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Disney Close To Unveiling New "DVD Killer"
Uncle Rummy writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Disney is close to releasing a new system that will sell permanent, multi-device access to digital media. The system, dubbed Keychest, is being positioned as an answer to consumer concerns about purchasing digital media that are locked to a small number of devices, and thus as a way to finally shift media sales from an ownership model to an access model. They claim that such a service would reduce the risk of losing access to content as a result of a single vendor going out of business, as purchased content would remain available from other vendors. However, they do not seem to have addressed the question of what happens to customers' access to purchased content if the Keychest service itself is discontinued."
This coming from a company that puts movies in the vault for a decade to increase demand. How do they reconcile the two philosophies? Maybe it's a case of the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, but the cynical side of me thinks they are counting on new file formats (.avi->.dis) being introduced in the future that will not be compatible with Keychest. In any case, Disney thinking in the best interest of the customer does not seem to be what is happening here.
What happens when Disney decides you aren't complying with its terms, are abusing its service, have posted something nasty on their forums, etc.?
If they lock your keychest account does all your content vanish across all services? Are their forfeiture clauses in the licenses? I only ask because I could see stuff like this happening...
It seems to me that media companies see DRM as a printing press on which they can print their own cash.
And seem sore when they find out no one but them seems to value their funny money.
If they really want us to see value in it, they need to back it up with a gold standard... put copies of the movie in some DRM-free format in escrow.
Your technology goes away; we get DRM-free version of the movies we purchased.
I agree with the parent. I trust the Disney corporation about as much as SCO or anyone involved in investment banking. I completely distrust DRM schemes, and anyone involved in them. Why would I want anything to do with some stupid plan Disney has for wringing a few more bucks out of consumers?
This press release is irritating me to no end. I'm going home to pirate a few crappy Disney films out of general spite.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
This bears repeating.
If not for Disney, you would already be able to take home your Bluray of Snow White
and suck it straight into iTunes where it would be immediately accessable to any of
your AppleTV units.
Similar non-apple solutions would exist including one from Microsoft and one from Tivo.
Any "barriers" to your grandmother having Desperate Housewives ripped to the rediculously
oversized hard drive in her clone crapbox PC are artificial. Technology really has squat
to do with it.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If we're going to go the law route, I say there oughtta be a law that says if you use DRM then you don't get copyright protection. With patents, you either keep your stuff locked up, or you publish it and get the government to enforce exclusivity for you. Same should be true with copyrights. You can have the government enforce exclusive rights to copy, or you can use DRM and try locking it up yourself.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
You are not alone. I feel this way about my TV as well as movies. It used to be that you could expect a television to be around for a while. Now they are expected to break in just a few years and no one complains as it is an excuse to buy the newest shiniest tech.
Once the upgrade path settles for a bit ( which is in no one's interest) I have no need to purchase my collections again and again, just to keep up with the ever changing hardware.
...a company that was renowned for giving us stuff to watch is now going to start telling us how we can watch it?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Is that a PAL vs NTSC issue, or is that a region coding issue?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The way I understand it, it doesn't work that way. With this system, you give THEM your service subscription info, and they tell the providers you subscribe to that you're allowed to view this content. So you'd have to give them the account info to everyone on the planet if you wanted those people to access the content.
Now that I think of it, this raises all sorts of privacy and security concerns. First, do you want Disney and the other affiliated studios to have all that info? Second, what if there's a data breach? Suddenly, all that information is floating around out there.
Keychest, indeed! More like a treasure chest of everyone's account information to a myriad of services. The number of attack vectors this potentially creates is staggering.
Don't forget too, with all this push to 'online distribution', is that the big providers are now starting to limit bandwidth usage since we all got used to trying to use what we were sold. Making this even less appealing.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
> Thus Disney is in the problematic position of having a durable physical medium that may cause an eventual saturation of their target market.
Indeed. Test by: Go to any of the larger Salvation Army outlets, and check their DVD section.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
1) Take two different versions from two different retailers (or the same retailer, if the watermarks are personalized, making uploads traceable)
2) Check the RGB values of every pixel of every frame (you can write a program to do this)
3) For areas where the values differ, insert a random number between the two values.
4) Watermarks are destroyed beyond recognition, even watermarks which make subtle changes to the entire screen
Didn't work for my nieces. Christmas saw to that. Just about everyone gave them Disney crap. I was able to persuade them to use Linux on a beater box and live without Shockwave, for a while. Flash was enough for most parts of the kiddie web sites. But the Disney Windows only PC games sunk it. No, WINE wasn't good enough, the old computer could barely run the game natively.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Which VCR did you use 35 years ago? That's a serious question.. or are you using hyperbole?
(According to Wikipedia, Betamax came out in November 1975, VHS in the US in July 1977.... there were other VCRs before that though... and a Columbo episode (with William Shatner) from the 1970s used a video recorder, I believe reel to reel, as a major plot element.)