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Movies Media

Napster And Legal Movie Distribution 77

Posted by CmdrTaco from the wouldn't-it-be-nice dept.
FreakzZ sent us linkage to an MSNBC story which talks about Napster and Hollywood getting in bed together by forming a new start up known as AppleSoup. It doesn't really say what sort of stuff will be on the site, but one can only hope that this isn't just vapor.
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Napster and Legal Movie Distribution More

Napster and Legal Movie Distribution

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  • Its £104, (unless it went up in the last 4 days). Anyway, I haven't actually read through all the terms and conditions, but I'm pretty certain that if you have a radio and no TV then you get it for free.

    Although if I'm right, this means the radio service must be funded from the TV only licence. These people without TV's are stealing from all us couch potatoes I tell you!
  • This has nothing to do with Napster! It's founded by two of the investors in Napster. It is a totally separate company from Napster and totally different software.

  • Between Apple Computer for all things digital and Apple Corps. for all things musical, I think they will have a hard time retaining that name.

  • 13 - 17 is a rather useless spot to be trying to get customers from

    That's not true. You gotta remember that even though they don't have very much income, they don't have any expenses. Most 13-17 year olds will find a way to get money (from their parents, or by getting a job) and spend that money faster than an adult will. Or, if they don't have the money to blow, they can get their parents to pay for it.
  • Why in hell would a major company (i.e. we're not talking garage bands here) that wants to distribute content legally want to use the Napster model, particularly for HUGE content? More than half of my Napster downloads fail, and they're only 3-4 megabytes. What's going to happen when they're 100 or 1000 times that big? And why would you want to make your customers have to go hunting for your products and hope that someone just happens to have them available at the time? If you're distributing content legally and therefore have no reason to fear being sued, wouldn't it make far more sense to put the content on some nice, fast, highly-connected servers at a well-known place and just let people ftp them in peace?

  • Re:Napster is a demographic (Score:3)

    by thesparkle ( 174382 ) on Monday July 17, 2000 @04:17AM (#928490) Homepage
    The demographic is useful. Youth buys, but only certain things. With the economy such as it is, and many parents both working and spending less time with Jr, many parents are placating children with "stuff". A few years ago, mind you this is quite out of date, the 12-18 year old market, spent on average, about 20Billion a year. This does not include what their parents spend on them for clothes, food, etc. but rather what they personally spend in discretionary income.

    The most desirable of demographics remains women, 26-54, however. They are responsible for the sale of big ticket purchases, cars, appliances, etc.

    As I learned in marketing class, "A man may decide to buy a car, but a woman decides the features, color, type and price". It may sound outdated, but I know that is what happens in my home.

  • hmm... I'm fairly certain that when bandwidth increases in the future the differences between MB and GB won't matter much.

    The bit that DOES matter is that nobody will want to pay for the subscription service, when people can just rename their Star_wars.mpg to Home_movie_31337.mpg . I doubt that the 'policing' that is being proposed goes further than looking at the titles of the films proposed. I'd be insane for them to try to d/l and watch each and every film to check whether it is copyrighted.
    The napster method is definely not the right one if you're trying to make money off people's downloads - you need a central server for that.

    Da Warez D00d
  • Considering that apples would make a horrible soup, their corporate name does not seem like a good omen. Of course, one could wonder what kind of a name "Napster" would make for a file-sharing service.. NetShadow
  • He didn't say it _was_ Napster )at lease reading it over a couple times, I don't see it) He did say "the Napster model" which isn't the same thing at all as saying this is Napster.
  • AppleSoup is working to produce a next generation peer-to-peer network that lets content owners distribute "anything digital" via the Internet while giving them a way to control and monetize their intellectual property. For more information, send email to info@applesoup.com [mailto] So bassically this will be a gnutella [wego.com] clone.
  • (from the story)

    "Basically we're using technology to give copyright owners a secure way to use viral distribution without losing copyright protection," said Bales.

    (Emphasis added).

    "Hey, cool! It looks like AppleSoup is hosting a porno movie! Something called 'ILoveYou'...."

    "Oh, man. I don't feel so good. I think I just caught a bad case of Battlefield Earth from that unprotected contact with AppleSoup..."

    The possibilities are limitless! And the irony of modern pop-crap spreading unstoppably like a metaphorical disease is just too much...
    Incidentally, does the name "AppleSoup" imply that all of the video will be in Quicktime only?....


    Joe Sixpack is dead!
  • You've probably never heard of DivX ;-) (yes, that's the actual name, including the emoticon). It's a high-quality video codec (actually just MPEG-4 with MP3 audio hacked in). I downloaded a 2 minute trailer for The Matrix the other day, and it weighed in at 640x480, 30fps at a whopping 13MB (and it looked as good as some of the videotape formats I have access to at work, although not quite as good as Betacam SP or 1-inch). It can be used to re-encode a DVD down to more manageable sizes, but it can also be used to encode original content for easy distribution over the net.
    _______
    Scott Jones
    Newscast Director / ABC19 WKPT
    Commodore 64 Democoder
  • I read the press release. I don't see that your quote contradicts the idea that purveyors of IP content would join their network and serve their content off of big servers. The server scalability is the "member"'s concern and not AppleSoup's. I was not suggesting that AppleSoup would run those servers, just that they might end up sporting features that would make the arrangement work better than it currrently does on Napster.
  • Agreed.

    Pac Bell just sent me my letter telling me that I'm not eligible for DSL service (prolly too far from the CO, as I suspected). The bandwidth aint there for movies. It just aint. 56k is barely enough to just surf - I don't even like wasting my time waiting for pr0n downloads.

    And cable? I'd rather give Bill Gates a rim job than go back to giving Charter Communications my hard-earned dollars.

    if it ain't broke, then fix it 'till it is!
  • The press release also falsely claims that Bill Bales co-founded Quote.com.
    Quote.com was founded in late 1993, and made a profit in the fiscal year ending Sept. 1995. Bill joined Quote.com in the fall of 1995.

    He also misled Quote.com about at least one important issue while he was employed there.

  • What do they mean by: Compensates the artists. Is this going to be a paying service?
  • Unless the industry forces people to buy new compliant CD players, free file swapping is going to be around for a while. A friend of mine sent me the link to a site www.popnuvo.com that claim artists can still get compensated for music being free online. very interesting. their music was, strangely, excellent.
    another slant I guess
  • goat

    You raise some interesting points.

  • In bed together? (Score:3)

    by (void*) ( 113680 ) on Monday July 17, 2000 @03:05AM (#928503)
    But who is f*cking who? :-)

    Less facetiously, I am wondering what Napster gets out of this. They'll have to pass on some royalty to Hollywood, and probably will be resticted in the kinds of things they can do to the data.

    And what would Hollywood get out of this? If they think this is some cheap way of not hosting the Gigabytes of download, they are just going to be in for a shock. Chances are, Joe Random's harddisk is not going to have as much throughput as they expensive servers, unless Napster is going to do a different model. Then the question comes down to why Napster. I would imagine that some other company would have the relevant experience in setting up high bandwidth streaming servers.

  • Aren't they going to have problems when AAPL sues them for taking their name? The even InterCapped the name.

    Then again, I could go on about the silliness behind a name like AppleSoup. How strange

    They are definitely trying to capitalize on the brand name that Apple has built up over the last 23 years, to give themselves instant recognition and credibility.

    Reminds me of that shameless "Dodge Different" campaign that Chrysler is running.

  • So let me get this straight - I pay you for hosting a movie file that eats up half my hard drive and pretty much all of my bandwidth (not everyone has T3 access you know)?! Ok I'll bite...what's available? Hmm...a trailer for the new Julia Roberts piece of crap and a short montage of scenes from last year's Kevin Costner box office flop. Cool, where do I sign?

    The Divine Creatrix in a Mortal Shell that stays Crunchy in Milk
  • It's a former employee of Napster that left and is now starting AppleSoup.

    Refrag
  • Something tells me, that these people are looking at their options... Hrmm, lets see, real, windows media player, doh, why can't people just get the whole file at once, oh, look, I bet the kind people at Napster could come up with something, and we could save them a lot of legal trouble.

    Yes, and now we can set up a buggy distribution network.

    Of course, we could have just set up an FTP site. Duh.


    We're all different.
  • Did anyone catch the Future of Digital Music hearing on CSPAN on Saturday? It was excellent. I was just flipping through, and there on CSPAN was some kid, last name Kan, who was listed under Gnutella! I *had* to see what this was about. Actually it was a great hearing. I will be writing Senators Schumer, Leahy and Hatch thanking them for keeping an open mind. They were surprisingly clueful!! The funniest part was when Hatch demanded the RIAA shill to answer the question whether it was legal or not to copy a cd to tape for his wife. She fumbled and backtracked. There was also a joke about the Senate server going down because of people downloading Schumer's voting record. I think their cluefulness should be rewarded with at least a thank you letter of recognition. I will probably post that letter somewhere on Slashdot when I finish it.
  • Are you sure that those failures are due to the client or the whole setup itself? I've seen quite a lot of people shutting down their computers when a download was running. Offcourse those downloads failed but IMHO you can't blaim the whole napster concept for it.
  • I am skeptical about this working. How good can the quality be on a movie downloaded from the net? Unless it's going to be a bazillion megabytes in size, I don't see how the quality could compare to popular technologies like DVD.

    Fact is that I, like many other people, have no desire to watch movies on my computer screens when I have a large projection TV in the room next door.

    On the other hand, this could lead to more 'fun' and entertaining law suits.
  • I'd be insane for them to try to d/l and watch each and every film to check whether it is copyrighted.
    That is true, but why is that the only other option they have besides looking at the titles of the files? First, who is controlling the distribution of content on this service? Napster-like does not necessarily mean Napster with different file types being distributed. Since this is done with the "blessing" of Hollywood, it seems that they would be a likely point of distribution for the copyrighted content. The policing could include checking the films against the "valid" films that could be available (using md5sum say). This tactic wouldn't work well on Napster since there are 29 million potential sources for content. But AppleSoup is playing by different rules so the policing options are much different and very possibly more realistic.
  • You'd be surprised how difficult ftp programs, even in the browsers, are for stupid people to use. I'll be honest, the first time I used ws-ftp or a linux command version of ftp, I had some troubles. And I'm not a techno-dummy (but by no means a genious either).

    This whole thing is kinda on the AOL principle: Build a point and clicker that dummies can use. People like pretty, so that is what is being attempted here.

    Even though I doubt I'll use it, and stick to my network at the university, I wish em luck. It could have some positive results.. COULD.
  • The Napster network model is a nice way to ensure availability.
    See it like a closed system, where your searches never return what you don't want (a search on www returns very broad results) and the server's never down.
  • teh problem is inherent in digital distribution methods. there is teh dichotomy between total freedom, which means no protection of teh copyright, and a monitored, fascist system in which everything you do is logged and watched over and disected. there is very little room for middle ground. it is one or the other. i will not give up my freedoms just because some movie studio decides it can make a quicker buck through cheap, computer-based distribution. i would rather not own a computer and only watch teh old marx brothers movies on teh betamax vcr ok bye.

    loev,


  • If someone would read the story they would notice, AppleSoup, the new company, was founded by an early Napster investor and founder (Who left). This not Napster. It is a totally new, different company.

    This isn't Napster. Gosh!

    -Davidu
  • First off, when you're naming you're connection in napster, There AIN'T NO SUCH THING as a 56k modem. You upload at 33.6, so don't even bother. Just put it down as a 14.4 and the rest of us LPB's will go elsewhere. Second. Don't share Britney. Share something noone else has heard yet. If you share britney, you deserve all the teeneagers suckling your connection that you get.

    -Sincerely

  • Re:Will It Succeed? (Score:3)

    by drix ( 4602 ) on Monday July 17, 2000 @05:57AM (#928517) Homepage
    The problem with Gnutella, and any peer-to-peer ("P2P!", ugh) paradigm for distribution, is that it's just not going to work for movies - not for the feature-length ones that would be the main draw, anyways. Many people speak in ominous tones on Slashdot and in the newsmedia about the copyright cataclysm that will occur with digital video & ripped DVDs as it has so emphatically for music recently. Frankly I just don't see it. There just isn't the bandwidth to pull this off, and there won't be for a long, long time. Just do some simple math - the average MP3 is probably 5mb in size; the average DVD is somewhere in the neighborhood of 5-17gb big depending on length. Even at the most conservative estimate, people would need to increase their bandwidth by three orders of magnitude to emulate that speed and convenience of Napster. Companies like Qwest proclaim with alacrity that bandwidth is doubling every few years a la Moore's law. Even in their wildest, most orgasmic bandwidth-filled dreams (you have to see their commercials to know what I'm talking about), I don't think they can concieve of a thousandfold increase anytime soon. Neither can I.

    And that's just downloading. The idea that people could actually start serving these behemoth files to other people is just ludicrous - there is even less upstream bandwidth in a consumer connection that downstream, usually.

    So you are sort of half right and half wrong. Their advertiser-supported service isn't going to work, but neither will Gnutella. Nothing will. Movies are just such a bigger beast than music. They will take horrendous amounts of time and effort to distribute, and time is the enemy if you've ever used Napster. Most people don't have the patience or goodwill to let some stranger tie up their computer for the next four days finishing their "Driving Miss Daisy" download. The one thing the P2P paradigm was not made for was longevity.

    In short, I just don't see digital movie distribution taking off in the near future. Even if people could download at 30mbps off their cable modems, which is a long time coming, it would still take more than a day to polish off a single DVD movie. All but the most dedicated of geeks will just pay the $19.95 at Best Buy and get it over with.

    --
  • I would call that a failure in the concept, but that's just me. For some *constructive* criticism, let's say that they should implement something where if your D/L gets cut off, the program should automatically search for an exact filename/size/md5 match from another individual and then resume from them.

    -Sincerely
  • Now here's the ironic thing. It appears that MPAA is higher in the "bad guy pecking order" than trademark lawyers; otherwise, why would /.ers push for Apple to sue Soup for trademark violations?

    sulli

  • Other investors include John Valenti, son of Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti

    I found this interesting. I wonder what Pops has to say about this one. If John is in it for the right reasons, talk about a 180 from his father.

  • Movie Distribution via Napster (Score:4)

    by Space ( 13455 ) on Monday July 17, 2000 @02:23AM (#928521) Homepage
    I'm actually suprised it took this long for this story to get on /. because I heard about it on ZDTV over a month ago. They didnt think it would fly and neither do I. If you use napster for downloading 1-10MB MP3s then you know why it'll never work for multiGB movies. There's nothing wrong with hosting movies on a passworded FTP serv unless the movie companies just want free hosting instead of paying for the bandwidth for downloads.
  • Well, great. To appease the legislature and the judiciary and everyone who's been jumping down their throats recently, the US Copyright Cartel has decided to make vague noises about vaporware that might kind of begin to solve all the problems that everyone's talking about. Oh boy.

    Let's face it: we haven't put nearly enough pressure on these thieves and scam artists to make them cave yet, and this is going to just be more of the same SDMI-tainted, pay-per-listen, don't-you-dare-loan-it-to-your-friends drivel that I honestly can't stand anymore. If they've got something to say, they should say it, but if they don't have anything more than hand-waving, they need to shut the hell up.

    I'll believe it when I see it, and even then only after they've shown me the fine print.

  • Doomed to fail..... (Score:4)

    by TheReverand ( 95620 ) on Monday July 17, 2000 @02:30AM (#928523) Homepage
    Ok this is a good idea, take video and share it like Napster. However,

    1. They want to charge people.

    Noone is going to want to pay for this, especially since it's

    2. Proprietary Content

    This won't be a place to shoot around your vcd dump of The Matrix, they are going to distribute their own content. Until they are putting up some kind of programming that people know and like there is no hook for people to sign up in the first place. People loved Napster because it's easy to get something that (and this is important) they want for nothing. This program doesn't seem to offer that, and if Valenti jr. is involved, you can believe that they will be keeping close tabs on what goes through the service.

    Rev.

  • Napster ?
    Hollywood ?
    Could be some sort of streaming media company aimed at interactive digital broadcasting...
    Sounds Deja-vu.
    I mean, this is so buzzworded that it would really be interesting if there were sufficient hype 'round this to democratize Internet/Radio/TV, this time.
    Of course, this'd imply more bandwidth, cheaper stuff but also... pity... a deeper supermarketization of the Net.
    --
  • I hate to get all excited over rumours, but I can't see this happening. Not well. At least the part of pulling the plug on all the songs. 29 million users are going to get mad the day they show up and no Metallica & Hanson songs are available for download.

    If they change gears, they're going to lose their popularity. Their venture capitalists are going to pine for the days of being sued and being so popular!

    What could people "trade" that's about movies? Whole movies? Probably not. Trailers? Oooh... like I need to have ALL of those. Celebrity pictures? Maybe. Nude pictures? Probably not. I can't see how they could say 'yes' to this file, and 'no' to that file. Unless they wen't and 'tagged' all the files that are 'allowed', but if someone is going to tag all the 'allowed' files, then they might as well just provide all those files at one site.

    Rader

  • Hollywood wants to sell movie tix, etc. etc. to napster users. Took them long enuff. Assuming most people on napster are say, 13-25, what better way to send your message to this most desirable of demographics than get in bed napster?

  • Read this instead (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's a much more interesting article on napster/mp3 in todays LA times--it's an interview with producer Jimmy Iovine:

    www.latimes.com/business/20000717/t000066998.html [latimes.com]

  • As we look at www.applesoup.com [applesoup.com] or www.applesoup.net [applesoup.net] we still don't know what it is. Other internet-it magazines (not in English available as far as I'm concerned) report that Holywood has invested mucho money into the applesoup project already.

    Beats me what this is, they already have a service for new artists...

  • This is a speculative move (Score:3)

    by Jon Erikson ( 198204 ) on Monday July 17, 2000 @02:28AM (#928529)

    I've already read comments about how this is premature, downloads are still too slow etc. etc. but I don' think that's the point of this at all. My thought is that rather than attempting to be a "finished" product this is more an attempt at a proof of concept - that the Napster model can be used in a way that the industry (movies in this case) can accept.

    Using this they can test out different approaches to things like security, validation, pricing and so on without the dangers of designing a system from scratch to be their Big Thing. The things they learn from this will be used to then develop future systems when using the Internet to stream TV-on-demand and feature-length films is viable.

    ---
    Jon E. Erikson

  • Too Good to be True? (Score:5)

    by Captain Derivative ( 182945 ) on Monday July 17, 2000 @02:37AM (#928530)

    Before we start celebrating about how AppleSoup is going to give some legitimacy to Napster-type file sharing systems, read the article, especially this sentence:

    "As for what will be carried over the networks, Biondi said he expects short videos to be distributed first, but eventually he envisions the Internet having either network television on demand or its own programming, or a combination."

    It sounds like Hollywood is planning on using AppleSoup as a platform to have other computers host videos it wants to distribute. In this sense, it wouldn't really be a file-sharing system, but a way to take the load off of their own servers when Hollywood starts moving toward computer-based distribution. In other words, you can share only what they want you to share. Also, from the article:

    "AppleSoup promises to actively police its network to try to find and weed out any file that is violating copyright law."

    I'm wondering how they plan to do this. My best guess is that AppleSoup will have a list of the "only" legitimate files allowed to be distributed. Again, this will allow AppleSoup to distribute only what Hollywood wants. There's a good chance, in my opinion, that the average Joe won't be able to post his own homemade shorts or anything. "Actively polic[ing]" the system sounds like they're going to use a whitelist instead of a blacklist.

    And of course, the article doesn't say what format these videos will be in. Possibly something specific to AppleSoup, and I'd bet they aren't going to release software for the average user to create these files either.

    At least, that's the feeling I get from reading this article.


    --
    "Better dead than smeg."

  • Precisely, this sounds like Circuit City's Divx model of business: move the video rental store into the customer's house so that we don't have to pay for real estate, and continue to charge them the same (or more) for the "service".

    No thanks, if I'm storing your stuff for you, I expect to get it cheap.

    Refrag
  • Eh, I've always been confused by the people who knowingly and willingly kill their bandwidth so some strangers on the net can download the same songs over and over again at hideous speeds. There are some weird people out there.
  • i'm sure whoever makes teh newsreader mac soup will be thrilled. :-) ok bye.

    --
    "How many six year olds does it take to design software?"

  • It sounds like the MPAA will keep close tabs on what appears on this program to prevent copyright infringement. My point is this; if people can't use it to download a free version of "X-Men" before it hits Blockbuster, they won't even bother with it. Bandwidth is precious, and if people have to pay to sit and wait an hour (or so with DSL) to download a movie, they would probably rather hoof it to the video store and just buy it on VHS or DVD. I know I would.


    luckman

  • Why would Hollywood invest in a "napster" company?

    This is probably more of a pre-emptive maneuver by the movie industry, the music industry has been reduced to playing a defensive game, reacting to developments on the Internet i.e. suing. Offering pay-per-view downloads won't work if there's anything like the piracy in the music industry.
    Because of bandwith issues, the threat to video hasn't really materialized yet, but eventually the bandwidth will arrive, and by that time they'll have learned a lot about this type of filesharing.

    Why would Napster do this (or ex-employees of Napster)?

    Napster is not really a winning business model is it?

    They're dealing with lawsuits, competition (freenet, gnutella), and a bad image towards investors, legitimacy and an exit strategy are probably the main factors.
  • This is not Napster even, it's just investors, and I can't really see them sinking a toni of cash into a proof of concept they'll get nothing out.

    So, Napster is NOT "their" Big Thing. It's a different company. It's nice that you read the /. comments, but maybe read the article too.

  • Less facetiously, I am wondering what Napster gets out of this.

    One thing they get out of this is some serious ammunition in their ongoing court case against the RIAA Cartel.

    The courts might be persuaded to ignore the rights of a legitimate company, if it is percieved to have a product which is primarily used for "illigetimate" purposes (this has happened before - Bong makers in some states, whos tobacco product is banned because most users use it for marijuana instead). However, if the company has a product with a clearly legitimate use, and an alliance with Hollywood is a pretty high profile "legitimate" use, the RIAA will likely be slam dunked for trying to strong arm them out of existence.

    And if the deals with Hollywood prove to onerous, napster can withdraw after the trial is over.
  • Well...

    The alternative view is that Napster and its VCs spend so much money and time on the elusive Next Big Thing of video that they forget their core audience, which is music listeners. Napster service quality suffers, customers get frustrated, and either they buy legit MP3s or just go back to emailing them around.

    Meanwhile, Hollywood threatens even more severe legal action if Napster backs out of this deal, even if they lose tons of money. So they can't. They burn through their VC, can't pay their ISP bills, get cut off, finito.

    I for one cannot rule out sinister motives, at least in this case...

    sulli

  • Oh, how I wish I could get CSPAN without having to pay for all of the other crap Time Warner makes you pay for. I guess it's still rabbit ears for me.

    Refrag
  • I wasn't making a distinction between failures due to acts of God versus people shutting off Napster because they want to play Quake at max speed. The end result is pretty much the same: you have to hunt again and start over. I'm not assessing blame or criticizing anyone here. I actually love the whole Napster concept. I just think that human as well as systemic factors make a centralized distribution model more sensible for for-pay material.

    In a related matter, one thing that passed through my mind when I read the story was: if a group of people were really ticked off at a big media corporation, one tactic employed could be to put together phoney 'movies' and trick people into wasting the time to download them. If widely-enough done, this would undermine the confidence in the system and constitute a serious attack.
  • The best form of copy protection the record industry could find is larger files. And how do they get larger files? Start supporting DVD Audio!
    I want very high resolution audio, dammit!

    Refrag
  • Why in hell would a major company (i.e. we're not talking garage bands here) that wants to distribute content legally want to use the Napster model, particularly for HUGE content?

    It's not to hard to envision a way to make this work. Make it a subscription service and give everyone on the service a super-high bandwidth internet line as part of it. Partition the movie across many different machines in segments to solve the size problem. Play as you go. Heck, you could even get the part of the movie you are watching from somebody else who is watching it at about the same time (i.e. as it loads on their drive it speeds over to yours slightly behind). Once everyone is done with the segment it deletes off their drive, then off your drive in a cascade. This would relieve tons of pressure on the main servers which would only be required to start the process.

    This could all be managed from some kind of load balancing software. You could even have it seemlessly move you over to the exact needed spot in a show on another machine if you lost your connection to the original source...

    Uhh, actually, forget I said all this. I'm running over to the patent office...

  • 1. Bill Bales is not a founder of Napster, Inc. He joined the company in late August, 1999.
    2. Bill Bales was forced to leave Napster, Inc. for gross misconduct December 17th, 1999.
    3. Napster, Inc. != AppleSoup. The relationship is disingenuous in nature and constitutes a fabrication to gain press attention.

    jordan@napster.com
  • Actually Napster has nothing to do with AppleSoup. A former executive at Napster has started this company and is no longer associated with the company other then still owning stock. There is a big article in Monday's USAToday about the new company
  • First, we know next to nothing about AppleSoup, what it will distribute, what IP protections they will ofer, or what their revenue model will be. I bet they haven't nailed much of this down yet either.

    But one thing is pretty clear. If they are distributing media files that are larger than MP3 they will not rely on Joe Consumer to serve up the files.

    If Napster did offer IP protection, industry distributors would log into the Napster network with big honkin servers that could serve up quality MP3s at optimal bandwidth. These servers would be advertised; they would be on-line at all times. We would all learn to keep them on our hotlist and use them in preference to Joe Bloe's random PC. (And Napster would undoubtedly enhance their support for hotlist to make it all work well.)

    I don't have any answer to the physical problems of sharing multi-gig files. But do not assume that Napster is the end all, be all of peer to peer networks. Once the legal issues are settled, service will improve and the distribution model will be more valuable.

  • As with normal TV, why don't they just use advertising to generate revenue, and keep the downloads free? Makes life easier for all of us. And they can then encourage individuals to distribute their content, rather than labelling such people as "pirates". Most people wouldn't bother editing an MPEG to get rid of all the adverts (someone recently had this idea with MP3s).

    But then again, the motion picture industry could just be too greedy and try to make money both ways...

    Oxymoron of the week: "Secure Digital"
  • Right - I actually included that idea in my post but took it out later because I thought I was rambling. Obviously, the only way that this has a prayer of working is with some beefy servers and big, fat internet connections. Even then it's too much of a stretch given today's technology, but I guess that could at least be concievable in a few years.

    However, the company's press release [applesoup.com] contradicts pretty much everything you say:
    AppleSoup's peer-to-peer solution connects members' hard drives to create a global, virtual library of non-infringing content. When a member requests a specific piece of digital content, AppleSoup sends him or her directly to another member's hard drive within a matter of seconds to retrieve the file. The platform makes a plethora of specific, valued information available to the masses, without the cumbersome scalability issues of the central server model.
    There you have it. These aren't stupid people, judging from their backers, so I'd say they know a bit more than they're letting on in their release. Nevertheless, the idea seems just totally brain-dead as it stands now.

    --
  • People have been paying for TV and films for years through cable subscription and the like. Ont the other hand, the last time I heard about people paying for audio was years ago when you still needed a radio licence in England.

    Society is much more willing to pay for video even though its still just data,

    Given a reliable place to get films, people will be willing to pay for the service. If a cut goes to the person who supplies the film, then it will suddenly become more beneficial not to pirate, but to get official authority to sell the film. A central server like Napster should be able to deal with all the finances. The studios should be happy because they can get eliminate the cost of media.

  • Aren't they going to have problems when AAPL sues them for taking their name? The even InterCapped the name.

    Then again, I could go on about the silliness behind a name like AppleSoup. How strange

    Also, How long till whatever encryption they use gets cracked? Problems ahead indeed.

    Perhaps I'm dis-illusioned from being subjected to Ads on TV, at movie theaters, and so forth. Hollywood.com and a few others in the theatres, and every DotCom under the sun on every channel imaginable. They now have a talk-over-the-web product that will do nothing but increase the required bandwidth of the net AND increase the minimum speed of InHell processors. Frankly, we don't need any more startups. Go away!

    Your resident Dot Grump..

  • Re:Doomed to fail..... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They want to charge people.

    Dear God! Capitalism! Quick, hide your head in the sand! People demanding to get paid for services they perform! How horrid!

    Noone is going to want to pay for this, especially since it's Proprietary Content

    So, do you sneak into movie theaters without paying as well? Or are you one of those GNU zealots who want everything GPL'ed? Mp3s are "proprietary content", but that doesn't seem to stop you Linux users from hoarding them.

    Once again, "open source" reveals itself to be nothing more than the whiny, greedy brats screaming "MINE!! ALL MINE!!", and who are never satisified, no matter how much they steal.
  • With unregulated content-neutral file sharing programs like Gnutella around, I fail to see the advantage of using an advertiser-supported service that bans copyrighted content. If one feels morally obliged not to download pirated material, he can still use Gnutella to find the legal files that he is looking for. Even for the service's target audience, there is no benefit to using this service and no cost-advantage that would justify paying a subscription fee.

    I fully support the industry's attempt to use a distributed distribution mechanism for legal media, but I think that they need to add value to such a service if they want it to succeed. Value-added services like real-time voice chats with celebrities, access to movies and music before they officially debut, etc. that cannot be replicated by Napster/Gnutella are what is needed to drive such a service.
  • This is a smart move by the MPAA because they are trying to prevent what is ahppening with the Music Recording industry.
  • MP3's are a proprietary format, not content unlike the movies made just for the AppleSoup service. They aren't going to be showing the Matrix they are going to show their own shows. I don't pay for anything on the net but thats because I just buy CD's. I've been accused of a lot but never of being an OpenSource Zealot.
  • Napster is not really a winning business model is it?

    No, it isn't. And once the media hoopla dies down, it won't be long before they have to shut their servers down. The banks will be knocking on their doors and bankruptcy will follow.

    Taking a nifty piece of programming and turning it into a profitable venture is always tricky. What is even worse is not even having a plan that would eventual create a revenue stream. I understand many companies lose money in their first few years as they struggle to reach a capacity, but as soon as they reach that capacity, they are making money.

    What has been demonstrated with Napster is people like free things. Any first year sociology or marketing major could have told us that. As a piece of software it does help move us to a different level of computing.

    Perhaps what Hollywood is trying to do is leverage a moderately successful application into another means of distribution. As it has been pointed out several times already, FTP is a much more effective method of digital distribution.

    AppleSoup also has the potential of stopping Napster from going Divx. Today's Wall Street Journal's Marketplace has an article on DivX and how it is becoming easier to download digital quality movies and burn them onto a standard cd. Time to alert the MPAA, the future is nigh.

  • I could get cynical about MPAA delving into the motion picture industry, but I won't. Fact of the matter is that the movie industry needs to change even more radically then the music industry. Theatres (at least to my understanding) do not generally turn a profit - especially on movies that don't attract large crowds. And for movies that do attract large crowds (E.g. X-Men) the theatre is unable to turn a profit due to licensing and fees imposed. Movies are a growing industry in the making part, but the actual showing of them has become so terribly expensive and overrated that most people do not want to go to see one - they will just kozmo it [kozmo.com] =).

    Being that as it is I imagine that we will see AppleSoup be a completely different method of being able to buy a movie. Something like pay 20 dollars for a theatre ticket, and get the ability to download the movie - or get the DVD for an extra 3 bucks. This would piss off video rental stores, but remember they haven't been turning a profit lately either.

    The eventual dream (as I see it for AppleSoup) is for movies to become more pervasive such as what Napster did for the music industry. Regardless of if the music industry will accept it. Napster has created millions of loyal music fans most of whom I guarentee buy more CD's now then they did prior.

    What it comes down to is this, old media is no longer profitable, and entire industries would rather not kill the cultural significance that a movie theatre generates. And I doubt that MPAA wants to go out completely - so who knows it could work.(technical impossibilities aside)

  • So why Napster and not say, Cisco, who know much more about setting up high bandwidth servers, giving out proprietry content?

    Think.

  • We still need a radio license in England. Well, we have to buy a combined TV and Radio license. About £100 a year, for which we get the joys of BBC TV and Radio.
  • I've got enough problems downloading mp3s from Napster. 50MB is a floppy disk compared to a 640MB DivX file.

  • They should start a Napster-like service for DivX ;-) [divx.ctw.cc] trailers, I can never seem to find any new ones on Gnutella :-)

    And this isn't the sames as MP3 i.e. downloading whole tracks - the trailers may make people go out and buy DVDs.

    At least, after seeing the Bullitt trailer that's what it did to me.

  • And this isn't the sames as MP3 i.e. downloading whole tracks - the trailers may make people go out and buy DVDs.

    Unless they download whole movies that have been DivX ;-) -ed. Between downloading ripped DVD movies and new movies, I'll never rent a movie or go to a theatre again.

    Yes, the quality of DivX ;-) movies aren't close to DVD. But, like MP3, they're close enough for most of us. And some of us don't have a DVD player yet.

    Yes, new release movies are pretty crappy quality when downloaded (especially cam and telesync). But it sure saved me a bunch of money I would have spent to see such lamers as Rocky and Bullwinkle, Scary Movie, and Gone in 60 Seconds. And, after seeing The Patriot via the net, I've seen it in the theatre twice.

    I can d/l mp3 and movies over the net. Now, if only I can download groceries!

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