Warner Bros. to Try File Sharing in Germany

Carl Bialik writes "The Wall Street Journal reports that Warner Bros. plans to sell TV shows and movies online in Germany via P2P. In2Movies, to launch in March, 'will feature movies dubbed into German, including "Batman Begins" and "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," for a fee that Warner says will be similar to the cost of a DVD. It will also offer television shows like "The O.C." and locally made programs and movies. Users, who will have to register for the service, will be able to keep the movie indefinitely. But instead of getting a movie from a central server, pieces of it could come from other people on the network who also bought that movie.' The president of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group says, 'Studios can't just turn their backs and hope "P2P" is going to go away tomorrow.'"

Trial balloon?

[Noryungi]

Finally, some sense in the P2P/RIAA/MPAA wars!

If this works well for Warner, I am willing to bet they will extend this program to the rest of the world, pronto. At least, I hope so.

More DRM... great

[chris098]

Although it's good that the movie industry isn't completely blind, I think they're going about this the wrong way. It's definitely a good thing that customers will be able to keep their purchases forever (instead of some 'limited time' offer), but I still have trouble seeing the value for customers in a P2P environment where they have to pay the same price as a DVD.

The article mentions the videos will have security features added to them so they can't be copied. Without more details, it's impossible to say how much of a hassle this will be. What if I have two computers and want to watch the video on the other one? The article is a bit weak on the details...

Re:Incentive for the user?

[ehrichweiss]

That was the question I asked myself actually. Why would I want to help WB in the distribution if I'm PAYING them for the movie too? Now if they gave me a free gigabyte of download for every 2 I upload, then I'd consider their service. I guess they think that we like the P2P idea enough that we'll pay regular prices just to use it!?!? Their reasoning here is beyond me.

Learning from the RIAA's mistakes...

[PFI_Optix]

It seems the television networks and movie studios are learning from the record labels what not to do. A lot of networks are jumping on board with Google and iTunes, and now Warner is looking at embracing digital distribution before movie sharing becomes as commonplace as music sharing has been for the past seven years.

What I'm most excited about is Firefly Season 2. From the buzz I've been hearing, they intend on doing something really revolutionary with it: it's going to be a subscription-based show not available on any networks. If the Browncoats can fully support a show the caliber of FireFly, that's going to force the network execs to sit up and take notice.

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck

[sane?]

Same price as a DVD, using somebody else's bandwidth. Unless these are released before the DVD is then there is no reason to choose this option. Maybe that's the point.

Since I can rent a DVD by mail for 1 unit of currency it difficult to see anything else other than an attempt to say "see tried it, didn't work". The price needs to be around half that of a retail DVD, at most.

Oh, and no intrusive DRM either.

On a related point, has anyone noticed how movie and TV are coming together into a true competitive marketplace? The gap is much smaller than it used to be.

Re:This makes no sense

[atezun]

If you hadn't noticed, most DVDs these days have DRM on them too. So Eeither way you're going to have to break DRM.

what if...

[MooseTick]

Everyone is complaining about the fact that it will be "similar to the cost of a DVD." What if it will be 1/2 the cost of a DVD. Would you want to use it then. Would that make it worth the hassle of downloaded, potentially using up dl quotas, DRM, etc?

When you can illegally download nearly anything for free or goto Blockbusters and rent whatever for $5, what would you pay to be able to legally download content using P2P that will be DRMed?

Re:Incentive for the user?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Speed of download. Especially if they had a few distributed servers in the mix run by WB, your download would be significantly faster than say, buying Quicktime copies of BattleStar Galactica through iTunes.

Re:Incentive for the user?

[yabos]

Instead of the distributed Akamai servers that Apple uses?

Re:what if...

[RingDev]

Matters on half of what. Getting a $22 movie for $11, that's not half bad, but worth leaving your PC on all month? Nah. I can goto a local Block Buster and rent new releases for $1.50. I can open Video On Demand (Charter) and get videos instantly for $4-6. Sure VoD costs more, but I don't have to dirve anywheres, return anything, and it's instant.

The BEST way to get this to work would be to replace NetFlix. $15 a month to have access to their private P2P network. As long as you pay your monthly fee your P2P account and DRM key remain valid. Now that I might be interested in.

-Rick

Re:Trial balloon?

[CastrTroy]

The problem is, is that they are very afraid to undercut their own retailers. If they significantly undercut the DVDs, and people actually start buying a significant amount of stuff online, many retailers won't see it as worth their time to continue to even stock the DVDs. They have to keep the retailers happy. If you don't then they will revolt. It's the same reason why buying a computer direct from HP costs the same amount as buying it from the retailer, even though there should be no distribution markup.

On Pricing

[ratboy666]

I am a Rogers Broadband customer. Rogers has, in the last year, set a data cap for my digital data service. Specifically, Rogers gives me 60GB per month, upload and download combined. I pay $40CDN per month for the service.

Now I finally have a way to compute the value of such things as this Warner P2P offering.

We need a little bit more data, though. Specifically, how big is a DVD quality movie? Between 600MB and 1.4GB for an MPEG encoded video of sufficient quality to (subjectively) look good on my big TV. 600MB for an animation, 1.4GB for a feature movie. Lets "split the difference" and call it 1GB.

Which means I can download 60 movies per month for $40. Each movie will cost me 67 cents to download.

But the P2P (Peer to Peer) model only works if I upload the material as well. To one (or more) clients. Note that my cap applies to uploads as well. I am going to assume a 1:1 ratio for down to uploads - which means my data pipe price is doubled. Specifically, to $1.33 per movie.

There is also a cost associated with having material on the hard disk for servicing uploads. I know the cost of on-line storage. My average price is now $2 per gigabyte (for my drives in service), and I replace drives every 2 years. Which means $1 per movie per year. If I assume data retension for a year (got to fill this in with something. and there has to be client retension to make P2P work!), this adds a buck, bringing my cost to $2.33.

Would I spend $2.33 to download a movie? Rental at BlockBuster average $3.50 (ish) per movie. One buck more. Which is then what the content is worth to me. Without DRM, unlimited personal use: the price of the DVD minus the above costs, minus a factor related to the time it takes to actually download/upload (because my Internet connection is tied up... and its a nuisance). I figure a MINIMUM of 5 bucks.

So, "Unencumbered DVD quality downloads using our P2P, at 30% under store DVD price" is the beginning of the play for me.

Ratboy

Idea

[Renraku]

Here's an idea. You pay a few bucks to watch the locked copy. You know..$1-5. Then if you want to buy it, you can have them send you the DVD just like you'd buy in the store, less the price of the download. Like if you paid $4 and the DVD is $20, you pay $16 and the DVD gets sent to you.

With discounts for those that are 'seeders' like free downloads and 25% off DVDs or something.

Re:At last

[AeroIllini]

...big corps start to realize that the old bussiness model is dead, and begin to use the new model at their advantage, instead of fighting the tide.

Nope. They're not beginning to use a new model at all. At most, they are trying to apply their current (old) business model to a new medium. At the very least, they are going to try this "intarweb distribution" thingie and do it so poorly that they can then say, "but we TRIED selling this stuff online, and no one bought it! They're all filthy pirates!"

The old business model is: "We create content. You pay for this content, but you only get to watch it when, where, and how we say so, because of our precious IP. Oh, and we're greedy bastards and have no concept of supply and demand, so our prices are unfairly high and we blame the internet on low sales, not taking the quality of our product into account."

Their new model is: "We create content. You pay for this content online at the same inflated prices as physical media, except that we don't have to pay for printing any physical media, and this is a peer-to-peer system which means the customers are paying for bandwidth costs as well! We don't allow them to alter or burn this content in any way because of the restrictive DRM we place on it. Basically, you only get to watch it when, where, and how we say so, because of our precious IP. Oh, and we're greedy bastards and will blame the failure of this system on the filthy pirates and not on the inherent flaws."

How is this new or innovative, again?