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Miramax To Distribute Films Over Net? 84

Posted by Hemos from the passing-around-the-movies dept.
cinchel wrote to us with a story talking about Miramax's latest move. They've partnered with Sightsound.com to allow pay-per-view downloading of 12 films. They haven't yet decided which films, but this is a cool step in the right direction for film distribution. Now if they can just work out some of those broadband issues *sigh*.
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Miramax To Distribute Films Over Net? More

Miramax To Distribute Films Over Net?

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  • The creator who newgrouped the alt.binaries.cd-images newsgroups was flamed into ashes for the very notion of how much net bandwidth such a group would suck up. But when some company does it, it's *heralded* by everyone as a *great new breakthru* in *streaming media technology*. So now instead of distribute once, with users downloading from local servers, users can repeatedly slam the internet with this data again and again.

    How is this fair to all the net sites along the chain who are passing this waste along? Did you really think the movie jumps from MiraMax to your PC? Do a traceroute to Miramax and see how many other sites you are DoS-ing with the movie you're watching. And this list will vary with every user.

  • Courts have upheld that it is legal for anyone to record programs with thier VCR for 'timeshift' purposes. I want to record the PPV fight on HBO while I'm at work and watch it when I get home. Got a problem with this?

  • This sounds like an idea that won't fly... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This sounds like an idea that won't fly for a few reasons... I've d/l movies before, and on a cable modem at least, it takes at least an hour. From the 20 minutes that they're quoting it sounds like they're using ASF, which isn't as good as a VHS tape IMHO, wait a few years till bandwidth increases, and the file sizes for video shrink to a reasonable size As far as I'm concerned the only decent quality filetypes for movies are mpeg, and divX (a modified for of mpg4, using mp3 sound and packaged as avi format) Does anybody know what type of file they would use?
  • wishful thinking...

    Oh well I have laserdiscs, just need a player.
  • I agree. There is already a competing service that is superior in many respects (but unfortunately is limited to a handful of metropolitan markets). Like SightSound.com, it offers video-on-demand. Unlike SightSound.com, it has many times as many titles, there is no loss in video or audio quality, it uses a tiny fraction of the bandwidth (transfer time is under an hour even with a 28.8 kbps modem), and it doesn't even require a Pentium II or Windows.

    Guess who? [kozmo.com] :-)

  • While you talk about not "minding getting off your ass and returning a movie", I assume you mean not minding getting into your car (and sitting on your ass there) and driving to the video store. I don't own a car, and for that reason I prefer to do as much as my shopping as possible via the Web. While I too have serious doubts about the feasiblity of downloading movies with today's bandwidth, there are other reasons besides laziness to want to access movies without having to leave home.
  • Subject says it all.

    I guess for the part of the population that are not ambu.latory, this might make some type of sense, but I would think DVD or tape would be a better answer.


  • I bet if a concentrated effort is made, this new "secure" file format can be cracked and unlocked in record time...

  • I've seen something similar (though not identical) to this in the Amiga market. The market is so small and unhealthy, that some developers (of both hardware and software) have taken pre-orders for products, with the condition that it will only be produced if a certain number of preorders are received. (The main difference between this and the Street Performer Protocol is that these developers haven't offered to make their products public domain after the required amount of revenue has been received. There are other minor differences as well.)

    For works that are expected to have only marginal comercial success, I think it's a pretty good idea. I can't imagine George Lucas using it, though.


    ---
  • Banner ads on movies is just wrong from the point of view of the content provider. They have a product they want you to watch and they want your attention for the full experience. If halfway through the production, you see a banner ad for "myMonkey.com" and decide to leave to view that, they just lost you. If there are any ads, expect them to come at the begining or the end of the film.
  • Why don't you actually read the information!! The movie is downloaded to your computer, then unlocked when you want it, then played.

  • It's bad enough to go out and see "28 Days" by accident and then regret you ever went. It'll be even worse to spend 10 hours downloading it, watch it in a 1" x 2" window, regret ever seeing it, then accidentally click on it again when you're trying to shut down, have to pay for it again and then watch it again cause you feel guilty about wasting money.

    So in short, it sounds like a good system that will become viable sometime in the future, perhaps as far away as the "Year 2000."

    Hotnutz.com [hotnutz.com] - Funny
  • What exactly prevents you from recording events you get on pay-per-view on cable? Or movies on HBO for that matter?
    Pretty much just ethics.
    So, I suppose the folks who don't think twice about recording pay-per-view events on TV probably won't think twice about saving these movies.
  • Disney being sued over "Takedown" [securitygeeks.com]. Suppose their trials will be streaming as well as their fiction? hehe

  • If I could have access to, for example, every Nine Inch Nails album for $20 a month, for streaming from anywhere, I'd pay it, and over a year they'd have made just as much money as I've spent on the CD's.
    you mean you spend $240 a year on NIN records. I am a bit confused.
  • I would like to see how Mirimax is going to implement this idea. I only ONCE managed to watch some music video from launch.com at the 300K level stream(where you get REAL sound quality, and the images don't look heavily compressed). I can't imagine paying for a movie where you'd get lag during the show, or "can't connect to server" or some dumb error message saying the plugin cannot be insatalled, OS crash,etc. pay per view on cable never had these problems.
  • They're the ones who where suing mp3.com a while back over that inane patent on music distribution on the net.
    Cheers,

    Rick Kirkland
  • There is no solution that will "make everyone happy". Particularily content providers who make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. They can afford to spend a small percentage of their profit (i.e. millions) to lobby the prostitutes . . . I mean elected officials who are representives of the American people.
  • That sucks for latency, though.
  • Blockbuster's days are numbered. All they really are is a (very bursty) bandwidth provider. Once there's a way to get movies downloaded directly into homes, the entire video rental industry will disappear. And it won't take very long.

    Oh, you mean like Pay-per-view? PPV has been around for quite some time, and Blockbuster's business seems to be doing quite well, thank you. Besides, there are millions of people that don't even have cable TV, let alone a computer with a high-bandwidth connection, that do have VCR's that are quite happy with renting a VHS tape from the local video store.

  • The swedish government laid out plans to spend about 1 billion$ And Private companies does the same. So the whole country of sweden(which allso allreaddy is the most internet able country in percentage (we only have 9 million people)) will have broadband within a few years. There allreaddy exists ways to get it for about 25$ a month if you live in one of the major cities. So this sounds like a really good thing. yay! Movies on demand.
  • Right now I can go on IRC and download any movie I want for free. Even if they are still in theaters.

    Hmm, yeah, I love watching home-video style recordings of movies. Don't you love the noises of the teenagers making out, and the old man coughing up a lung, who were in the movie theater?
    I also love the overall crappy quality of the videos.

    Not to mention, the joyous hours I would spend downloading these movies, on my 56k modem.

    *Insert "Hahaha, I have a t3 at my college" reply here*
  • Yes, I'll give you that, there are some very high quailty bootlegs out there, which I have seen. The majority that I've encountered are pretty cheap, such as the quailty which was described in my post.

    And for the record, anything called DIVX can't be good. Don't people learn?
  • If so, there's an ariticel on heise.de [heisde.de] about this. It also mentions that Miriamax makes Internet Explorer 5.0 and Media Player 6.4 the minimum requirements... I wonder how long it'd take the Linux-community to find a workaround.
  • There is no compelling reason for Miramax to go to the trouble. The quality will be worse than VHS, and it'll be less convenient than going to the store and renting a VHS tape. If it was hardcore indie filmmaking with a niche audience, putting it online is justified because a production like that can't deal with the distributive overhead of getting their tapes into the neighborhood Hollywood Video. But as to why anybody would go to the trouble to spend 20 minutes downloading "Cider House Rules" to watch it on a tiny little window in their monitor is beyond me.

    Francis Hwang

  • No, you can't write to your congressman and ask for him to be set free because he's a CANADIAN! In fact, a QUEBECER! But that's OK, he'll be free in a couple months just like all the other murderers and rapists are up here. Maybe you can adopt him. - gnome

    - gnome

  • SightSound.com CEO Scott Sander said, "An average feature-length film might take 15 to 20 minutes to download on a DSL or Cable Modem connection. The same film would take eight to 10 hours to download over a 56k dial-up modem connection."

    Let's talk about the dial-up modem scenario first:

    On a good day, a 56k modem will download about 5k/second. That translates to 300k/minute and about 17.5MB/hour. At that rate, one could download 140MB in eight hours or 175MB in 10 hours.

    If we use 175MB as the expected file size, their "20 minute" download translates to 300k/s. That means a full T-1 or anything slower (including most cable modems) will take 40 minutes or longer, in the best of conditions. Real world numbers will probably be much higher.

    Ignoring the long download times, their 175MB estimate for a movie size seems laughable, at best. I've seen an ASF of The Matrix that looked decent compressed to 600MB. Any 90-minute film crunched to 175MB, would, IMHO, be rather unwatchable.



    ---
  • This could be a great way for independant film makers to get exposed. Especially since the Desktop video market is about to explode over the next few years.

    Of course some films will be crap, but I bet there will be a lot of great movies that Mirimax could filter out and make available for a relatively low cost.
  • whooped-doo. I am so glad that miramax sent us the privilege of some day being able to download one of their super-exiting movies. yay. cheers. I'm as happy as a mole on groundhog day. (?)
  • I think this could be cool - I'm sure there aren't well stocked video stores in some places =)

    um, if there aren't well stocked video stores, what are the odds that there will be broadband access (or access at all)???

  • Hmm, Mirimax published the dub of Mononoke didn't they?
    ----
    Don't underestimate the power of peanut brittle
  • A majority certainly have 56k dialup connect, but an increasing number are moving to cable & DSL. For those peaple (including ME!!!), a 15 minute wait for a download is just time enough for me to make a nice snack. Bandwidth is a serious potential problem, but there is too much money on the line to let that be a problem, and high speed access becomes more prevelent, the "powers that be" will (hopefully) find a way to scale everything upwards to compensate. We'll all move to the Internet2 backbone and all those people will happily move to Internet3 or something.

    Don't worry -- be happy -- this is all about choice -- VHS - DVD - or whatever! Take your choice.
  • I watch as little TV as possible on channels with ads. I hate spending 1 hour watching 40-45 minutes of TV, and I hate VHS's qualitative drop.
    I have been proclaiming my belief in an Internet variant of the Ad-Funded system whereby you make a choice, will I watch this with ads or not? and if not am I willing to pay the distributors price for the privlege. Resellers (Cable and Internet companies) could agree a fixed price with the provider and then set their own price and advertising regimes to try and recoup those costs, also allowing for areas with broadband networks but not the interconnecting infrastructure to have internal streams.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Although I am sure this is useless to half the people out there you need to remember it does fit a niche market. If your sitting in your college dorm room with no TV or car to go into town the only real way for you to watch movies or television is threw your computer. On campus is the one place you could download something like this at 500k/sec and think the wait is reasonable. Although I understand all the comments of the other /. about this being 10 years to early. Remember that it needs to start somewhere and if you think about all those college campuses out there you have a market. If this was Word, then I'd have spell check....
  • I think this could be cool - I'm sure there aren't well stocked video stores in some places =) (there has to be *somewhere*!)

    But, I'd rather wait until the bandwidth and format issues have been worked out - I sure hope they're released in a format playable by Linux ;)

    --

  • hmm (Score:1)

    by wizbit ( 122290 )
    i just hope to god they have a better streaming media technology than ASF. i've spent years on college campuses where full length bootlegs or pirates of movies are in ASF format (in ungodly length) and suffer from its generally terrible compression loss. it makes sense to have movies which have to be downloaded each view or at least "unlocked" for each view. divx had its shot and didn't make it... i guess they figure if you're not going to pay to have the media on hand you might as well spend all night downloading it! whatever. unless there's some seriously good, high quality low bandwidth reproduction (i mean, why pay money if you have to watch a movie that's grainy or only fits in a postage stamp-sized window?) this has the potential to become old news REALLY fast.
  • This will last for about a week unless two things happen:

    1. They come up with a payment scheme that doesn't suck. I mean, are people really going to pay like 5 bucks to download a movie that they can watch once, in most cases on a crappy comptuer monitor? I'm thinking like a buck a dowload would work. How much overhead is there really anyway, especially with allt he advertising payouts of a heavy-hits website?

    2. They use an ecryption scheme that doesn't suck. This is much less likely. For some reason content providers have not been able to understand encryption for the life of them. They should take a lesson from banks and use already existing standards. if they really want us to only be able to watch once, they are sorely mistaken and should think about the reality of things. If I can *see* it I can *record* it. Now repeat after me...

    ------

  • Good fscking idea, lets overload the laggy network we have now with something that is better pushed though a DVD/vhs media. Oh and watching a low res movie that is flicking, good idea! That will get my $5... sigh

    The above was sacarism, that or I am just bitter from the amount of bandwidth I have here... sigh

  • -1, redundant, see post #2
  • it'll always be possible to record. if nothing else, write a video driver which saves to mpeg instead of outputting to a monitor.
  • Jesus H. Cheap-bastard Christ, I am sick unto fucking death of people suggesting that we have even more ads rammed down our throats to "defray" the cost of some inexpensive item that they don't want to pay for.

    Then how do you propose to fund the production of content? I'd personally be quite happy to pay a reasonable price ($10-$15) to d/l a movie, or ($0.50-$1.00) a 'one-time' stream. But others are unwilling to, and have the means to insure that they don't pay if they don't want to. You can see this in action with Napster et al.

    We need to find some revenue model that provides content to the consumer that they can use as they wish, yet provides sufficient renumeration to the content providers that they continue to create content. Ads are one method to do this. If you don't like ads, suggest another revenue model that will make everyone happy.

  • ...of bandwidth. Everyone talks about all of the great things that they will be able to do over the Net once most people have broadband connections. What they fail to realize is that much of what they want to do already has better channels of distribution and will be a large drain on bandwidth. Once everyone has Cable or DSL service and is downloading Mighty Aphrodite from Miramax everything will slow down, and it'll be like everyone has 33.6 modems again.
    Keep Net transfers slim!
  • It is hard to believe people are still using modems. This isn't the twentieth century. You can watch 'The Beverly Hillbilies' on liketelevision.com now as many times as you want.
  • Well, we all saw how long the whole DIVX fiasco lasted, so I'm not expecting this one to last very long for a couple reasons:

    1.) Its a proprietary format. I woulden't want to have to download some player to play the film when I'm already sucking up all my bandwidth to try and get it in the first place!

    2.) I don't want to pay each time I want to watch the movie, I want to pay once and be able to show my friends without having to show them my cc number. It should work the same way that VHS tapes work. You buy once for $15 and watch as much as you can possibly stand.

    Just my thoughts
  • The article states that a feature length film could be downloaded in 15-20 minutes over a broadband connection, and viewed full screen at VHS quality. WTF??? Whose broadband technology are they using?
  • While I'm sure that this solution won't be perfect for everyone, it's a great start.

    Blockbuster's days are numbered. All they really are is a (very bursty) bandwidth provider. Once there's a way to get movies downloaded directly into homes, the entire video rental industry will disappear. And it won't take very long.

    Though some may object to the play once (a la DIVX) aspect, that doesn't bother me. I didn't like DIVX because the players cost more, it seemed wasteful (a disk you have to throw away), and, most important, it dialed the phone whenever you watched a movie. If the disk had a fuse or something that blew, it would have appealed to more people.



    --- Speaking only for myself,

  • Reminds me of the old saying:

    You can never have more bandwidth than a station wagon full of tapes driving at 100 MPH...

    or something like that...

    Remember, bandwidth is bits/sec :-)

  • The Street Performer Protocol [firstmonday.org]

    Picture an online movie studio where artists could request money to produce a work they intend to release as freely available online. They post a trailer for free to generate interest, then charge to complete it. The more popular they became the more they could charge. They could also make money on merchandise (ask George Lucas), higher quality offline formats (like DVD, or even film), and offlne presentation (no need to sign away theater rights, and the hype online could make this more lucrative).

    Sound Interesting?

  • This sounds more like a publicity stunt than anything. There isn't any new technology involved and it isn't particularly practical. It is apparent that eventually physical media distribution will go away, but it is also apparent that it is 3-5 years away at least for video content.

  • I suppose this might be what "broadband distribution issues" meant, but @Home filters out video >5min long, and yells at you if you download files >500MB consistently - trying to "conserve bandwidth", to make up for the fact that they have 5.2e2063 people on a node. They say they don't want the broadband competing with cable - does this mean that the largest cable ISP (to which I subscribe) will be effectively "out of the loop" when it comes to distribution? I hope not. Anyway, they need to work this out with AT&T and Excite@Home.

    ---------------------------------
  • Miramax will eventually allow you to download some crappy movie to your computer but the Library of Congress has no plans to digitize books i.e. make available over the Internet.

    This bodes well for all of us. 30 years and we will be lucky if we can even dress ourselves any longer.
  • Mafiaboy has been in proson for 1 day with no trial for the DDOS attacks.

    Ha! 1 day! Wow, a new record! And with no trial! What a shame! Write back in 90 days, and we might have something to complain about.

    ... but I'm not sure I would even then...

  • Forget about it guys. It looks like they require internet explorer and M$ media player. IMO if it doesn't run on linux it is as if it doesn't exist.
  • Read The Post. I said that I can go on IRC and download any movie I want for free.

    Not that I do go on IRC...

    Please think before you respond to posts.

  • I am not sure how popular this will be. Right now I can go on IRC and download any movie I want for free. Even if they are still in theaters.

    Pay-Per-View is one thing I am not sure will make the transition to the web.

  • a nominal fee if "Clerks" (the best thing to come out of Miramax IMHO) was available on the 'net to me on demand.

    Uh-huh.

  • You know, I hate to reply to myself but I just realized what a great candidate this flick has to be for this sort of thing. It's black and white, which has to make the size of the data to be compressed/streamed a lot less (or am I just an idiot?).

    So long as this is a pay ONCE, view on demand scheme, of course. No DivX-type swindles, thank you.

  • Pure evil. (Score:2)

    by pb ( 1020 )
    I'm not really impressed by our 'friends' at sightsound.com. On the one hand, designing a site that "needs" Java, IE5, Microsoft Media Player, Shockwave Flash, etc., etc. is pretty mean, and they don't give you any feedback if those aren't present. (You need Java to find out that you need IE5, etc., etc.)

    However, they did give me a reason to test out IE5 for UNIX again, and it's okay. It looks significantly better than the old IE4 for UNIX, (it loaded for me, maybe that's because I'm running on an older SPARC, or maybe they finally fixed some of those version-specific issues they had.) but it doesn't support any plug-ins, or no one has written any. (same thing?) Oh, and they're using Sun's JVM on Solaris. I got a kick out of that. :)

    Anyhow, yet again, I'd love to live in a world where web sites really were cross-platform, or companies would bite the bullet, and develop apps properly. It looks like IE5 for UNIX should work great as long as (a) you have enough RAM for it, and (b) you don't plan on doing anything else.

    If Microsoft would release a decent version of IE5 for Linux, they could really capture some market share where it matters, or if the Wine project develops to the point where IE5 runs decently, (the installer too, please...) they might get some converts anyhow. But as it stands, I'm not too impressed with their attitude either.

    Looks like another reason to use Mozilla, and write friendly letters to companies: "I'd love to use your software, but..."
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [152.7.41.11].
  • Expect them to use some kind of "secure," proprietary format with a player that can read the datestamp and disable it. Someone will crack it, yes, but we don't know how long it will take.

    I still think that a subscription model would be great for movies and music. They've got to make it easier to find the music I want and pay for it than it would be for me to pirate it. If I could have access to, for example, every Nine Inch Nails album for $20 a month, for streaming from anywhere, I'd pay it, and over a year they'd have made just as much money as I've spent on the CD's.
  • The internet is not for movies, yet,

    But, the head of the MPAA thinks the Internet allows someone in their basement to distribute a DVD quality feature length motion picture to 4 billion people instantly!

  • Right now I can go on IRC and download any movie I want for free. Even if they are still in theaters.

    It is my sincere hope that the people who do that, eventually end up trading movies with an investigator, and end up getting fined. And if they do it enough times, maybe they could even get an education in anal sex at a "corrections institute."

    This would have great advantages. If enough people got prosecuted for piracy, then pirates might start getting scared and cool down. Then the entertainment industries would have no excuse/reason to continue using closed or copy-protected formats, and that would make life much easier for people who are not thieves. When Disney sells me an unencrypted Tron MPEG, I'll be happy.


    ---
  • If I want pay-per-view movies I can just switch my digital satellite receiver to the appropriate channels. MPEG video equivalent to DVD-quality, for just a couple of bucks. I think Echostar's (Dish Network) latest receiver models include a TiVo-like disk system so you can pause/rewind the movie if you need to take a potty break or grab a snack.

    Heck, in the time it takes to download even over a fast line, I can drive to Blockbuster to pick up the video and be back. (I don't recall who first made the comment about not underestimating the bandwidth of a stationwagon filled with magtape, but I do recall once calculating the bandwidth of the highway that ran between two university towns where I lived/worked.)
  • Oh, happy days. Miramax is our saviour. Now we can download low-quality videos (Windows Media Player) of low-quality movies (Miramax) and watch them in our low-quality operating systems (Windows 98.) Welcome to the new millenium.
  • Give me pay-once downloadable mpeg's, and then I'll be happy.

    Ah, but then evil HACKERS will pirate the movies using their elite underground network of black market bootleggers.

    (heh. I feel like a journalist.)
  • Clerks is available "on demand" to me. It's called the DVD and laserdiscs that I own.
  • Seems like that, no matter how good the encryption they provide is (and it probably will be pretty lame anyway), people will just do what they're doing now with DVDs. Take a perfectly legal playback, then do a high-res screen capture and then re-encode it using a better codec than the original. Then, they can join their 3l33t friends on #pr0n-m0vieZ-wAreZ-fbi-go-home and trade tiny ASF files that are at least as good as VHS.

    I'm still a believer in the "drug dealers don't sell aspirin" argument, I just think that Miramax is going to really have to make the pay-per-view fee really small...
  • First, until everyone has broadband, no one is going to bother to download a likely lower quality than VHS video from the net? Also, who wants to tie up their bandwidth for hours and hours to watch some movie when they can just go rent it for 2 dollars and still have their computer available to them? It's still far too early for this to be a good idea - give us 10 years to improve broadband access to the point where the net would be useable even if EVERYONE on it was downloading these movies. I'd rather just pay for pay-per-view tv than pay for pay-per-view internet. The internet is not for movies, yet, so I dont see this idea succeeding in much magnitude.
  • It looks good until you think for about .01 seconds and realize that this is nothing more than divx that wastes bandwidth. Add on top their (almost certain) proprietary encryption, viewing software, etc, and you have a product that bascially sucks in every way it can. Give me pay-once downloadable mpeg's, and then I'll be happy.
  • This does not sound particularly interesting to me... Watching Wazzup or South Park clips in a tiny window with RealVideo or Windows Media (or anything of the sort) might be acceptable, but entire movies? The video and audio quality is even lower than that of VHS!

    I recently read that TiVo [tivo.com] plans to offer on-demand movies and found that interesting. I'm curious how this will work though! One hour of video in respectable quality requires about 3Gb (!) of space. An average two-hour movie would take about 1 DAY to download through my 640Kbps ADSL connection (assuming it was working at full capacity)! Now imagine a few hudnred thousand people doing that on the net at the same time...!

    Obviously, broadband is not up to this and I do not think it will be up to this for quite some time. I believe the way TiVo will be doing this is by using some of the few hundreds of PPV channels to schedule essentialy multicasting of the movies. So, you say you want a movie in the evening. That movie is scheduled to be multicast (in analog form) at some point during the night and the TiVo wakes up and records it (with MacroVision enabled, if the distributor chooses, BTW) and you can watch it the next day. This is somewhat better than NetFlix (overnight, instead of 2-3 days for delivery)... However, you get no extras and no 5.1 surround like with a DVD (and I think fully digital transmission of video and 5.1 surround will take some time, mostly because of legal reasons -- watch what happened with poor MP3 and imagine how happy companies would be with Dolby Digital... ;-)

    BTW, if you do a search for multicast file transfer [google.com] you might be surprised with the volume of results... This seems to me the only viable way to do things (if company lawyers allow it, of course! ;-).

  • Why the hell would I want to pay $3 for a crappy mpeg4 movie that takes 30mins to d/l when I can rent a perfectly good DVD for $3? Unlike most Americans, I'm not a fat, lazy bastard who cares about getting off his ass and returning a movie.

    Let's talk about Mpeg4. Mpeg4 supports up to 10mbps streams. At its highest bitrate it's equivalent to a NTSC broadcast, meaning somewhere around 330 lines or so. Nowhere near as good as a DVD and no Dolby Digital 5.1 support to boot.

    There is no possible way they're going to encode the movies at 10mbps, 700k-1mbps seems more likely. While the movies look decent at that bitrate, even my 1.5mbps cable modem tends to choke on them realtime. Can you immagine every cable user on your block trying to watch a 1mbps stream at once? It just ain't gonna happen. If this is the market these PPV-Streaming companies are shooting for they've got a serious flaw in their business model.

    On top of that, throw in no Dolby Digital sound, having to sit in front of your PC, etc. You get the idea. I think the real future of mpeg4 movies is when they start building it into cable boxes, that way the tech is seamless. You won't really notice the movie is coming over the net, because everything is.
  • I agree advertising only leads to more advertising and shitty service.
    Case in point: You can watch 'free' television with 15 - 20 minutes advertising (30 % [tvfa.org]), pandering to the lowest common denominator (When Animals Attack? When Good Pets Go Bad? ) , lack of minority representation,and a complete disconnection from viewers and disinterest in improving the quality of the shows (or even killing off good shows that have passed their prime). Or you can watch premium TV and for $10 a month get quality shows (Sopranos, Sex In The City, Oz), no advertising spam in between shows, shows that end once the spark is gone since with no ad dollars there's no point in keeping a show alive once its past its prime a la Frasier or Friends (thus the Sopranos will end in the 5th season [yahoo.com]), minorities being represented in realistic, non-stereotypical, gripping roles and constant improvement of service (or else you switch service).

    With this prior knowledge, why would anyone clamour for more advertising supported services?
    I'd rather pay once and for all and keep away advertisers than have my personal data, tastes and habits sold to one and all to defray the costs of me watching a movie. Like, my personal viewing habits, address, etc. are worth how ever many measely dollars I am saving by watching advertising supported material. Yeah, right.



  • Am I the only one that opposes total electronic distribution of art? I like holding my DVD's, CD's, and books.

    Don't worry, you're not the only one.

    I also like to read books (the good old fashioned paper kind), watch movies (on DVD or VHS) and listen to music (audio CDs). However, I also like the convience of having these same things available in electronic form. How often have you looked for hours for something in a book when having grep and and electronic form of the book would have take seconds? Or, when have you really wanted to hear a song and all of the places that sell CDs in town are closed? Or what if you want to take your CDs with you on vacation (laptop -vs- lugging 200 CDs)?

    I don't feel anytime soon (read: next 200 years) that movies, books and audio will be available strictly in digital format. Why? Because there is a higher cost of entry as opposed to the "hard copy" forms. Want to watch a VHS tape? Buy a $50 VCR. Want to watch a movie in ASF or MPG? Buy a $1500 computer. There's even more of a case with books. It costs me only the cost of the book to purchase and read it, but if the book was only available in electronic form, I would also have to buy a $1,500 PC as well. Put simply, it isn't worth it to publishers; it makes the entry level higher for consumers.

    Put simply, I like having both mediums available. I usually choose hard copy (books, CDs, DVDs, etc) over their digital counterparts, but having them in both forms allows more of an "on demand" type of viewing/listening/reading.

  • The joke's on anyone who relies on streaming media to protect their "intellectual property", since the only thing keeping users from saving a more permanent copy is reliance on proprietary client software that doesn't allow users to do that.

    So, how long until the MPAA files an injunction against "unauthorized" programmers of TCP/IP stacks and hard disk manufacturers for distributing tools whose only real (wink, wink) purpose is the unauthorized copying of M*ramax films?

    Maybe they'll get lucky and the government will classify movies as "munitions" to prevent Bambi and The Sound of Music from falling into enemy hands.

    Hey, it worked for cryptography, didn't it?

  • What'll they think up next? Streaming video over coaxial cable?

    Nah. Sooner or later, somebody would create a magnetic storage medium to "archive" this streaming video and then the entertainment industry will go bankrupt!

  • Netflix distributes movies over the Net... kinda. OK, so you rent your DVD's from Netflix and they send them to you in the mail. It still beats this Miramax crap and Blockbuster. Who would turn down unlimited rentals (only 4 discs out at once) for around $20 a month?

    Am I the only one that opposes total electronic distribution of art? I like holding my DVD's, CD's, and books.

  • Good idea - in theroy

    "A feature length movie will take 8 to 10 hours to download over a 56k dialup connection" - which I'd guess the majority of people will have. What they are forgetting is that 56k is the MAXIMUM throughput and who can sustain a reliable connection for that length of time? I haven't heard of anybody yet!

    "20 minutes to download on a DSL or Cable Modem connection" sounds a lot better - until you realise that this is 'pay-per-view', once you've spent so long downloading it you'll have to pay every single time you want to watch the movie. Something that I don't really see taking off.

    They also speak of "The films will probably be available for viewing for one day, after which their files would become disabled" - does this sound like it will be multi-platform to you? Doesn't to me :(

    Ho hum.
    Richy C. [beebware.com]
    --

  • Then how do you propose to fund the production of content?

    Sell the movies. Use an unencrypted and open format, and just sell unscrambled files. There's your money.

    But won't people circumvent? Yeah, some will. So? One can also trivially copy an audio CD or a VHS tape, and those markets somehow survived. Very little computer software is copy protected these days, but the software market doesn't seem to have a problem. I'm still getting paid.

    But won't a higher fraction of the market start pirating, since the internet makes it so blasted easy? Well, the internet also make it a lot easier to catch people too. MPAA can't afford to put a security gurad next to every VCR to make sure that I don't hand any copied movies to another person. But they can quite easily have a few narcs check the pirate distrition channels (whether that be web search engines, IRC channels, Napster-like programs, or whatever) and log IP #s and collect evidence for prosecution.

    Remember: The guys at ID Software were able to buy Ferraris because enough people (like me, for example) registered Doom or bought Doom 2 in stores. Doom would have been easy to pirate and undoubtably was pirated to some extent. But you can't deny the physical reality of the Ferrari: The business model worked.


    ---
  • According to sightcouns.com, all they offer are one time downloads. You download the file (EXE which becomes an ASF video), which takes the 15-20 mins broadband, and you have the file as long as you want it. Whenever you want to watch the movie or whatever it is you downloaded, it prompts you for payment information (credit card, o course) which is verified over SSL and the ASF becomes viewable for a set period of time until it becomes disabled.

    This is currently how their system works... for big name movies like they were talking about, who knows if they'll think of something new.

    I'm just waiting for someone to hack the encryption or expirey checks so you just need to download the video, run the crack, and you've got it.

    Even then I can see people 'defending' the bootlegged ASFs they get off the net, saying they purchased the download. I dunno...

    I agree that this is too early for the net though... not enough interest, and the quality of video still isn't good. Now that we have DVD, and NO PLACE will stream dvd quality video for years at least, it's not really worth the download of a large video file, especially when you have to pay for it.

    Storage is the other big issue. So many people have movie collections over 100's... how many people have 30GB spare for video storage?

    I can see however, from the legal lines, something like this taking off for a company like SightSound.com. If their service costs them nothing, and they sell their product, they're making money, and they won't care if they get pirated. And especially if it is made illegal for the files to be pirated, they'll have the law behind them. - They can make money with no worries whatsoever.

    All in all, we'll just have to see where things go with it...
  • Is this going to be any different?

    Capturing a data stream to a file is fairly trivial, and even if they use a special client and/or a closed format to play it, that won't take long to break. We know this and they know this, so what is the incentive for them to do provide this service? If they charge for it, it will be circumvented, and if they don't charge for it, there is no reason for them to provide the service.

    As a suggestion, how would people react to Miramax (in this case, but it generalises to other content providers as well) moving to an ad-based revenue model? ie: release a player that will show the [movie|book|mp3] at no cost the the user, but will display an ad banner as the stream is playing. It might even be possible to encode the ads into the content stream, for that matter.

    This would seem to benefit all camps. Piracy would likely be reduced, as there is no financial or convenience benefit -- you still have to d/l the stream, either from the content provider or your favorite warez site, and both are free. The provider gets revenue from the advertising, and the advertisers get lots of eyeballs. Win win. For that matter, they could make the files available for stream and/or download in a standard format with the adbar overlayed on the bottom.

    I realise this is likely a pipe-dream, as the providers have shown much more interest in keeping far more control than this would allow, but what do the rest of us think?

  • Re:Exactly what prevents me from "archiving" this (Score:3)

    by djrogers ( 153854 ) on Wednesday April 19, 2000 @06:26AM (#1123542)
    RTFA.... The download is only active for 1 day. One would infer from their description of the process that they are using some sort of cool technology to allow this.

  • Re:Look what happened to the King book, though... (Score:4)

    by jimhill ( 7277 ) on Wednesday April 19, 2000 @07:11AM (#1123543) Homepage
    Jesus H. Cheap-bastard Christ, I am sick unto fucking death of people suggesting that we have even more ads rammed down our throats to "defray" the cost of some inexpensive item that they don't want to pay for.

    You people would have us live in a world of ebooks with embedded ads, streaming movies with embedded ads, streaming music with embedded ads, DVDs with unskippable ads, web-enabled phones with pushed ads. Enough, goddammit!

    Let's put a stop to this bullshit idea of letting advertisers "help" promote something new before I have to worry about bringing my newborn son home from the hospital with "Brought to you by Mediconsult, Inc" tattooed on his ass.

  • Decline of American Civilization (Score:4)

    by ucblockhead ( 63650 ) on Wednesday April 19, 2000 @06:02AM (#1123544) Homepage Journal
    So, when combined with the previous /. story, this means that in the future, we will all have instant access to the latest Adam Sandler piece of dreck, but if I want to read an obscure 19th century book, I'll have to hop a plane to Washington.

  • The return of DIVX (Score:4)

    by msaulters ( 130992 ) on Wednesday April 19, 2000 @06:03AM (#1123545) Homepage
    They haven't yet decided which films, but this is a cool step in the right direction for film distribution. Now if they can just work out some of those broadband issues *sigh*.
    Am I wrong? This sounds to me like DIVX without the DVD, and requiring butt-loads of bandwidth. We cheer when DIVX dies, but we applaud THIS??? I've recently noted PPV prices on cable go up dramatically (from 3.95 to 6.95). Can we expect this to be any cheaper? How can we justify the bandwidth usage? I think I'm going to puke.

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