at the local rental store. Why would I pay more for less quality? If they do feed the actual DVD files (dual layer, not compressed like a file you might get from illegal p2p) that goes back to the problem of massive files being transfered over your internet connection and the risk of getting cut off.
This service will be dipping into the pay-per-view funds of some cable companies giving them even more incentive to drop you from their service. They want your money and will not let someone else take it from you easily. Unless the cable companies and/or ISP's get a slice of the pie, I do not see this happening. Greed kills innovation more often than poor planning from a technical standpoint.
"This is America... where the will of the few outweigh the outrage of the many..." - Unknown
Movie studios are missing the point. DVD sales are slowing/stagnating not because their back catalogue has been released (it hasn't I'm sure) but by the overall PITA that is DVD viewing.
Find DVD on shelf amongsth the 1000s of others
Open box, fiddle with little plastic thingy that keeps disc secure
Insert DVD -> wait for drive to spin up ->
Wait for the DRM Copyright notice to go away (PITA) ->
Watch Disc manufacturers logo ->
(optionally sit through dozens of equally annoying, piss adverts or trailers that you can't skip)
Wait for piss poor "animated menus" to appear->
Press the button you want->
Watch equally pointless animated menu ->
Watch starting logo: Universal, fox, dreamworks etc. Yawn ->
Watch film, then put back in box and re-file.
Forget about the 2 or 3 other discs in the pack that give you tonnes of extras you'll never watch - forget about the DVD commentary (for all but you most treasured films) - Forget about the "great" interactive games included on the disc.
When will companies learn: people just want to watch the fucking film.
My first reaction was: why should I provide free hosting for a commercial vendor of video? Let them pay for their own hosting and bandwidth.
But, come to think of it, if a service like this legitimizes large upstream bandwidth, we all win. One of the biggest threats to the Internet is still that upstream bandwidths become limited. So, from that point of view, I'm all for commercial P2P. I can still give its traffic low priority at the router.