Disney Close To Unveiling New "DVD Killer" 498
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."
Keychest vs. the Vault (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:So, basically, this is Steam for movies? (Score:2, Interesting)
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...
Printing Press (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
DisneyRM(tm) (Score:3, Interesting)
This press release is irritating me to no end. I'm going home to pirate a few crappy Disney films out of general spite.
Re:Disney sells product that solves Disney's probl (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Disney sells product that solves Disney's probl (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Some consumers do... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Dead DRM remote-authorization services. (Score:1, Interesting)
If I were the guy in charge of planning a remote-authorization service, I would establish a trust to fund the maintenance of the servers indefinitely. You can estimate the yearly cost of maintaining the servers, determine the amount of money that needs to be invested to pay that cost indefinitely (believe it or not this is a finite amount of money), and require that all of the partners in the venture pay their share of that cost. Each year you measure the difference between the trust's assets and the estimated amount of money needed to fund it and require the partners to pay in their share of the difference (which should be small if it's fully funded from the beginning).
This shouldn't be a difficult problem. The cost of providing a guarantee can be estimated and funded in advance. The fact that no one has done this so far shouldn't be taken as a sign that this is impossible.
Don't we already have this (Score:1, Interesting)
Let's say I have knowledge, gained in some way, that certain people have been encoding HD movies, without DRM, in near perfect quality at as low as 2 gigs of information. Let's say they've been doing this for a while, and quite frankly it already allows unlimited access, to unlimited media devices as is. Now Disney's plan, it seems to me, is to make something worse than this and then charge more for it. I'm sure this business plan made all kinds of sense in the boardroom where it was concocted.
Re:Can I avoid this simply by avoiding Disney? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Be afraid! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Bandwidth (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Can I avoid this simply by avoiding Disney? (Score:3, Interesting)
> 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.
Re:watermark on massive consumer sold item ? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:Can I avoid this simply by avoiding Disney? (Score:1, Interesting)
"Me? I've got all of them I would ever want from Disney, my daughter is 17 and does not care about little mermaid anymore."
Good for you...wake up and smell the napalm, the've taken the adult movies (Touchstone pictures), comics (Marvel, so prolly e- comics will suffer), and please don't forget that, as a teenager, and unless your daughter is goth or has been living under a rock her whole life, she will surely like all that Camp Rock (Rock? gimme a break), Jonas Brothers and the rest of the wannabe toy artists Disney is producing these days. So , if they cut some ways of distributing their content, we will notice.
At this moment, Disney is almost everywhere
Re:Can I avoid this simply by avoiding Disney? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Can I avoid this simply by avoiding Disney? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)