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."

Comments

Re:Disney sells product that solves Disney's probl

[jedidiah]

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.

Re:Out of Business?

[Chosen Reject]

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.