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Rent A Downloadable Movie 361

Posted by timothy from the like-divx-without-the-joy dept.
Syn Ack writes: "The New York Times is reporting (free account, blah blah blah) that five (5) major Hollywood studios (MGM, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures) are going to begin offering downloadable time restricted movies. The video will remain watchable for 30 days but will become unplayable 24 hours after it has been viewed at all. Sounds like if you start the movie at all, the clock starts ticking so no peaking until you're ready to watch it ALL. Downloads are expected to be in the 500MB range. However downloads will only be available well after the DVD release of the same movie so as to not cut into DVD sales. Expect to see something late this year or early next. Perhaps the Music People can get some tips from the movie people?" What a bargain.
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Rent A Downloadable Movie

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  • Yay, we can watch it go under a SECOND time! :=) Just like Hollywood tradition to produce bad sequels...

    • Re:I guess they didn't learn their lesson with DiV (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Registration Free Link [nytimes.com]

    • Yay, we can watch it go under a SECOND time! :=) Just like Hollywood tradition to produce bad sequels...

      Well, the article says it will be priced similarly to pay-per-view movies. Also, it will be functionally better than pay-per-view movies (which don't give you the ability to pause, rewind, etc.), except that you have to use your computer to view it. People buy pay-per-view movies now. Therefore, the only factor that its success hinges upon is whether people who buy pay-per-view moves are able to use this, and don't mind watching on a monitor (unless they have TV output). The time expiration in and of itself can't cause it to fail, because pay-per-view movies sell. Also, they might later decide to lower the price to make up for the inconvenience of watching on a computer.

      Actually, I don't think this will go over all that well, but that's because I suspect that the intersection of the set of people who buy pay-per-view movies and the set of people who want to watch movies using their computers is small. My main point is that people already buy time-limited movies for the price they will be charging.

      • Also, it will be functionally better than pay-per-view movies (which don't give you the ability to pause, rewind, etc.)

        You don't have a TiVo, do you?

  • [Flash Quiz!] Ladies and Gentlemen... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Noryungi ( 70322 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @04:34AM (#2196496) Homepage Journal
    How much time is it going to take to crack this new movie format?
    • 24 hours?
    • 7 days?
    • 1 month?
    • 3 months?
    • It's already cracked, but the programmer who did it is not going to release his/her results because of the DMCA?


    Please don't forget to put your name on top of the sheet.

    Next week, we'll discuss the ROT-13 encryption used in some EBooks. Class dismissed.

    • I give it 3 months from implementation (Score:4, Insightful)

      by VValdo ( 10446 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @04:43AM (#2196514)
      That's my guess. Of course, if they preview the format and ask for comment like SDMI I give it 3 months from the preview.

      If there is a hardware component involved, I'll give it another..oh, say 3 more months.

      Thats my guess.

      Still, I think this is a good thing, as the MPAA basically has no choice about whether the stuff goes online or not. They may as well offer it online themselves, and if they make it reasonable I bet the majority of the public will pay to use it, DMCA or no DMCA.

      Of course, if it's successful, the MPAA will give credit to the DMCA for stopping piracy, and if it's not a hit the MPAA will blame pirates. I have a feeling though the success or failure will more have to do with the number of people with broadband and their willingess to watch movies on their computers.

      Oh, and if Passport is required to use it, I'll be pissed.

      W
      • by "I bet the majority of the public will pay to use it" I mean the majority of the public THAT USES IT will pay for it, not the majority of the public at large, because I mean, only a tiny percentage are going to have the bandwidth and want to wait hours and hours for it to download.

        Plus people with shared bandwidth are gonna piss off their neighbors ;)

        W
      • Still, I think this is a good thing, as the MPAA basically has no choice about whether the stuff goes online or not.

        Good call. The movie industry is learing from the music industry's mp3 mistakes. In business if you don't figure out how to put yourself out of business, someone else will. I think this is a good idea. It's like renting a DVD from Kozmo.com except Kozmo doesn't exist anymore. The reason this is better than DIVX is that you don't have to buy a physical disk. Also, you are not dependant on a decryption stream from the company. Hopefully the're smart enough to release a Linux player so that only crackers will be trying to break the encryption and not self rightous linux dweebs like me.

    • Depends on if they release a linux version (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jesser ( 77961 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @05:08AM (#2196562) Homepage Journal
      DeCSS was created, and quickly became widespread, because it was the only way to play DVDs under Linux. If the studios have learned their lesson (and I bet they have), they'll release players for as many operating systems as they can think of. This might not slow down the development of a crack, but the crack would not become as widespread, and the media would be less favorable toward it than it was toward DeCSS.
        • the studios have learned their lesson (and I bet they have), they'll release players for as many operating systems as they can think of

        Why? It's a niche market, Linux users aren't big spenders (are they, Loki?), and when we do hack it, it'll give the MPAA an excuse to initiate another FUD "evil commie child molester drug dealing pirates" suit to put the frighteners on both us and Joe Windows.

        • But regardless of the market size, creating players for Linux and FreeBSD and BeOS and QNX RTP (even if it costs more to port, than they make back in rentals to the users of these minority systems) could still be a good idea, as a strategic move: to keep the crack from becoming necessary.

      • It also seems that they're basically assuming it'll be cracked (good assumption). Yes, it's highly possible they'll sic some feds on whoever does the cracking, but this quotation from the president of Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment, Yair Landau, blew me away:

        "I think the majority of consumers believe that copyright has value and that if they have a pay vehicle to watch movies on the Internet, they will pay for it," said Yair Landau, president of Sony (news/quote) Pictures Digital Entertainment. "We want to give honest people an honest alternative."

        I copied and pasted it just because I didn't believe my eyes the first time I read it. Could someone put this guy (girl?) in touch with the music folks? Personally, I've never pirated something I could buy off e-music.

    • Re:[Flash Quiz!] Ladies and Gentlemen... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by shut_up_man ( 450725 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @05:50AM (#2196644) Homepage
      I don't think it will be long until whatever security they use is cracked - since one of the parties in the secure transaction is the enemy, it makes it pretty easy. What remains to be seen is if the companies involved can balance the difficulty of cracking the system against the following:
      • Ease of use - AOL Joe isn't l33t. No codes, no dongles, no Captain Crunch decoder wheels. Quick initial registration, download and double-click, get billed monthly.
      • Speed of download - Downloading DivX movies still costs TIME. The corps need to have monster servers, monster pipe, and redundant, distributed infrastructure (kinda like a P2P network ;). This is something a DSL user cannot compete with.
      • Film quality - It's pretty irritating to spend all day downloading a movie, only to find the aspect ratio all wrong, the soundtrack in some unheard-of codec or the video stream corrupt. If the companies guarantee quality, that's a big advantage.
      • Quality of catalog - Underground sites only host movies the operator likes, or have managed to get hold of. Having a broad catalog gives more choice, which makes the service more attractive. The catalog should also be as current as DVD, or else people will grab the DivX instead.
      • Cost - The companies ARE competing against a free service, but they can charge a small fee for the aforementioned enhancements. Small. As in, not large. As in, "Oh pfffft, I'll get it off MovieCorp, that's nothing."

      That's the recipe for a winning net movie delivery system. From the article, it sounds like they are screwing up cost (pay per view? ewww!) and quality of catalog (post-DVD releases only). Still, it's a start...

      shut up man
      • Ease of use - AOL Joe isn't l33t. No codes, no dongles, no Captain Crunch decoder wheels. Quick initial registration, download and double-click, get billed monthly.

        There's a better argument for the importance of ease of use than "AOL Joe isn't l33t". They'll be competing against P2P services like Audiogalaxy, which is extremely easy to use, as in you click buttons next to a few songs in a list on a web page, and your AG client downloads the songs as soon as it gets a chance with no additional user interaction.

        Actually, now that I think about it, the movie and music industries might not be able to compete against Audiogalaxy in ease/efficiency of use because of Amazon's "one-click purchase" patent. This could be interesting :)

    • Re:[Flash Quiz!] Ladies and Gentlemen... (Score:5, Funny)

      by loconet ( 415875 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @06:45AM (#2196708) Homepage
      and the bonus question for this quiz.....

      How many bytes of perl code will it take this time?

    • Re:[Flash Quiz!] Ladies and Gentlemen... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by image ( 13487 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @07:44AM (#2196787) Homepage
      How much time is it going to take to crack this new movie format?

      • It's already cracked, but the programmer who did it is not going to release his/her results because of the DMCA?


      I guess this means the DMCA is working, right?

      They made something illegal, and lo-and-behold, many people stopped doing it.

      About six months ago I commented on slashdot about how the fight against Napster vis-a-vis the DMCA was analogous to the US "war" on drugs. I said that the criminalization of a certain lifestyle behavior along with an aggressive punitive justice will never stop 100% of people from participating in the lifestyle, but it may stop 85% or 90%. Which the US government must consider "good enough" to create a net positive effect for the whole of society.

      Now it seems that DCMA is having a similar effect.

      * as a footnote, the government from time to time is forced to re-evaluate punitive justice policies that have very serious negative consequences. As that 85% effectiveness drops to 65%, and the side effects of losing freedom are more apparent, these laws are often modified or repealed (amendments XVIII and XXI come to mind.) Keep the faith. Keep making noise.

    • I love the idea of a raffle to determine when the security will be broken. Proceeds to the EFF. Can I get one ticket for, um, 8 days and one for 35?

      But the real problem will be distributing the crack without the author getting arrested.

      Ideally, the film industry would distribute movies at a price that makes cracking not worthwhile or most people. (Like that will happen.) And with the download time, the effective price of renting the same movie twice is huge even if they charge $0 for the second rental. Oh, and no more Disney "limited time sale" scams, eh?

      It kinda scares me that huge sectors of our economy are willing to bet the farm on DRM, which-- to my thinking-- is in the same class as perpetual motion machines. I realize the studios have no good options, but if some hokey DRM system (and they're all hokey) is all that's protecting their entire archives against replication... *DAMN* If publishers, studios, recording companies, etc. all do stuff like that, we're creating an economic risk of staggering proportions.

    • Next week, we'll discuss the ROT-13 encryption used in some EBooks. Class dismissed.

      You just gave away the secret to decrypting Adobe's format. I'm gonna call the feds on you!

  • Decisions (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mbadolato ( 105588 )
    Hmmm, spend 7 hours downloading the movie which I then have to finish watching within 24 hours of starting it, or drive to the video store 2 minutes away, rent it, watch it at my convienice and as much as I want over the next 5 days.

    Factor in, sitting at the computer to watch it, or putting the dvd on the 61" tv with the full surround system.

    <sarcasm>Hmmm that's a tough one.</sarcasm>
    • Hmmm that's a tough one.

      Look at the current proposition: Spend 7 hours (or more) downloading it, usually from sites that spend more time down than up, choosing from several different file sizes to give you the same product, not knowing whether they're complete or not, and have to watch it from a PC unless you convert it yourself to VCD.

      Seems like an awful lot of work just to save yourself the rental fee, but a lot of people apparently are doing that. All in all, this isn't a bad first try.
      • In my experience most of this isn't designed to save the rental fee... its to save the $8-$12-$whatever *theater* fee. Movies on the internet traditionally don't respect the release schedule that the MPAA thinks will make them the most money.

        If they cripple the movie in this way, release-time-wise, they will completely fail to even put a dent in most trading of their film. The coolest part of downloading a movie, and the only reason not to rent it, is to see it in your home before average joe dumbfuck can.

        Re: How long will it take to crack... people might not even bother unless there is a clear quality difference. The alternatives already exist.

    • There's a (potentially) better solution: Netflix [netflix.com]. I've just started using it, but in theory it looks good. For $20.00 a month, you get as many DVD's as you want, for as long as you want, but you can only hold on to 3 at a time. When you send one back, they send you the next one on your list. The disks get send to your mailbox and the return mailers are pre-paid. Seems like a good deal to me.
      • My parents use it, and love it. It works great! They've never complained about it. You can pre-order a queue of movies, and they send you this first three. Watch one, drop it in the mail, and when Netflix gets it, they send you another one out of your queue.
    • Factor in, sitting at the computer to watch it, or putting the dvd on the 61" tv with the full surround system.

      My monitor is bigger than my TV.

      C-X C-S
      (And my computer has the surround sound speakers.)

  • 500mb? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lupetto ( 16876 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @04:40AM (#2196510)
    This sounds like it would be cool, but I don't think your average dial-up user is going to wait to download 500mb.

    Besides, 250 of the 500mb are previews..

    • While this is truly funny, note that the article states that they really are targeting only the high-speed folks (mis-named broadband). Still, I think even the average cable-modem / DSL user isn't going to be willing to wait up to 40 minutes to download either. I can just see it:


      Wait honey, don't start the popcorn yet! We're still downloading. Darn it! The Smiths next door must have posted a link to their personal web server on Slashdot again!

    • How about all those only entitled to 1GB/month or whatever before they get billed for excess bandwidth?

      Who is seriously going to pay $15 to rent a movie?

  • Fatal flaws (Score:3, Insightful)

    by proxima ( 165692 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @04:47AM (#2196523)
    Perhaps this is too obvious, but this seems to have a few fatal flaws. If the article resolves them somehow, I'd be happy to hear, but I don't have a NY Times account and don't really want one.

    First, people don't watch movies on their computer. I spend about 15x more time on my computers than in front of a TV, but I still watch all of my movies on TV (mostly for the screen size, my chair and sound are superior on my computers). For most people they have larger screens, better sound, more comfortable seating for a group, etc.

    Perhaps the most obvious is the 500 mb download. I rarely make such large downloads with my cable connection at home and network connection at work (1/2 T1 now, soon to be full T1). In fact, the only downloads I can think of that large are Linux distribution CDs, of which I have several. Why spend 30 minutes or much, much longer when I can make it to the video store, rent, and travel time both ways in about 20 minutes? We don't really need internet bandwidth sucked so much by having movies sent around - I'd rather see more streaming sources personally.

    So of all internet users, only those with high bandwidth connections can use the service. There goes a good deal of potential customers. I don't think there is much of a market left. I actually think that DivX (the rentable DvDs that diabled themselves) had more chance of succeeding than this ill-fated concept.

    Of course, since these are so obvious I hope the article dealt with them.

    • We don't really need internet bandwidth sucked so much by having movies sent around - I'd rather see more streaming sources personally.


      This is what I'd really like to see. Plus, it really deals with the time factor. Give people 5 days worth of time to watch movie "X" in streaming format, and they can watch it as many times as they want. I also wonder if they could offer a service similar to pay-per-view. They stream a movie starting at a given time. Anybody that wants to watch it at that time can pay and join in. If you're late, you just miss the first few minutes. I could see doing this while I'm programming -- watch the movie in a window while programming in another. But the pricing structure would have to be good and it would have to work with Linux.

        • it would have to work with Linux

        Why? It's a niche market, Linux users aren't big spenders (are they, Loki?), and when we do hack it, it'll give the MPAA an excuse to initiate another FUD "evil commie child molester drug dealing pirates" suit to put the frighteners on both us and Joe Windows.

      • > > We don't really need internet bandwidth sucked so much by having movies sent around - I'd rather see more streaming sources personally.
        > This is what I'd really like to see. [ ... ]

        Eh? I don't get it. A movie is 500M.

        Whether those 500M get sent to your box, saved on a hard drive, and deleted 24 hours later, or whether they get sent to your box, rendered onto your screen, and vanish into the ether, is irrelevant.

        You've still "sucked" the same bandwidth.

        I'd argue against streaming services for this very reason -- transit costs (especially at prime time, which is when most users are likely to be watching movies) aren't for data aren't "too cheap to meter", and dumping the bits into the ether is, IMHO, a far bigger waste than saving them to a hard drive, where they no longer have to be downloaded again. Download 500M movies when the pipes aren't in use. Not when everyone else is.

        Ignoring the DRM problems introduced by streaming (streaming is far more friendly to "pay-per-use" model than download-and-playback), it's a hell of a lot easier to rewind/fast-forward through a movie that's sitting on your hard drive, than it is to rewind/fast-forward a "stream".

        And if we really can ignore the DRM issues - as in, h4x0r the world - I might spend 7 hours downloading a movie if I could burn it to CD and keep it forever, but I still wouldn't be interested in streaming it.

        (I guess that's the "Damnit, I spent 7 hours downloading this FPOS, and I'm not just gonna delete the file! It took too much work to get it!" excuse ;-)

    • Re:Fatal flaws (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Erasmus Darwin ( 183180 )
      "Why spend 30 minutes or much, much longer when I can make it to the video store, rent, and travel time both ways in about 20 minutes?"

      Things you can do during a 20 minute visit to the video store:

      • Talk to someone you brought along with you
      • Listen to the radio in your car
      • Think

      Things you can do during a 30 minute download of a movie:

      • Talk to anyone at your house
      • Call someone up on the phone (without contributing to the whole cell phone/distracted driver problem)
      • Watch TV
      • Read Slashdot
      • Read a book
      • Cook dinner
      • Eat dinner
      • Think
      • Meditate
      • Excercise
    • The concept isn't flawed, because the purpose isn't to immediately make money selling downloaded movies. The purpose is to prevent services like Napster from springing up. The movie industry hopes that if there is a low-cost method for downloading movies, that the geeky types who like that sort of thing will just pay the five bucks instead of throwing together some sort of peer to peer movie trading system.

      It is a preemptive measure. They want to get it into place before such trading systems get popular so that they can avoid the bad publicity the music industry is being hit with. They don't want congressmen asking them why they are stalling on electronic services (as has happened to the music industry.)

      Six years ago, the idea of a downloadable music service would have seemed flawed as well (too slow at 14.4, not enough harddrive space on the average machine), but ask yourself this: if the music industry had a system for downloading music in 1995, would Napster have the millions of users it does now? Probably not.

  • "Rental" of information an impossibility (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DataGrok ( 81077 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @04:49AM (#2196529) Homepage
    Didn't we just go through this with the e-book story?

    There's no such thing as the "rental" of electronic information!

    If you can view it on your screen, through a machine you own, you can make a digital duplicate of it! That's all there is to it, no matter how long the big companies try to struggle to come up with the next best way to cripple/encrypt the content that you have paid for.

    And as soon as someone cracks whatever scheme they plan to use to "time-limit" the movies, we'll be seeing the lawsuits flying. As usual.

    Until the media megacorporations realize and accept this (I'm not holding my breath waiting for that), we're just going to see the Skylarov incident and the DMCA invoked to hurt innocent people over and over and over again.

  • Generic NYT account, no registration req, blah bla (Score:3, Troll)

    by Bosconian ( 158140 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @04:50AM (#2196532) Journal
    User: slash2001
    Pass: slash2001

    Enjoy.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Dot-bomb (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Placido ( 209939 )
    A film will remain on a computer's hard drive for 30 days but will erase itself 24 hours after it is first run.

    Obviously they're going to develop a proprietry software package used to play the movies and control the copyright. It'll also have to be memory resident (or possibly run on boot) if they want to delete the film after 30 days.

    To be really honest it sounds just like a dot-bomb venture:
    The studios that will be partners in the service are MGM, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Warner Brothers and Universal Pictures. Noticeably absent were Disney and 20th Century Fox, although sources close to Disney said that it intended to announce its own video-on-demand service within 10 days. Fox issued a statement late this afternoon saying that it, too, would announce plans soon for such a service.
    ...
    The real question, though, is how many people really want to download movies onto their personal computers.

    "To be really honest, we have no idea," Mr. Waterman said.


    To be read: "Oh wow! We're going to put a product on to the internet which'll be really cool and people can buy said product anytime they want. And here's the cool thing! We don't even know if said product is useful!"
    Other manufacturers: "Oh I'm going to do that too!"
    More manufacturers: "Me three! Me three! Let's sink money into technology just because it's technology and forget all about wether or not we will make money."

    Yes I am a cynic.
      • To be really honest it sounds just like a dot-bomb venture [...] Yes I am a cynic.

      I'll trump that. Want to bet that they'll launch this in a half assed fashion, get about four downloads, wait for the Linux hack to appear, then scream that this proves that everyone is an evil, child molesting, drug dealing movie pirate, and they need stricter laws?

      How about, for example, copy control built right into the hardware (been there, backed down, but what goes around comes around)? Or, how about, oooh, targetting devices that allow unrestricted copying. Software devices. Applications. Operating systems.

      You can't too cynical when dealing with corporations and their bought politicians.

  • ATTN: Movie Studios, You're a Bit Late (Score:4, Informative)

    by Redking ( 89329 ) <stevenwNO@SPAMredking.com> on Monday August 20, 2001 @04:55AM (#2196540) Homepage Journal
    Downloadable movies? Haha, who are they kidding? Ok, let's go over the math again.

    First, 90% of American households with internet access STILL USE DIAL-UP. Like people want to sit there and download a 500 meg file to watch it ONCE.

    Secondly, those with broadband already have easy sources for movies currently in theaters or just released on DVD. Kazaa, Gnutella, Hotline, FTP, IRC, etc...

    Thirdly, why would anyone want to wait to rent movies that are available as DVDs? If you have US Postal Service, you can sign up for NetFlix [netflix.com] and rent DVDs thru the mail. It's $19.95 a month and you get to check out three DVDs at a time. They have new releases and foreign films. There aren't any late fees and to return DVDs, just drop them in the return envelope they provide. Mad easy! (Only problem with NetFlix is that since I'm located in NJ, it takes a while for them to ship and receive the DVDs I rent.)

    w00t!

  • slightly off topic: Try before buy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by staeci ( 85394 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @04:57AM (#2196546) Homepage Journal
    I don't know about anyone else but I treat downloadable movies (ie cam rips) as previews, mainly because I'm in Australia and we get movies some times months after the US. I download the first half and watch it while the second half is downloading. If the movie is bad I'll cancel the second half. If it is an ok movie I'll watch all of it. If it is really good I'll actually pay to go and watch it when it comes out. They are not good enough quality to replace the real thing and no substitute for the big screen.

    Other than this the only indicator of whether or not you are going to like a movie is the trailer, an advertisement designed to make you want to go and see it, not to help you make an informed choice.

    Most games you can get a demo of, books you can read a bit of in the store or at a library, a car you can take for a test run but movies you have to just fork out the cash and hope that its good. In my mind that just isn't good enough - if the movie is worth it I will pay to see it - otherwise I'll save my money.

  • Hmmm. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by javaman235 ( 461502 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @05:02AM (#2196551)
    It seems like there's something very wrong with that idea of movies that "erase themselves off your hard drive" after 24 hours...Why does this sort of thing just give me the creeps? Is that just me?

    It seems to be part of a bigger picture: The industies in control are literally trying to change the entire way of the Internet right now, to make it fit a more "profitable" model without them trying to change their existing business models.It seems a strange idea to me that anything or anyone but me should control what happens on my hard drive, but that's exactly what we are seeing...software that takes control of your personal computer and works it into a business model contrary to natural structure of the decentralized Internet we use today.

    This little thing is not that scary...But behind the guise of lots of these little things lurks the ominous monster of a global information infrastructure controlled by corporations, not by individuals. We need to take this seriously...

    • The industies in control are literally trying to change the entire way of the Internet right now, to make it fit a more "profitable" model without them trying to change their existing business models.

      Not really... We already have a long-standing precedent for this type of electronic distribution: The software demo. If you like what you see, go out and buy the DVD of the movie.

      But behind the guise of lots of these little things lurks the ominous monster of a global information infrastructure controlled by corporations, not by individuals

      Naah. You can only control the content you own. If you don't like the way the current content is distributed, by all means, create your own and distribute it in any way that you like. Only at such time as they start making things available only through time-bombed channels, rather than in addition to, should we start becoming gravely concerned.

    • Re:Hmmm. (Score:2)

      by Alan ( 347 )
      What they forget is that people want to be able to use this like a DVD or VHS tape. If I rent a DVD I want to be able to watch it as many times, or in as many jumps, as I can for the duration of the rental period. I also want the ability to "keep" it longer than allowed (late dues of course) if I have a really busy week and don't get a chance to watch the movie until the night it's due back.

      However, this is still a step in the right direction, and we can only hope it becomes more user friendly and linux-friendly (who wants to be they won't let you download mpgs or playable-by-linux avis (aviplay is your friend)?

  • There are too many unknowns for me to have a meaningful opinion about this. There's a good chance it'll stink for all the reasons everyone will no doubt post about. But the two big unknowns are video quality and pricing. If the video quality is good and you can rent a movie for a third of what it costs for a three-day video rental from Blockbuster, I'd be hard-pressed to get annoyed about it.

    If, on the other hand, they follow the example of DirecTV pay-per-view, with a higher price point than most video stores, or if the video quality is no better than a typical 1-CD DiVX rip, it probably won't do so well.

    The key difference between this and DiVX, in my mind, is the 30-day hard expiration date. That makes this proposition seem a lot less slimy and risky to me. With a DiVX disc, the theory was you'd be able to buy the disc and wait a year before activating it, which obviously was no good when DiVX Inc. went out of business in the meantime. But in this case, from what I can tell from the article, it's more like a one-day rental from a video store; you go into it expecting to not have the movie any more after a particular time. If they fold, it has no impact on movies you downloaded more than a month prior.

    I imagine there'll be people who find this new proposal distasteful but aren't bothered by one-day videotape rentals (which similarly limit you to a 24-hour viewing window, unless you want to rack up late fees). I'll be curious to hear what makes one business model more acceptable than the other, if anyone wants to take that question up.

    On another note, I wonder what the legal issues would be if you rented a movie and dumped it to videotape using your computer's TV output, then erased the tape within the 30-day rental window. Would that be considered the same thing as taping a TV show (protected by the Supreme Court) or would it be like renting a video, copying it, and returning the original? It might not be a DMCA issue in this case, since you wouldn't be using a protection-circumvention technology.

    • > I wonder what the legal issues would be if you rented a movie and dumped it to videotape using your computer's TV output, then erased the tape within the 30-day rental window. Would that be considered the same thing as taping a TV show (protected by the Supreme Court) or would it be like renting a video, copying it, and returning the original? It might not be a DMCA issue in this case, since you wouldn't be using a protection-circumvention technology.

      Actually, it would be.

      1) Macrovision is almost certainly enabled on whatever output device is involved. You'd have to disable (circumvent) this protection technology.

      2) Even without Macrovision, you'd have created a device (a VCR/TV hookup) to circumvent (even if you erase the tape, you've changed the power balance - you choose to erase the tape after 30 days, and in so doing, you've gotten around the restriction they built in - the restriction which is clearly...) a protection technology (the one that automatically wipes out the content after 30 days or after first viewing, rather than relying on you to erase the tape yourself).

      It'd be an interesting test case - I think the Supremes would decide that your activity (time-shifting) was indeed not a copyright violation because it's fair use... but that they'd also decide that you still violated anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA in order to exercise those fair use rights, and you'd wind up in jail anyways.

      This is, of course, the crux of the DMCA debate -- you still have your fair use rights; it's just a crime to exercise them.

      The Supremes may or may not decide that this is unconstitutional. It'd be a good test case. I wouldn't want to be the defendant.

      • Macrovision is almost certainly enabled on whatever output device is involved. You'd have to disable (circumvent) this protection technology.

        I don't think TV-out ports on video cards do Macrovision. Certainly not all of them do.

        But your second point is where the question gets sticky -- at what point are you creating a device rather than using an existing, legal one? From a strictly technical point of view, hooking two existing devices together is in some sense creating a new device. But I think you'd find very few people who would describe hooking a VCR up to their TV to be creating a new "VCR+TV" device.

        As you say, though, I wouldn't want to be the test case.

  • Good service. Bad delivery. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AtariDatacenter ( 31657 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @05:15AM (#2196581)
    If they would allow me to view movies in the timeframe that they are in the theater, or just before DVD rentals, this would provide value to me. Charge me as much as a seat in a movie theater, but keep the revenue all to yourself.

    But delaying until after DVD rentals are available? Forget it. The service isn't bound to go anywhere.

    The movie industry is stuck in the same paradigm. They want to figure out where internet technology can be used to ADD to their current offerings. (Purely chasing up the revenue tree.) What they should be doing is asking, "What do our customers want?" But, there is that paradigm again. We're not customers anymore. We're faceless consumers who will take what they are given.

    See how the whole mindset feeds on itself?
    • But delaying until after DVD rentals are available? Forget it. The service isn't bound to go anywhere.

      Are you kidding? They don't want it to go anywhere. They want this to fail, to prove that serving *paid* content via the Internet is not profitable. Or, put another way, only Commies who don't like to pay for content are on the Internet. Oh, and pedophiles, too. Musn't forget them...

      And since writing paid laws is profitable for polititians, we'll see more laws that treat the Internet as a lawless free-for-all that must be regulated to stop the Red Menace.

      We're not customers anymore. We're faceless consumers who will take what they are given.

      We ceased to be customers a while ago. In particular, all Slashdot readers are criminals because we know more about technology (i.e. how lame DeCSS is at its job) than they do.

  • Actual forward thinking from MPAA members? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dr_Cheeks ( 110261 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @05:21AM (#2196593) Homepage Journal
    Well, as several people here have stated, the format is going to get cracked sooner or later, and at the moment it's still a bit costly, but at least they're actually trying to embrace the tech instead of burying their heads in the sand.

    OK, for now there's not going to be a huge amount of people who want this, but as it becomes more popular I can see that the mainstream will pick it up much more willingly. There'll always be people with cracked movies just like there's still people who sell pirate videos, but if this service is simple enough then people will use it. People use Pay-Per-View when they could go and buy a priate copy of a movie for less money, so why shouldn't this work.

    Additionally, they could eventually extend this to their whole movie library. Want to see some obscure flick from the 50's that never made it onto VHS? Well all you'll need to do is swing by IMDB, click on a link, and you'll be able to download it. This is a good idea (definitely better than just ignoring the problem and letting other people distribute your movies for free), and once they work out this niggles and broadband becomes more widespread I can see the service becoming incredibly popular.


    • Actually, despite my dislike of watching films on my PC (rather than my nice TV) that is a service I would use.

      It's about $5 to rent a new release video/DVD here in the UK, and a similar price for PPV movies on cable. Older films in the video store are only $1.50 to $3. I'd happily pay $1.50 to view each of several old films if I could do so - there are a lot of films that I can't get hold of, and the local video store can't justify the expense of purchasing them just for one odd user (me).

      Linking to them on IMDB just kinda makes sense.

      The big problem here is availability. None of the old films are digitised. It would be a massive effort to convert them all to digital form, and an impressively big database to store them. Would the potential market size cover that level of expenditure? Given their lack of knowledge of a market size on relatively new films, I suspect they wont be ready to commit those sort of resources until the whole movie download technology is mature and accepted.

      ~Cederic
      • None of the old films are digitised.


        I have Metropolis on DVD right in front of me. I'd consider that old, especially considering it's not even a 'talkie'.

        You'd be surprised at what you can find in digital form. I live in Canada and I've found that http://www.cnl.com [cnl.com] has a lot of old stuff that you won't find in your local Future Shop (even though I found Metropolis there).

        However, the service would have to get popular before you'll see old movies trickle in but the infrastructure, even though it requires big-ass servers is still cheaper than pressing DVDs.

  • Another fine example of dumb people at work (Score:3, Funny)

    by t_allardyce ( 48447 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @05:23AM (#2196595) Journal
    The list of dumb ideas from dumb people hall of fame:

    -CSS (if i can see it i can copy it)
    -SDMI (they should have learnt from css)
    -CPRM (the hard drive protection)
    -That thing to disable electronics with GPS
    -DMCA (not such a dumb idea as an evil one)
    -SafeAudio (cut off your nose to spite your face but didn't work)
    -WMA (we want to wean people off mp3 and onto superior digital rights management)
    -DivX (the company)
    -eBook (rot-13)
    -Renting films (you cant rent data. period.)

    Anything More?

    Most companies have some sort of technical advisor/analyst/window-cleaner who can tell them if an idea is dumb or not. Obviously these studios don't. This is _very_ serious, these people along with those responsible for the list above, are making business decisions everyday. Its plainly obvious to see that something is very wrong here so i have come up with some possible explanations:

    1. They are on crack or some other expensive narcotic and need money to keep the habit growing.

    2. They have been abducted and replaced by aliens who have no business experience.

    3. They never went to harverd etc.. and just lied their ways into high positions and now they don't know what to do.

    4. They are just really really really dumb.

    5. They actually have a plan and all these seamingly dumb ideas somehow fit together to produce something big that we couldn't possibly figure out.

    -tfga

  • Without NYT Registration (Score:4, Informative)

    by dazed-n-confused ( 140724 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @05:25AM (#2196600)
    http://archives.nytimes.com/2001/08/17/technology/ 17STUD.html [nytimes.com]

    As always.
  • Hmm...

    Lets see. A standard 56k dial-up connection gets about 5.25 KB/s with a *good* server and ISP. The movie is 500 MB. That's about 1,625 minutes, or around 27 hours to download, +/- a few hours.

    On a 750 Kb/s cable or DSL line it would take between 1-170 minutes to download, streaming if the movie is at least that long.

    Anyhow, for most people they're saying that after you wait over a day to download it, that you won't be able to play it possibily and if you do it will be but once?

  • The dilemma (Score:5, Funny)

    by quintessent ( 197518 ) <my usr name on toofgiB [tod] moc> on Monday August 20, 2001 @05:30AM (#2196604) Journal
    "Well, honey, we have 3 choices. We can get in the car and drive to the video store, which you know we don't want to do, because getting into the car is too much work, so that's out. we can order the DVD from Amazon and be able watch it in 5 days. Or we can start downloading it now and have it ready to watch in 4 1/2 days."

    "Didn't you say the neighbors had a copy of this on DVD?"

    • the obvious choice: read the movie review pages until you see something interesting then spend two hours at a movie theater. That sure is a big screen, and the sound is good too.

      I'm not looking forward to this garbage clogging up the net just yet. Now it's still easier to rent a VHS copy on the way home from the grocery store. There are some people it will be good for, who live way out there where there's only one video shop censored by the local prudes. For the rest of us, the 9 Gig downloads of common movies will be a drag. Expect a novelty peak of joe AOL's next year downloading "I love Lucy" to make "I love you" look small.

    • "Didn't you say the neighbors had a copy of this on DVD?"

      "Yes, but they only purchased two viewing licenses. It'll cost us $5.00 each to purchase temporary viewing licenses to watch the movie with them tonight. Still, it is easier - we can just swipe our credit card through the MPAA-Enabled TV (the only type you can buy nowadays) to buy the licenses."

      "Well can't we just borrow the DVD?"

      "Honey! Are you nuts! President Valenti declared that a federal crime last week, punishable by 10 years in prison."

      Fortunately, the couple's 10 year old son, who had just completed his school's mandatory "Sharing is Un-American" program, overheard this conversation. Following the instructions he memorized during the program, he immediately contacted the proper authorities. The next day, friendly agents of the MPAA arrived to escort his mother to the nearest 'Happy Camp', for her own good and for the good of America. She completed the re-education program within a year, and is now a productive, dues-paying, consuming member of society.

  • It's already reality in Germany (Score:3, Informative)

    by ^ZuLu^ ( 103831 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @05:31AM (#2196605)
    As we have Streamgate [streamgate.de] here, this is somehow pretty much what those hollywood-companies try to do. You will get a DSL (with 1024kbit/s download and 128kbit/s upload) and you could watch movies which will be "streamed" to you and could be watched for 24hrs.
  • http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/08/17/technology/1 7STUD.html
  • What if the p1r@t3D DVD rips came out earlier and looked better?

    Oh.
    Wait.
    The rips will be out earlier..

    Now. About the 500mb file / encoding / view part.

    I've put divx (700mb encoded rips, not the failed divx, btw, did this in canada, where it is still legal) movies (via TV out) on a 54" TV and could not tell the difference between that and a DVD (I have a cheap sound system, i.e. 2 speakers).

    In any case, it'd be interesting to see how they shave 200mb off the file. I'm sure people will, um. adapt it.
    • Well, seeing as how the movie studios are under no obligation to abide by the DivX releases specifications developed by the dupechecking groups...it's a simple matter of just encoding at a lower resolution or bitrate.

      You see, all those DivX movies you find floating around the Internet have to conform to a list of guidelines if they want to get "credit" for releasing it first. One of the specifications of these standards is to ensure you put the most quality on each CD.

      That means you first see if the movie will fit on one CD at minimum quality. If it won't fit on one CD at minimum quality, then break it into two CDs and encode at maximum quality. If it will fit on one CD and there is room to spare, use a bitrate calculator to determine exactly how much you can improve the bitrate and still have it fit within the 700MB size limit. This size limit represents the total capacity of an 80-minute CD-R (not everyone can use 90/99-minute ones).

      The movie studios:

      A) don't care that they aren't going to be on the dupecheckers,
      B) will probably just release it at VCD-level resolution (352x240) instead of the current DVDRip resolution (640x360 or something like that)
      C) will probably tag the movie file an ugly intro and a stupid logo during the first few minutes so you will be reminded where you got it.
      D) will be released it a couple weeks after everyone else already has downloaded it in a higher quality format.

      In short, the movie industry is becoming PURiTY-DivX [puritydivx.com].

      - JoeShmoe
  • of the movie studio's

    i mean, seriously, do they employ /.'s Squadron of Attack Elephants?

    ok ... lets run down the options:

    Movie Studio's Official Format:
    Lifetime of file: 30 days
    Watching period: 24 hours
    File size: 500 MB
    Encoding: Proprietary (in all likelyhood)
    Interface: Most likely pretty useless and annoying
    Availability: Some time after DVD release
    Cost: Something

    DivX:
    Lifetime of file: Unlimited
    Watching period: Unlimited
    File size: 600MB-1200MB depending on quality desired
    Encoding: DivX (mpeg-4)
    Interface: Anything you want
    Availability: At or Pre-DVD release
    Cost: Nothing

    Yeah, sure the new format is gonna be successful
    (opinion brought to you in part by Scarcasm(tm))

    • ethics, anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mosch ( 204 )
      Movie Studio's Official Format:
      Legal: Yes

      DiVX
      Legal: No

      That right there is enough to make most people avoid DiVX. Most people don't want to be criminals, even if they know they won't get caught.

      • I don't consider it unethical to download and view a DiVX version if I know I'm going to buy the DVD (and the DVD is not out yet or in shipment), or if I own the DVD. It's like making a tape of a CD, essentially...

        That's why I think DivX is still a better choice than this new format, in that there are lots of very ethical uses for the format.

        The new proposal sounds interesting, but I think they would be better served by just feeding you streams with no limits at $5 a pop. Way more people would buy the movies, people would still buy DVD's for the extras, and most people would delete a lot of movies after a while anyway to conserve on space. The "hoarders" who will keep buying HD capacity to keep every movie ever downloaded are the same people who have 8000 VHS tapes of every movie ever rented, so you should really just give up getting money from them more than once anyway (and they represent only 1% or so of the population).

        If people are really ethical (and I believe the majority are, at heart) a company could reap great rewards by treating them as if they were. It's too bad they're all too afraid to see if it's true.

  • Daffy (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Graymalkin ( 13732 )
    The highest throughput I know of for an FTP server is Walnut Creek's record of 1.39TB over the course of a day, that's about 115 movies per hour or so. Let's say you can provide this sort of throughput to several servers all the time. How much bandwidth is required for this system to make any money at all? It's pretty fantastic, especially when you figure in the cost of maintaining the hardware which has to store all these movies. To figure if this will make any money at all, decide how many potential viewers you're going to have. How many people have the bandwidth necessary to download these movies that don't have DirecTV/Dish Network (who can pay a couple bucks for an all day movie pass on a PPV movie channel) and aren't so fucking lazy that can't drive their secretary asses down to the video store. This isn't really anything I couldn't do with DirecTV and a TiVo.

  • With a few changes it could much better. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Shivetya ( 243324 ) on Monday August 20, 2001 @08:22AM (#2196813) Homepage Journal
    1. Order movies for later viewing, it downloads to your TIVO or similar device.

    2. Movies NEVER to be on DVD, or old TV shows of the same. (now that I might pay for, if the movie was like 2 dollars or something, tv show 2 to 3 dollars per 5 episodes.

    For existing content, they can forget it. If I can get it on DVD the charge for the movie that I HAVE to download would have to be in the 2 dollar range to make it even worth my time.

    (still downloading to a computer is useless overall to me, I have a big TV just for watching movies, and my computer is NOWHERE near my entertainment system)
  • Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that this is going to be limited to Windows? It will, unfortunately, limit their audience as I would have thought that Mac's would be good for this kind of thing. Oh, well...
  • "Sounds like if you start the movie at all, the clock starts ticking so no peaking until you're ready to watch it ALL. "

    Saaaaay...what kinda movies are you watching anyway, perverts? Oh wait, you meant 'peeking'...
  • If " A film will remain on a computer's hard drive for 30 days but will erase itself 24 hours after it is first run" is all, then burn a copy onto a CD so that it won't be able to erase itself.

    of course the old changing the clock in the BIOS trick might work too :)

  • Peaking? (Score:2, Funny)

    by CDanek ( 34285 )
    ...so no peaking until you're ready to watch it ALL.

    That sounds strangely sexual..

  • "I think the majority of consumers believe that copyright has value and that if they have a pay vehicle to watch movies on the Internet, they will pay for it," said Yair Landau, president of Sony (news/quote) Pictures Digital Entertainment. "We want to give honest people an honest alternative."

    If Landau actually beleived what he was saying, then he would use a standardized and non-copy-protected format instead Yet Another abomination. Software developers have understood the uselessness of copy protection for many years.

  • Another major problem with this scheme is that the video quality is going to be awful. 500Mb means it's going to be equivalent to VCD/MPEG1 which is about the same as a cheap VCR.

    A DVD stream uses MPEG2 and gets up to 10 Mb/s. If you assume an average of 5Mb/s (which is low) and a 90 minute movie, that's 27GB.

    They could be planning to use MPEG4 which is better quality, but even then they'll be compressing the hell out of it to get a film down to that size.

    I'd rather drive to the video store or use NetFlix and watch a real DVD. Not to mention I can do that a lot sooner after the films release.

  • In my experience downloading... erm, "independant" films through gnutella, I've found that a 500mb DIVX file is simply not going to be very good quality. And I'm not talking about amazing sharpness or biting sounds. At 500mb, there are often annoying intruding audio artifacts. The video is a tenth of the resolution of DVD and it looks like a JPEG on the highest compression setting.

    The gap between 500 and 800mb really seems to make all the difference in the world. At 800mb, the quality is just good enough that you can forget about the artifacts and get into the movie.

    -Erik

    P.S. I know the length of the movie changes the file size. I'm generalizing here.

  • I don't care so much about movies, since I don't imagine they'll be releasing anything for download that isn't already available on DVD. However, I'd love to see the TV networks pick this up! How many times have you said, "Doh! I missed The Simpsons again!" (Or, more likely, "Doh! Fox screwed around with its schedule again!") I'd pay money to be able to download a missed episode of my favorite shows. Make 'em available for download a week after the original air date, and I'll guarrantee they'll find an audience.

  • Because the resolution is going to be very bad. A DVD has a multi-GB capacity. 500MB is good for a choppy or poorly resolved 320x160 feature leangth movie.

    This is not the kind of quality you invite pals to watch at your place.

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