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Blockbuster Working on Set-Top Box
An anonymous reader writes "According to the Hollywood Reporter and news.com, Blockbuster will soon be announcing yet another reason not to go to a rental store. A media-delivering set-top box is in the works for the company, leveraging the store's existing competence in the industry to provide a viable alternative to iTunes, Xbox Live, and Amazon. 'There was no mention of price or how such a service would work in the report. But let's think about this: to compete with Apple TV or Vudu, the device would have to cost around $200, and rentals of movies and TV shows should be around $3 to $4 each, which would be slightly cheaper than rentals of new releases from Blockbuster currently. The big advantage Blockbuster would enjoy over Apple TV, Vudu, and TiVo, it seems, would be selection.'" I still think they're kinda doomed.
I would be more apt to enter into a service, where the hardware I buy would be generic. Sort of like Napster is now for all "compatible" music players.
Basically, I want some company like Logitech to build a sweet-ass DVR-type box with the ability to CHOOSE which services I want to download/buy from.
Exactly.
Give me a service that will work with my non MS media center PC and I'll be all over it.
NONE of them work with the decent media centers, only a couple that kind of work with the crappy Windows MCE product.
I want a mediaportal plugin or a MythTV plugin etc...
support standards not specalized DRM.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I was commenting earlier about how many businesses are going to fail in the recession due to tight margins now that won't maintain them under duress of less custom.
.... but sadly, big business doesn't think that way, no, they want everyone's share of the pie, or at least everyone eating from their pie and nobody else's. Shame really, they have a lot of assets/resources to push the home video/DVR arena into common practice.
If, and IMO, IF they want to stay relevant and solvent, what they need to do is keep away from lock-in business models and get on with 'we work with anything' business models. Yes, that would make for weak competition according to some, but if all you had to do was go to Blockbuster and ask the tech guy what to do to get all the movies you can handle, then sign up for their business/app/service they would only win.
Even better if the same system they sell or advocate supports anything else that is not damned^H^H^H^H DRM'd
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I tried using Blockbustre for a while. But their utter incompetence at renting DVD-based products ultimately drove me away. First off they only sell you the 'child safe' versions of a lot of DVDs, so you never even get to see what the director actually intended. Once I tried going through the whole Alias program. They were missing a disk right in the middle of the last season (which I didn't find out about until I tried to rent it). They said they could not, and would not order the disk, and that this kind of thing happened all the time. And of course there were months when each time I came in they would beg me to do the online thing. The last straw was when I went to rent two movies at normal price and the clerk told me I was throwing that money away compared to what it would cost to get it online. I realized she was right, and after that I went to Netflix, and never went back. I think Blockbustre is like that Real Player company, once you've proven to be beyond a doubt how evil you are at your chosen field of business, I will NEVER go back to you.
They tried this already...
http://www.forbes.com/2000/07/20/mu4.html
and we all know how well THAT worked out.
What dooms all of these slightly different boxes, whether cablebox, cablemodem, TiVo, or even gaming machines, is that people don't want a pile of different boxes, each one trapping them in a different "mode" in which they use their TV. Where each content mode has a different GUI, and lots of redundant overlap with the others. They certainly don't want to get locked into different boxes with different viewing modes for different sets of the same kind of content, like movies. Who wants to care whether they're watching a "cable movie" or a "TiVo movie" or a "disc movie" or a "Blockbuster movie"?
What will replace all these boxes and modes is an open standard box that does it all with a unified GUI. It might even take "expansion boxes", to handle retrieving and decoding different data types, especially if they're as different as, say, a videogame and a newshour.
That's why I say "game consoles" will replace all these different "media terminals". The Sony Playstation3 is probably the winner waiting for the world to catch up with it. With the imminent introduction of PlayTV, a TV decoder, the PS3's single GUI will play regular cable (or broadcast) TV and enable tivo DVR, and of course games and DVD/Blu-Ray, as well as on-demand and multicast Internet video (and music, and telephony...). Since the FCC has mandated that cablecos stop bundling set-top boxes with their networks and data (including TV data) service, the PlayTV cable decoder will fill that gap. If PlayTV had a DOCSIS modem built in, it would do it all - until then, the DOCSIS modem gets its cable from a splitter off the incoming cableco coax, just like now with the regular cablemodem, but the DOCSIS modem can plug right into the PS3 gigabit ethernet port (or one of its USB ports).
The important difference is the integration. The PS3 has a single GUI for all that. It's also got multiple parallel DSPs ("SPUs") onchip, for fast processing all of that different media, all in parallel, all flippable around "picture in picture" (or whatever paradigm Sony brings to true multimedia). The PS3 runs Linux already on its PPC, with drivers arriving for video and other media processing on those SPUs. So even the "PC" might get sucked into this single platform.
There will be a few years while the PS3 is still ahead of its time. In that time, Blockbuster and the others might have some markets they can reach with their dumbed-down, simple "single media" players. But they'll have to invest quite a lot into new kinds of tech they're not familiar with. All the while showing Sony what works and what doesn't, for Sony's paid-off manufacturing plants to adopt as software on the PS3s increasingly filling people's homes. Eventually the shakeout will come (not too far off), and Sony's position and diversity will win. The dominance of Sony in that landscape will also intimidate smart investors from backing competitors, further delivering the market to Sony instead.
This analysis could also apply to other game consoles, like the X-Box. But the X-Box took a serious setback by betting on HD-DVD instead of Blu-Ray, and against Sony which controls what has now won the HD format wars for physical distribution (which beats Internet speeds in the USA for the next couple years for most people). X-Box is also not able to compete with the PS3 parallelism, either in the multiple streams or in the ultimate rendering chip to the TV. And so even the leader right now, the Wii, will be underpowered for the multimedia challenge the PS3 will win.
It's a win for us, too. Because it will work only if these different media work on open standards, which is the only way to integrate them on a single box, rather than proprietary formats on proprietary, redundant, compartmentalized boxes. Which means the overall economics and tech directions favor openness. A non-PS3 PC with the same horsepower, and 3rd party integrated GUIs could come in and compete, too. Which means you.
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make install -not war
I take it you haven't tried Netflix's Watch Now. You get surprisingly good quality video from cable modem speed internet. I don't think I've ever had to wait more than 10 seconds at the beginning of playback for it to finish buffering. No, its not quite DVD quality, but it's better than SDTV. That's probably good enough for most people. I think streaming video would work, from a technical perspective, for a lot of people today. I think it hasn't caught on yet because 1) the current lack of an easy way to watch these videos on TV (hence the STB) and 2) the movie/TV selection isn't great.
Sell it for $200, with your first 20-40 rentals being free. Once someone has rented 40 movies on the device, Blockbuster have made back most of the cost and the customer has got so used to on-demand movies that they don't think of using other services.
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