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(Almost) Free Movies On-Line... Sorta
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Feb 03, 2002 10:15 AM
from the not-sure-if-I-trust-them-with-my-visa dept.
from the not-sure-if-I-trust-them-with-my-visa dept.
Snaller writes "See the latest movies on the net? Its possible - apparently the law in Taiwan says that for a movie to be protected by copyright law one has to apply for such protection within a month after the opening in the theaters. This rarely happens and as a consequence movie88 has opened a virtual movieplex: See any of their films for 1 dollar. The movie is streamed in a format that doesn't allow you to save it on the harddrive, but for that 1 dollar you can view it anytime and as much as you like for 3 days. The selection includes movies like "Shrek", "Legally Blonde","American Pie 2","Gone with the wind", James Bond and Batman." Yeah this'll last.
Right. But it really demonstrates what TV will be like in the future
when you have access to thousands of movies. And the buck a film
rate strikes me as awesome. I'd watch a lot more movies if they were
only a buck.
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Imagine the time that went into this. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't imagine that this will stay around for long, as the content producers will go nuts when they hear about it. It would seem that they took all this time to do this in futility.
Re:Imagine the time that went into this. (Score:2, Insightful)
O well (Score:3, Interesting)
And
roy
Re:O well (Score:4, Informative)
You don't really have to crack it. I've noticed they technique they use to make it difficult to change around links. they open up a no permission browser window and then from there redirect to the link of the actual
Parent
Re:O well (Score:4, Interesting)
For those interested in the dirty details, may I recommend:
With that combination (and sometimes "strings") I can download ANY Quicktime or Windows Media video that I want to - permissions be damned. Plus, get this: mplayer on Linux does a better job of playing Windows Media files than Windows Media Player on Windows! (And at a higher screen res too!)
BTW, the secret letter is 'm'. (This may become apparant if you have done the above.) I don't have time for a complete downloading HOWTO, but ... mov = wget, asf = wget, asx = asfrecorder, wmv = try asfrecorder then wget.
Parent
Re:O well (Score:2)
Real Player 8 [real.com] which is good. It's not the newest version so they don't give you the option to download JUST the player anymore, which is hard to find. Email me (address listed above) and I can send you the RP8 install (basic, non-network install).
RealOne Player [real.com] which in my opinion sucks. This new piece of bloatware does everything the previous versions did but so much more (that you don't want it to do). I recommend against it.
Re:O well (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.littlechapel.com/downloads/rp8-setup.e
It's a church site that lets you download real player to see one of their presentations. I guess they felt that it was sinful to let someone endure the pain of trying to navigate through www.real.com.
Parent
Re:O well (Score:3)
From this moment on I a'm no longer atheist!
Re:O well (Score:3, Insightful)
And don't scream about not being able to save it locally. Why would you want to?
Some of us don't have super-fast internet connections like you seem to have. I've got 512Kbps cable and streaming video is pretty poor on it, however, downloading the stream while I'm at work to watch it in the evening is a viable option.
US Law vs. Taiwanese Law (Score:3, Funny)
Better mark Taiwan up on the Axis of Evil list too..
Re:US Law vs. Taiwanese Law (Score:5, Informative)
According to the Bern convention, you don't need to register for copyright protection.
But Taiwan was thrown out of the UN and most international bodies, in order to please China.
And thus Taiwan couldn't take part in the negotiations, didn't modify it's national laws.
Nice sideeffect.
Parent
Re:US Law vs. Taiwanese Law (Score:2)
price point (Score:5, Insightful)
Somethings that are free are not worth the price.
On the other hand, a dollar, euro, etc, is probably the minimum that most people would pay, since much less is possible too much of a hassle. dollar stores, dollar menus are popular because people think these provide good value, even if it is not true.
and think: when was the last time you changed a candy bar to a credit card? by itself? there is a point when paying by electronic means is perceived to be too much of a hassle.
Amen to that! (Score:3, Insightful)
Amen to that. I've downloaded several divx movies and after the nuisance of finding it in the first place, followed by a couple of weeks of broken and resumed downloads (and thats with a reasonably friendly file-sharing utility), using the better part of a Gig of bandwidth, and having other miscreants weezing stuff off my hard-drive, I'd rather go out and spend 20 bucks on a DVD. It's a better picture and sometimes they even throw in some other goodies (though I thought the tone poems on the Episode 1 DVD kinda sucked). I really wish someone would clue in the MPAA to this: That downloading movies is a pain in the ass and though I can't speak for everyone else's preferences, I really don't think that movie attendance or DVD sales is going to be threatened by it in any perceivable way. Please leave off the copy-protection shit and the regional encoding...you don't really need it.
Re:price point - Needs to be =$1 World Wide (Score:2, Insightful)
The nice thing about buying items from the rest of the world is that it is often at a much lower price point overseas. Importing IP into the US is far easier than buying other IP such as drugs in Mexico.
Re:price point - Needs to be =$1 World Wide (Score:2)
Interesting that you consider drugs to be intellectual property. Care to expand?
A buck isn't worth anything? (Score:5, Funny)
Heh. Eat that, Terry Bradshaw.
Should be interesting (Score:2, Insightful)
Cannot be saved? (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems to me the content producers are trying to do the impossible. In this case and in other cases where they try to do copy protection.
Copy protection is the attempt to create something that will send a good signal to a display device but a bad signal to a recording device. Every implementation I have seen to date sends a less than perfect signal to the display device resulting in unwatchability at times.
When it comes right down to it, all you need to do to copy the signal is create a recording device that emulates a display device well enough.
I have 1 DVD that will not play with my current DVD player. My other DVD player had trouble with 2 different DVDs. Macrovision resulted in a distorted picture with the combination of hardware I was using to view VHS.
Is it too much to ask that I be able to view the content I've paid for?
Legal Release Date (Score:2, Interesting)
Although it's nice that someone sticks it to the MPAA, how many channels would they need to go through to protect their wares. I don't like their bully tactics anymore than the rest of
Everyone ought to check it out - NOW (Score:5, Insightful)
Even thought it is real streamed at 300k bps, you'll get an idea of what the future could look like if we really could get our film libraries live.
Remember that many US concepts of copyright, fair use, etc don't translate into equivalent laws in other countries. This may be legal now and forever for agreements executed under the laws of Taiwan (this site). Note that some countries consider region coding to be unlawful (NZ?.
Note that the fair use concept in the US is stronger than in many others.
US owned a lot of IP and is considered to be unfair in its licensing practices in other countries -- they don't like embargoes on content, restrictive format licensing on contects, copy protection, delayed release dates in other countries and other US centric concepts.
its Taiwan (Score:2)
I could have gotten a dollar? (Score:4, Funny)
but the MPAA managed to hunt me down and send me and my ISP really naughty obscene letters. they quoted obscene literature such as "Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 106(3" and "we hereby state, pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 512" Eventually the letters started to get to offensive so I decisted all activity. But man, if I only had a team of lawyers at the time....
Same treatment as the Ukraine? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Same treatment as the Ukraine? (Score:2)
Worry not. A new Taiwan is just a matter of a few phone calls away.
Re:Same treatment as the Ukraine? (Score:3)
Maybe Taiwan already has a DMCA-like law. Who knows?
This seems to be an entirely different issue altogether. Taiwan just insists on certain time limits wrt Copyright registration and protection.
Seems pretty reasonable to me. This requirement just makes sorting out copyright infringement claims later much easier.
What will almost certainly happen is that the Studios will take care to make sure the Copyright protection is in place in Taiwan before opening movies now.
IANAL, but it would seem that telcos and ISPs might be at risk for carrying this in the US. Any knowledgeable lawyers out there who can speak to this?
slashdotted? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:slashdotted? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is pretty interesting. I guess they did a good job scaling their video servers but not a good job on the web server. Kudos to them for devoting the most resources to the most important application.
Parent
Balls (Score:3, Interesting)
Some of their pricing decisions seem a bit arbitrary, however. For example, you can view the 3h17m movie Magnolia for the price of a single download, but the similarly long Schindler's list is broken up into three streams that must be viewed separately.
I give them five days before the US government threatens to give China the green light to annex unless the Taiwanese government cracks down on this site.
Re:Balls (Score:3, Informative)
Umm... there are places in the world that have access to the internet and *don't* have access to NBC broadcasts. Think globally.
Re:Balls (Score:2)
I'm not sure I understand your point. I said that Movie88.com has balls because they are going to attract some extremely unwelcome attention from large, moneyed interests who can exercise more than their fair share of influence on the US government (and by extension, the Taiwanese goverment).
If you think this is changed by the fact that some people who are downloading "Friends" episodes don't get it on their local telly, you are extremely mistaken.
Sure.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Account Creation Broken? (Score:2)
Has anyone been able to actually test this service?
Re:Account Creation Broken? (Score:2)
Now I can login using Netscape (where I have RealPlayer configured) and see if this thing really works. :)
stream capturing (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be cool if you would put a machine on the network that watched every packet going by and detected when you were receiving a stream of data and would write that stream of data to the drive and then convert it to DivX? Then it could have streaming software and a web server to show you everything that is available and to present it to anyone in the house.
this is such crap... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a big endless loop of 'sign in', choose a movie, 'sign in', etc.
Already slowed to the point that it's worthless...
Also, no 'Clerks' or 'Chasing Amy'. Or the search function just doesn't work...
sigh.
Re:this is such crap... (Score:2)
So far the only problem has been the 6 zillion people hitting the site all at once.
Movie financing about to be turned on its head (Score:2, Interesting)
The only way to finance a movie in this new world is to sell the eyeballs that are watching the movie for other purposes. Already theaters make about half of their money on concessions, for example. The two other obvious ways of making money on the film is ancillary merchandise (toys, etc.) and product placement (advertising) within the film.
Future films will have smaller budgets, as these ancillary sources of revenues probably cannot replace the big ticket prices being charged today. One can make exciting movies for less money, of course. We worked on The Fast and The Furious last year, which was a low-budget (by today's standards) movie that was designed to get the most bangs for the very limited visual effects bucks that were available. We've been fortunate enough to be named to the "Bake-Off" for visual effects this Wednesday night, where they will choose the Oscar nominees -- which demonstrates that you can do competitive visual effects-laden movies on very limited budgets.
This may not sit well with the ILM's of the world -- but it is also inevitable. While with music there were huge profit margins that gave the record companies some slack with the advent of song sharing over the 'net, the movie studios don't have that kind of margin anymore. Once movie sharing becomes ubiquitous, they just will not be able to make $100M blockbusters.
Enjoy them while you can.
thad
Re:Movie financing about to be turned on its head (Score:3, Insightful)
Where this sort of streaming will have a big impact is in the video sale/rental market, which depending on the movie accounts for anywhere from 20-80% of total revenue. After all, an online stream or download is likely available before the video is released, is cheaper by far than buying the DVD, and likely looks better than the thouroughly beaten up VHS tapes at your local rental store. If anything, look for audiovisual effects to be regarded as a defense against online availability of movies in the future. Then people might actually go out and see the movie in a theater after downloading it, just to see/hear what they were missing.
On the other hand, $100M is an awful lot of money to spend making *anything*, and is certainly out of line with what is spent on most works of art. The protesters dancing outside the WEF in New York right now might have some ideas about how that money could have been more productively used. If summer action blockbusters go the way of pyrimid building as an art form, many would argue that cinematic art would be better off.
Damn it (Score:3, Redundant)
Da *buffering*
mn *buffer--*
movi *buffering*
e got sla *buffering buffering buffering buffering 3 hours remaining*
shdot *buffering*
ted! *buffering*
--joshua
/.d (Score:3, Funny)
A new development - the site was slashdotted - it's extremely slow and video downloads do not work!
I can almost hear the engineer in the background... " She canna take much moore of it, keptin! "...
I'd suspect that even if they have access to the fattest pipes in Taiwan, the international feed to Taiwan would be saturated with
Here's to their good luck!
Movies for less than US$1 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:right... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Oh...I see. (Score:2)
On an off-topic note, I have the plugin in both Netscape and Galeon and I still get the "not detected" problem. What are these sites doing to "detect" plugins, and why? Why don't they just send the damn stream and let the client worry about how to handle it.....
Re:Oh...I see. (Score:2, Interesting)
As I am on Slashdot,its even more interesting. They may have AOL in the back but Real isn't the only propetioary firm/codec giving you Linux/BSD client?
oh, I worked on AV business, let me say... Of course, Quicktime is the best one (if they can code a client that can do true fullscreen, argh) and Real is the second. Its my personal view. For me windowsmedia is the least suscessful project of Microsoft, forever.
If you want an open format? No, it won't happen, than people with T1/T3 whatever corparate lines will "leech" all movies from them.
Re:Oh...I see. (Score:2, Insightful)
If I'm paying for it, I want to enjoy it; nothing political about it; Real SUCKS.
:)
Re:I'd watch a lot more movies if they were only a (Score:2)
However life sucks. And BBC doesnt get adverts.
Re:Is Final Fantasy on the list? (Score:2, Insightful)
There has to be a law affording them protection, in order for them to have any.
Firstly, even in the US, there doesn't _have_ to be a law doing so at all. Congress could give up the whole idea tomorrow, repeal copyright laws, and it'd be one big free for all... domestically. (foreign countries would still have their copyrights, presumably; copyrights are not international, though there are mutual recognition agreements in many instances)
It's much the same elsewhere -- England was the first country to have such laws, that was ~1700. Took until the 20th century for them to propagate in most countries. Why? Because no one cared about them, and if it isn't illegal, what's wrong with it?
Secondly, US copyright law has, IIRC, been limited to only books and maps (films would've been fair game, music was), only for American authors (foreigners would be screwed), and only for 14 years (a fraction of the modern span).
Isn't this just as arbitrary? Couldn't it be claimed that this is "stealing" by someone as unknowledgeable as yourself?
Taiwan should pass laws that the Taiwanese _want_. It is that simple. Don't like it; don't go to Taiwan.
(Besides which the word you're looking for is 'infringement,' not 'theft' or 'stealing.' There are specific meanings attached to each, and they're not interchangable. Go read some legal decisions on copyright some time and come back when you know enough to meaningfully participate in the discussion, kid.)
Re:Is Final Fantasy on the list? (Score:2)
That _is_ the sort of thing you'd expect in a democratic society, is it not? Major music publishers have been frequently accused of illegal price fixing -- but if we adopted your view, they could do as they please, and antitrust laws a thing of the past.
Glad I don't live in your fantasy world.
Re:Well, this'll be interesting. (Score:2, Funny)
What are you really trying to say? Hongkong is not part of Taiwan. Or do you just mean the region? Hmm join the navy and not know the difference between Taiwan and Hongkong.