Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Opens On-Demand Video Store
g0dsp33d writes "Amazon opened the doors on its new video on demand service. Some promotional videos are free and the quality seems to be good. You can preview the first 2 minutes of any of the offerings. Episodes of TV shows cost $1.99 and movies are $14.99. Movies can also be 'rented' for 24 hours for $3.99. Purchasing allows download to two machines and unlimited viewing online. The service claims 14.5K movies and 1,200 TV shows including pre-purchasing the rights to upcoming seasons. Considering alternative, ad-based, free online video sites such as Hulu, is Amazon's service too pricey?"
Is this just a new press release for a rebrand of Amazon Unbox, the badly-named service that I have been using with my TiVo for a long time now? I checked the site, and I don't see anything to indicate otherwise. As long as they don't change the way it works, then I'll be happy. If they added some new features, then I might be even happier.
Rentals are for 24 hours, and purchases can be used on two computers. Sounds like some sort of DRM to me.
And if I'm not mistaken (and if I am, I'm sure someone will correct me) Amazon doesn't put DRM on their downloads.
You're mistaken. Amazon encodes all their video with Windows Media DRM.
The correct thing to do is to tag it "yes".
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
I don't know what kinda monitor the poster above is using, but on my screen it looks awesome. I went in expecting youtube. It looks great. Furthermore, I am an avid Hulu user. The video quality on Hulu is crap. But it's free, so you know. Seriously. Check it out, then decide.
swap priorities with obsessions you might be right, but 250GB's is about 60 DVD's a month... so one movie (at DVD quality) a day, still leaves about 125GB's for anything else which should also be plenty.
Nevermind that I don't think they are offering that high of quality, if you say 700MB's a video, thats 350-ish movies, a month
If you are surpassing 250GB's a month and you arent running a business (even most of those), you've got some serious packrat issues, I dont think ive ever passed 100GB's a month...
Doesn't seem like all movies are $15. I looked for Full Metal Jacket and it's $3 to rent and $10 to buy. And, that particular movie, like so many others, isn't available on Hulu.
:\
This is clearly a step in the right direction. I hadn't paid for music for several years before Amazon MP3 came out. I always said I would pay for a service to download that was simple, fair, and appropriately priced. Now, I've purchased four or five albums in the past month. I've been waiting for an equivalent service to be available for videos; maybe this will be the one.
Of course, I'm fortunate in that I have easy access to a Windows box to watch all this on... I guess Linux support is just too much to ask for.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
Or 3 movies from the Walmart $5 bin. (The movies in the bin are often 5 years old. For new movies, the Walmart price is ~$15.)
Or an unlimited number of movies "rented" from the local library for one week each. (Okay, I'm only allowed 3 movies at a time. That's still enough to get me through a weekend.) I've watched the complete Sopranos from my local library and will start on Deadwood next.
I know that when I need to get rid of some of the DVDs in my collection, they'll end up in the library for others to enjoy.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Broadcast is actually higher resolution than DVD.
The big thing for me is that you can view (online at least) in Linux.
Analog broadcast is less than DVD. It has 4.2 MHz of video bandwidth (about 440 pixels horizontally) and 485.5 visible scanlines (i.e. vertical pixels).
DVD movies are 720x480 in the USA and anamorphic, meaning vertical resolution isn't wasted as much on black bars.
Digital broadcast, on the other hand, supports up to 1920x1080.
Ah the timeless battle between consumers and providers, landlords and tenants, buyers and sellers. Neither side is morally superior here; each side simply wants to maximize its own economic gain. Of course maximizing your own gain is not an argument that is especially persuasive to the other side so you have arguments by buyers that if the seller would only lower prices the seller's business would increase (or piracy decrease) enough to make up for it. And sellers often complain that taxes and regulations force them to have higher prices than otherwise. In normal circumstances with many buyers and sellers pricing is determined by traditional supply and demand market forces.
In the specific case, if Amazon pricing is too high than competitors will jump in at a lower price because there is a low barrier to market entry for selling items on the internet.
You say "pirates" are the reason for DRM, but "pirates" don't have to deal with DRM. So, who has to deal with DRM? Legit users have to deal with DRM.
Let's see what DRM can do and the consequenses for legit users:
* restrict users from format shifting thus forcing a user to buy same content for a differnt media device.
* restrict users from reselling, thus removing the resale market and forcing new potential customers to buy new at retail price.
* restrict users to viewing/listening to content only when some server is up and able to authorize you.
* restrict a user to only a limited set of software/hardware that can play the media that supports the DRM.
There are probably more but you get the picture.
Hmm. Unbox Video store downloads don't work in Linux - or in Windows half the time. I decided I'd go ahead and buy a couple episodes of BSG from Amazon last season. After getting thoroughly bitten by their DRM to where those videos I purchased are pretty much useless at this point (they won't play on my main machine), I've decided that I'll not be bothering with any Amazon video services.
Their music services are MP3 based and so I support them over iTunes. Hopefully these companies will get the hint eventually that DRM doesn't prevent pirates from getting stuff (what are they aware that, GASP, a copy of this show/movie/song might show up on a P2P network? Who woulda thunk it?), but rather hinders legit users.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain