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(Almost) Free Movies On-Line... Sorta 293

Posted by CmdrTaco from the not-sure-if-I-trust-them-with-my-visa dept.
Snaller writes "See the latest movies on the net? Its possible - apparently the law in Taiwan says that for a movie to be protected by copyright law one has to apply for such protection within a month after the opening in the theaters. This rarely happens and as a consequence movie88 has opened a virtual movieplex: See any of their films for 1 dollar. The movie is streamed in a format that doesn't allow you to save it on the harddrive, but for that 1 dollar you can view it anytime and as much as you like for 3 days. The selection includes movies like "Shrek", "Legally Blonde","American Pie 2","Gone with the wind", James Bond and Batman." Yeah this'll last. Right. But it really demonstrates what TV will be like in the future when you have access to thousands of movies. And the buck a film rate strikes me as awesome. I'd watch a lot more movies if they were only a buck.
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(Almost) Free Movies On-Line... Sorta More

(Almost) Free Movies On-Line... Sorta

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  • Imagine the time that went into this. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Senor-D ( 242655 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @11:21AM (#2946153) Journal
    With such a large amount of movies available for streaming, the amount of people involved in transferring and encoding must be staggering. I'd like to know what sort of source they used to get all of these movies on disk.

    I can't imagine that this will stay around for long, as the content producers will go nuts when they hear about it. It would seem that they took all this time to do this in futility.
    • What about automated encoders? How hard could it be?

      • What about automated encoders? How hard could it be?

        Well, it depends on the media used. If they are transferring from the 35mm reels, someone needs to splice them together, run the video transfer device, etc. Real hassle. If they are encoding from DVD's, you need someone to format the output for every movie. Without this, the encoder would waste space and time on the sharp edge between the picture itself and the black borders. Also a real hassle. It would definitely take a lot of time, or a lot of people, in either case.

        I suppose they might be able to write a program to format the output of the DVD's automatically, but I've never seen this done myself.

        • Some of them at least are sourced from VHS tapes. The Frankenstein movie they are running for free today had some noticable tracking errors and other glitches from low quality video tape.

          Also, that movie at least was 4:3, so they could avoid reformatting it.

          Granted, the quality of the source material sucks, and even the 300k stream quality isn't as good as it could be, but film purists are not going to be watching movies on a PC screen over the net.

    • the amount of people involved in transferring and encoding must be staggering.

      It's not like they are encoding the movies using a hex editor...

    • they probably just hung out on irc for a couple years while they were in school-downloaded every movie they saw. one day they probably looked around and thought "hey lets sell this stuff on the web because in taiwan copying is a right!".

  • O well (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Compunerd ( 107084 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @11:22AM (#2946157) Homepage
    I guess this is fine - yes - but what about the quality? I work in a company doing video-on-demand (VoD), and VoD in less quality than 2Mbps MPEG-4 isn't a good thing.

    And ... I'll love to see this 'hacker-proof' format of theirs. I bet a hundered dollars it's already creacked :-)

    roy

    • Re:O well (Score:4, Informative)

      by Calle Ballz ( 238584 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @12:11PM (#2946323) Homepage
      They use Real (sucky)...

      You don't really have to crack it. I've noticed they technique they use to make it difficult to change around links. they open up a no permission browser window and then from there redirect to the link of the actual .rm or .ram file that you are streaming off of. If you have any sort of network monitor you'll be able to see the exact URL where you can download the file and save it to your hard disk.

      • Re:O well (Score:2, Informative)

        by kryptkpr ( 180196 )
        Not quite so easy.
        Once you've got the .RAM file, it contains a URL inside it (probably a pnm:// or rtsp://), and you will need a program that's

        a) capable of saving these streams, and
        b) capable of re-building the index block that required to view streaming RM video offline

        and there's only one that I know of that's capable of doing this: Streambox VCR
        • Ahhh, I just tried this. You have a good point. I also just checked out streambox, where has it been all my life? Easy enough to find, google search for streambox showed this first:

          www.streambox.com
        • Actually, accorinding to RealPlayer, it's being streamed via http.

          C:\>netstat

          Active Connections
          Proto Local Address Foreign Address State
          TCP moose:1272 210.59.224.72:http ESTABLISHED
      • URL snooper is also handy, when you want to find the link to the file.... if you dont want to browse through your temp internet files.

        download the program here [geocities.com]

      • Re:O well (Score:4, Interesting)

        by kimihia ( 84738 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @08:57PM (#2948309) Homepage

        For those interested in the dirty details, may I recommend:

        • wget
        • asfrecorder
        • Squid
        • Ethereal (+ tcpdump)
        • A plugin-equipped browser (eg, Mozilla)

        With that combination (and sometimes "strings") I can download ANY Quicktime or Windows Media video that I want to - permissions be damned. Plus, get this: mplayer on Linux does a better job of playing Windows Media files than Windows Media Player on Windows! (And at a higher screen res too!)

        BTW, the secret letter is 'm'. (This may become apparant if you have done the above.) I don't have time for a complete downloading HOWTO, but ... mov = wget, asf = wget, asx = asfrecorder, wmv = try asfrecorder then wget.

  • US Law vs. Taiwanese Law (Score:3, Funny)

    by Bren ( 153085 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @11:22AM (#2946158)
    I wonder how much sway MPAA has in Taiwan. Certainly in the US this little "problem" would be fixed quickly...

    Better mark Taiwan up on the Axis of Evil list too..

    • Re:US Law vs. Taiwanese Law (Score:5, Informative)

      by tlk nnr ( 449342 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @11:31AM (#2946192) Homepage
      I wonder how much sway MPAA has in Taiwan. Certainly in the US this little "problem" would be fixed quickly...


      Better mark Taiwan up on the Axis of Evil list too..
      That's due to being too friendly with China:
      According to the Bern convention, you don't need to register for copyright protection.
      But Taiwan was thrown out of the UN and most international bodies, in order to please China.
      And thus Taiwan couldn't take part in the negotiations, didn't modify it's national laws.
      Nice sideeffect.
    • How much sway the MPAA has? Well, given all the cheap ripoff DVDs and CDs that flow out of Taiwan already, I would be inclined to say, "Uhm...probably not very much at all, Bren."

  • price point (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @11:25AM (#2946172) Journal
    There is the old ferengi proverb:

    Somethings that are free are not worth the price.

    On the other hand, a dollar, euro, etc, is probably the minimum that most people would pay, since much less is possible too much of a hassle. dollar stores, dollar menus are popular because people think these provide good value, even if it is not true.

    and think: when was the last time you changed a candy bar to a credit card? by itself? there is a point when paying by electronic means is perceived to be too much of a hassle.

    • Amen to that! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Robber Baron ( 112304 )
      Somethings that are free are not worth the price.

      Amen to that. I've downloaded several divx movies and after the nuisance of finding it in the first place, followed by a couple of weeks of broken and resumed downloads (and thats with a reasonably friendly file-sharing utility), using the better part of a Gig of bandwidth, and having other miscreants weezing stuff off my hard-drive, I'd rather go out and spend 20 bucks on a DVD. It's a better picture and sometimes they even throw in some other goodies (though I thought the tone poems on the Episode 1 DVD kinda sucked). I really wish someone would clue in the MPAA to this: That downloading movies is a pain in the ass and though I can't speak for everyone else's preferences, I really don't think that movie attendance or DVD sales is going to be threatened by it in any perceivable way. Please leave off the copy-protection shit and the regional encoding...you don't really need it.
    • One dollar is a lot for 80% of the world, about right for a lot of the far east, and "too cheap" in the US. This would be the same even if it is DVD quality.

      The nice thing about buying items from the rest of the world is that it is often at a much lower price point overseas. Importing IP into the US is far easier than buying other IP such as drugs in Mexico.
      • Importing IP into the US is far easier than buying other IP such as drugs in Mexico.

        Interesting that you consider drugs to be intellectual property. Care to expand?
        • Virtually all of the cost of new drugs is in finding or creating the one out of 1000s that has significant beneficial effects vs damage and then going through exhaustive trials to make sure you didn't miss something.

          Actually manufacturing the resulting drugs is sometimes expensive depending on the process, but it usually nearly free. In third world countries there are often identical drugs that are 1/10 or 1/100 the blockbuster price in the US. And generics are often drastically cheaper even in the US.

          The raw materials are often virtually free, aspirin, codeine etc in bulk powder form went for at most a dollar or two per KG, when I last checked about ten years ago.

          Not unlike the cost of your homemade copy of windows on a CD vs from the manufacturer or the cost of the truly high quality plug and play fully functional "Rolex" knockoff vs the one that the Rolex company makes, or YSL dress or Gucci bag ... The IP of knowing how to make it is only value due to IP protection.
    • The biggest question for me is should I trust these guys with my credit card information. I mean, you must admit that the whole concept of their business is a bit shady. I don't know if I feel comfortable with doing that.

      Now if some major company started offering a service like this, I'd jump on it. Bigger selection, quicker response times, legal, and a lot more comfortable to do business with.

      .
      • There is nothing shady about their business; it's a perfectly fine idea. The world should be one where there's nothing wrong with watching movies and listening to music. The only shadiness is that the American fat cats have brainwashed everybody into mediocrity.
        • What I meant was that they are doing things that would be illegal in America, and there's not a whole lot our Government can do about it. So, who is going to be able to regulate how they use my credit card? If it was a large company that I had heard of before then no problem, but giving my credit card number to someone I don't know who doesn't have to respect our laws is scarey.

          .

  • A buck isn't worth anything? (Score:5, Funny)

    by doc_traig ( 453913 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @11:32AM (#2946196) Homepage Journal
    So now, for a dollar, I can not only make a 20 minute phone call with 10-10-220, but now I can watch Shrek on my 'puter.

    Heh. Eat that, Terry Bradshaw.
  • Seeing the MPAA react to their "business". It will yield 2 results. Improve the MPAA's copyright restrictions WorldWide, allowing the recording industry to follow suite, or create very bad blood between tiwan and the US, resulting in less exporting of movies, which affect DVD sales internationally, and things like movie paraphanalia. Betcha the Tiwan government will close them down before the US does.

  • Cannot be saved? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Grax ( 529699 )
    OK. If the data is sent to you and you can use that data to watch a movie how do you prevent that data from being stored somewhere?

    It seems to me the content producers are trying to do the impossible. In this case and in other cases where they try to do copy protection.

    Copy protection is the attempt to create something that will send a good signal to a display device but a bad signal to a recording device. Every implementation I have seen to date sends a less than perfect signal to the display device resulting in unwatchability at times.

    When it comes right down to it, all you need to do to copy the signal is create a recording device that emulates a display device well enough.

    I have 1 DVD that will not play with my current DVD player. My other DVD player had trouble with 2 different DVDs. Macrovision resulted in a distorted picture with the combination of hardware I was using to view VHS.

    Is it too much to ask that I be able to view the content I've paid for?

  • Legal Release Date (Score:2, Interesting)

    by satanami69 ( 209636 )
    Can somebody point me to the governing body that issues the legal release date? Or better yet, where do I have to apply to have my home videos protected from the Tawainese laws?

    Although it's nice that someone sticks it to the MPAA, how many channels would they need to go through to protect their wares. I don't like their bully tactics anymore than the rest of /., but they need a way to make a return on their investments just like you and me.

  • Everyone ought to check it out - NOW (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bdolan ( 125199 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @11:36AM (#2946211)
    You get a movie for free and a five dollar (5 movie credit) just for signing up. You can watch - dont pontification and see it go down or get slashdotted -- regardless of whether you feel it should stay up.

    Even thought it is real streamed at 300k bps, you'll get an idea of what the future could look like if we really could get our film libraries live.

    Remember that many US concepts of copyright, fair use, etc don't translate into equivalent laws in other countries. This may be legal now and forever for agreements executed under the laws of Taiwan (this site). Note that some countries consider region coding to be unlawful (NZ?.

    Note that the fair use concept in the US is stronger than in many others.

    US owned a lot of IP and is considered to be unfair in its licensing practices in other countries -- they don't like embargoes on content, restrictive format licensing on contects, copy protection, delayed release dates in other countries and other US centric concepts.
    • Note that even though NZ is often quote'd as being against region coding that I have never heard anything done about it here. We still sell coded DVD drives all over the place. Most of the movies in video stores are doubled up with region 1 and region 4 copies because not many people actually have region free DVD drives, and if you use WinDVD or PowerDVD these enforce region codes themselves. (Yes I know I can use DVD Genie but most people won't)

      • I haven't looked it up, but from what I understand it's perfectly okay to sell a region-specific DVD player. On the other hand, there's nothing the big publishers can do to prevent you from taking your DVD player to the shop downtown and having it de-regionised to play DVD's for other regions, I've definitely seen shops and electrical technicians advertising that particular service in the past. Region encoding was in some way ruled as an anticompetitive practice, I think, but I don't have it as firsthand information.

        I'm guessing but it probably came in about the same time that all the parallel importing restrictions were lifted a decade or so ago. They were temporarily put back for movie material a few weeks ago by the Labour government on the grounds of "protecting local cinema" from all of the currently released movies coming in on parallel-imported DVD's at the same time. That said, I'm not sure whether that actually involves de-regionising of DVD players or if it's actually just importing the videos and DVD's to New Zealand in the first place. I suspect it's only the latter.

        I noticed the other week that Wellington library even advises on the shelves that some marked DVD's they loan might not play in region 4 players, so if it's not legal (but I think it is) then I guess there's some significant civil disobedience coming from local government employees.

        Can anyone with a better understanding expand on this?

    • Caveat emptor,

      Here is what you agree to (among other things) in the Terms of Service:

      "You agree to indemnify and hold us. . . harmless from any claim, demand,loss and damage whatsoever including reasonable attorneys' fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of your use of the Product, your connection to the Product, your breach/violation of the TOS, or your breach/violation of any rights of another or any existing laws (local, state, national and/or international) whatsoever."
      (abridged, emphasis added)

      In other words: you could get busted for this, and that's your problem. In fact, if someone (MPAA, government) sues us because you have been using this service, you get to pay our attorney's fees.
  • They got plenty of movies, $1 is pretty cheap. I can use my Video/Audio Out from my computer to my VCR and record all those movies. So I couldn't care less about the 3 day rule.

  • I could have gotten a dollar? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Calle Ballz ( 238584 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @11:39AM (#2946221) Homepage
    When I first acquired broadband (a landmark event in my life). I figured it would be the nice thing to share out all the movies that I had downloaded for myself. All the movies I had downloaded were fresh releases, sometimes I had prerelease copies that weren't even in the theateres. I offered them in a format that could be saved to your hard disk... for free!

    but the MPAA managed to hunt me down and send me and my ISP really naughty obscene letters. they quoted obscene literature such as "Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 106(3" and "we hereby state, pursuant to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Title 17 United States Code Section 512" Eventually the letters started to get to offensive so I decisted all activity. But man, if I only had a team of lawyers at the time....
    • What do you expect? You were giving away these movies ripping the copyright owners off!

      I think this article is interesting because it's often fun to see big companies get screwed *legaly*, but you live in a country where the distribution is illegal. You can't just decide which laws you want to obey and which you don't, that's just not how society works.

  • Same treatment as the Ukraine? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BusterB ( 10791 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @11:48AM (#2946250)
    I wonder if the US government is going to threaten a trade embargo with Taiwan until its government passes a DMCA-like law. But then again, could the US really afford such a trade ban with Taiwan? Almost everything is made there!
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • If pretzels are made in Taiwan, then we may see this trade ban.
      • I wonder if the US government is going to threaten a trade embargo with Taiwan until its government passes a DMCA-like law.

      Maybe Taiwan already has a DMCA-like law. Who knows?

      This seems to be an entirely different issue altogether. Taiwan just insists on certain time limits wrt Copyright registration and protection.

      Seems pretty reasonable to me. This requirement just makes sorting out copyright infringement claims later much easier.

      What will almost certainly happen is that the Studios will take care to make sure the Copyright protection is in place in Taiwan before opening movies now.

      IANAL, but it would seem that telcos and ISPs might be at risk for carrying this in the US. Any knowledgeable lawyers out there who can speak to this?

  • slashdotted? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mjh ( 57755 ) <mark@ho[ ]lan.com ['rnc' in gap]> on Sunday February 03, 2002 @11:51AM (#2946257) Homepage Journal
    Maybe it's just my connection, but I can't seem to get to this site very well. If it can't suvive the /. effect, exactly how are they going to succesfully stream video ?

    • Re:slashdotted? (Score:2, Informative)

      by spudnic ( 32107 )
      It does appear to be quite slow navigating the site, but the streaming seems very solid.

      .

      • Re:slashdotted? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by m_evanchik ( 398143 ) <michel_evanchikATevanchik...net> on Sunday February 03, 2002 @02:34PM (#2946906) Homepage
        I have the same experience. The web site is slow but the streaming video is maxing out my broadband at 1050 Kbs.

        This is pretty interesting. I guess they did a good job scaling their video servers but not a good job on the web server. Kudos to them for devoting the most resources to the most important application.
        • Or possibly we're seeing the latency because of a satellite connection or something? Once the connection is established it's fast. I see this quite often at sites where our clients have satellite Internet access. Pages take a good while to come up, and running ssh over them is horrible, but once a download starts they are great.

          .

  • Balls (Score:3, Interesting)

    by corby ( 56462 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @11:52AM (#2946260)
    These guys definitely have gonads. Not only are they throwing a big "up yours" to the MPAA. but they are also charging for access to hit TV shows like "Friends." [movie88.com]

    Some of their pricing decisions seem a bit arbitrary, however. For example, you can view the 3h17m movie Magnolia for the price of a single download, but the similarly long Schindler's list is broken up into three streams that must be viewed separately.

    I give them five days before the US government threatens to give China the green light to annex unless the Taiwanese government cracks down on this site.

    • Re:Balls (Score:3, Informative)

      by karmma ( 105156 )
      These guys definitely have gonads. Not only are they throwing a big "up yours" to the MPAA. but they are also charging for access to hit TV shows like "Friends."

      Umm... there are places in the world that have access to the internet and *don't* have access to NBC broadcasts. Think globally.
      • Umm... there are places in the world that have access to the internet and *don't* have access to NBC broadcasts. Think globally.

        I'm not sure I understand your point. I said that Movie88.com has balls because they are going to attract some extremely unwelcome attention from large, moneyed interests who can exercise more than their fair share of influence on the US government (and by extension, the Taiwanese goverment).

        If you think this is changed by the fact that some people who are downloading "Friends" episodes don't get it on their local telly, you are extremely mistaken.

  • Sure.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is just as legal as the copy of Visual Studio Enterprise I bought in Taipei for $1
  • Is anyone else having trouble creating an account on the Movie88 site? I select a user name and password, and then get routed to their movie database without being logged in. When I try to log in, it tells me the password is wrong.

    Has anyone been able to actually test this service?

    • Followup- The problem was either Netscape or it they fixed their end very quickly. I was able to create an account using Mozilla without too much difficulty.

      Now I can login using Netscape (where I have RealPlayer configured) and see if this thing really works. :)

  • one of the really cool features back in the day of the bbs was a program that would detect when you were downloading an image and display it as it came in. This worked totally seperate from the terminal program.

    Wouldn't it be cool if you would put a machine on the network that watched every packet going by and detected when you were receiving a stream of data and would write that stream of data to the drive and then convert it to DivX? Then it could have streaming software and a web server to show you everything that is available and to present it to anyone in the house.
    • What would be cool is to have something like TotalRecorder for video. For those that don't know, TotalRecorder acts as an audio device driver in Windows. You set it as the default device and play whatever you want on your computer. When it's told to, the device driver encodes everything that is sent through it to a file on the drive based on your compression settings and algorithm of choice, then passes the audio on to the real driver for it to be played.

      TR is great for unencrypting all those Audible files, etc. so you can save them out as a standard mp3 or whatever. I just set it up and start playing the encrypted file before I go to bed. Next morning I have an mp3. I also record several radio shows this way. A cron job launches TotalRecorder about a minute before the show comes on. When the show is about to start it launches a url to the streaming audio of the radio station. It only writes to the file when there is audio to play, so no problems.

      Why not have something that did the same thing for the video card when in full screen mode? Combine the two and you're set.

  • this is such crap... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pipeb0mb ( 60758 ) <pipeb0mb@pipebom b . net> on Sunday February 03, 2002 @12:17PM (#2946347) Homepage
    It can't even keep track of my username. "Welcome VISITOR" after it tells me 'signin successful'.
    It's a big endless loop of 'sign in', choose a movie, 'sign in', etc.

    Already slowed to the point that it's worthless...

    Also, no 'Clerks' or 'Chasing Amy'. Or the search function just doesn't work...

    sigh.
    • I had the same problem when I used Netscape. I got it to work with Mozilla. It seemed like some sort of frame stupidity that Netscape didn't do correctly. Once you create your account, you can log in using Netscape.

      So far the only problem has been the 6 zillion people hitting the site all at once.

  • I'm in the movie business, specifically visual effects, and I strongly feel that we are on the precipice of a cliff in film budgets. CmdrTaco opines that he'd 'see a lot more movies if they were only a buck', and that would no doubt be true, but there is no way that anyone will ever be able to finance film extravaganzas like Pearl Harbor or, more to the point for this group, The Lord of The Rings for a dollar a ticket. Of course, in this Taiwanese case, the studios are probably getting $0.00 for each ticket, so it's even harder to break even.

    The only way to finance a movie in this new world is to sell the eyeballs that are watching the movie for other purposes. Already theaters make about half of their money on concessions, for example. The two other obvious ways of making money on the film is ancillary merchandise (toys, etc.) and product placement (advertising) within the film.

    Future films will have smaller budgets, as these ancillary sources of revenues probably cannot replace the big ticket prices being charged today. One can make exciting movies for less money, of course. We worked on The Fast and The Furious last year, which was a low-budget (by today's standards) movie that was designed to get the most bangs for the very limited visual effects bucks that were available. We've been fortunate enough to be named to the "Bake-Off" for visual effects this Wednesday night, where they will choose the Oscar nominees -- which demonstrates that you can do competitive visual effects-laden movies on very limited budgets.

    This may not sit well with the ILM's of the world -- but it is also inevitable. While with music there were huge profit margins that gave the record companies some slack with the advent of song sharing over the 'net, the movie studios don't have that kind of margin anymore. Once movie sharing becomes ubiquitous, they just will not be able to make $100M blockbusters.

    Enjoy them while you can.

    thad
    • I'm not convinced that you're right about the impact of cheap online movies on ticket sales. For the forseeable future, the best quality movie that can be reasonably distributed electronically is going to be highly compressed, e.g. MPEG-4 or similar, video streams. While this format looks okay on a computer monitor, slap it up on your home entertainment system with 60-inch TV and 18 speakers, and the result will look and sound like absolute crap. That is why people are going to keep going to movie theaters -- to see a movie with very high fidelity on audiovisual equipment that they could never afford. If anything, look for ticket prices to keep going up as this will become the major draw of movie theaters.

      Where this sort of streaming will have a big impact is in the video sale/rental market, which depending on the movie accounts for anywhere from 20-80% of total revenue. After all, an online stream or download is likely available before the video is released, is cheaper by far than buying the DVD, and likely looks better than the thouroughly beaten up VHS tapes at your local rental store. If anything, look for audiovisual effects to be regarded as a defense against online availability of movies in the future. Then people might actually go out and see the movie in a theater after downloading it, just to see/hear what they were missing.

      On the other hand, $100M is an awful lot of money to spend making *anything*, and is certainly out of line with what is spent on most works of art. The protesters dancing outside the WEF in New York right now might have some ideas about how that money could have been more productively used. If summer action blockbusters go the way of pyrimid building as an art form, many would argue that cinematic art would be better off.
      • Up until 5 years ago, I was a HUGE movie buff. I would go to see 1-2 movies at the theaters. When I went to school, I stopped watching movies much, because I wasn't watching television. Without TV, no commercials, no connection to pop culture... It was quite strange. I'd still see the occaisional movie, but I didn't hear about many.

        Now, I'm over a year away from school and have a home entertainment system. Until I got the system, I was watching movies and television again. Now with a ReplayTV, I don't see commercials. The cost of movie tickets is $9.50, so for the cost of the two movie tickets, I can buy a DVD and watch it at home in surround sound on a HDTV. If I want to watch the movie later, I can. I don't really rent movies because of the hassle of returning them.

        I never thought that I would stop going to see movies, but I mostly have.

        I'll still see an eye candy movie, but the rest? I'll watch at home. There is no reason to go see a movie that isn't for the eye candy. I have a better sound system than most of the theaters, so I'd have to go to the good one 30 minutes away.

        I dunno, I seem to enjoy having people to my place and watching a movie much more than going out.

        Now, if you don't really like to watch TV and Movies, the $5k startup costs for a decent system (what my "midrange" system cost) is rediculous. However, if you don't really care, you can do a passable job for $1500 and still enjoy the experience.

        Summer action blockbusters won't go, as those are more fun in the theatre. However, I no longer see them 2-3 times there. I see them once then buy the DVD when it comes out.

        I doubt that the blockbuster will go away, but the theater as a way of distributing artsy films may go away. That's okay though, digital cable and better encoding algorithms should open up plenty of channels for them, and artsy films need to make less to do well.

        The $100m film won't look good on your computer screen compared to a real theater, and when shit blows up I want to be screaming and yelling with the audience. However, $20 for two people to see a silly comedy is a bit much.

        Alex
    • but there is no way that anyone will ever be able to finance film extravaganzas like Pearl Harbor or, more to the point for this group, The Lord of The Rings for a dollar a ticket

      You may be right, but one could certainly argue otherwise. Producing movies is a lot like software in that almost all of the costs are upfront. Once the movie is made, or the distribution CDs are burned, the added cost to the production company of adding another viewing is minimal. Example:

      Suppose I go to the movies about 4 times a year at the current $7.00 price (which is about right). Now suppose the price drops to a buck and I start going every week. In the first scenario I transfer $28.00/year to the theater (and indirectly to the studio). In the second one, I transfer $52.00/year to the theater. The added costs incurred by the theater are very small (in fact, they wind up making a lot more money on concessions). The added costs to the studio are minimal (they'd need to strike more prints, and they're expensive, but they'd be amortized across a larger number of viewings).

      The point is that you can't automatically assume that "higher retail price" == "higher profit". Rolex watches cost a lot more than Timex ones. Which company makes more money? A meal at Wolfgang Puck's restaurant costs a lot more than one at McDonalds. Which company makes more money?

      Another example: In the early days of VHS tapes they were selling them for $70-$100 each (in less-inflated dollars!). Now they're more like $20. Guess which price has proven to yield more money?

      It MAY be that the current ticket prices maximize revenue. It may not. Expecting reasonable business practices from Hollywood is a little unrealistic, so I don't think we know for sure.

      Of course, your point about no one producing a big-budget movie in an atmosphere of universal piracy is spot on. Lower prices can increase profits, but the price has to be greater than 0. :-)
    • Here's what turns me off about rising movie ticket prices. I live in California, and when the power crisis hit ticket prices went up $.25 supposedly to pay for the power. Now power prices are back down but that $.25 is still there. If another power crisis comes I can be sure to see the tickets go up another $.25. Ten years ago a regularly priced ticket was $5.00. Now it's $9.50. WTF?!? If hollywood would stop shoveling shit onto the market maybe they would do better. Yet Hollywood has been shoveling shit for at least two or three decades and for a while there profits were just fine.

      The hollywood greed machine feeds itself. Eventually the general populace will give a big FUCK YOU to $12.00 ticket prices when they arrive, and go buy the DVD of it for $19.99.

  • Damn it (Score:3, Redundant)

    by The Pi-Guy ( 529892 ) <joshua+slashdot AT joshuawise DOT com> on Sunday February 03, 2002 @01:17PM (#2946601) Homepage
    The *buffering buffering buffering buffering 3%*
    Da *buffering*
    mn *buffer--*
    movi *buffering*
    e got sla *buffering buffering buffering buffering 3 hours remaining*
    shdot *buffering*
    ted! *buffering*

    --joshua

  • /.d (Score:3, Funny)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Sunday February 03, 2002 @01:17PM (#2946602) Journal
    (Roll of the drums)

    A new development - the site was slashdotted - it's extremely slow and video downloads do not work!

    I can almost hear the engineer in the background... " She canna take much moore of it, keptin! "...

    I'd suspect that even if they have access to the fattest pipes in Taiwan, the international feed to Taiwan would be saturated with /.ers around the world hammering it...

    Here's to their good luck!

  • The movie is streamed in a format that doesn't allow you to save it on the harddrive,

    Hah! They don't even control the client hardware.

  • They've got some pre-1923 movies, that are out of copyright now. Look in the classics section. Imagine a service like this, if copyright only lasted 20 years...
  • And it's not TOO bad. It's worth a buck to see a movie that I wasn't sure I wanted to see, if they fix the damn bugs... it's not worth a buck if I really wanna see the movie.

    I created an account and started watching "American Pie 2". The first three things I noticed out the gate... the sound SUCKS, the picture at 300K is very small, and the subtitles (which you can't turn off) are almost always completely wrong. On the up side, there was NO slowdown or stutter in the video or audio over the course of the entire hour I was able to watch the movie.

    After about an hour, the stream suddenly stopped, giving, instead, an error message that someone had just logged in as my user name, so I was being logged out. The message further indicated that it was likely my fault for handing out my login information.

    I then spent over a half hour trying to log back in to no avail. It is apparently impossible to log in... period. Ultimately, I created a new account again, ran the free movie (Frankenstein in College), and was confronted with the same problems again... to include my "stolen account". I find the odds of that happening, TWICE, staggering...

    At any rate, it could be a decent service if they offer a larger screen version, fix their sound, fix/remove the captions, and repair their screwy login system.

    Well, my $0.02, and that's probably overrated...
  • This was a program that very briefly let people download streaming RealMedia files to their hard drives to watch later, or even convert them to open formats like MPEG.

    Does anyone still have a copy of this program? Can you try it on this site to see if it still works? I know after Real got the company shut down they changed their format around to break a lot of Streambox's functionality.

    Every day I still curse Streambox for bending over and let Real have their way with them. If only this site were using Windows Media! ASFRecorder is still working flawlessly even on the latest WM8 files.

    - JoeShmoe

    .
    • Streambox had a nasty phone home, spyware thing built in. At the link below you can download
      streambox, the cracks to remove the "phone home" problem and also an intercept tool.

      http://www.afterdawn.com/software/audio_software /a udio_tools/streambox_vcr.cfm

      I haven't tested the download, so naturally use it at your own risk.
  • I can't believe the reaction this is getting on Slashdot. This is basically giving the MPAA all the ammunition it needs to get their increasingly restrictive controls approved.

    I am completely against all the extreme restrictions that things like the DMCA can put upon us. But, I am completely for the protection of intellectual properties for their creators. If the movie houses don't make money off of their movies, you can expect the quantity and quality to go way down.
    • If the movie houses don't make money off of their movies, you can expect the quantity and quality to go way down.

      They seem to be making plenty of money, the quantity is up, and the quality is crap for 95% of the offerings. Hmmm... how can it get much worse?

      Will Rogers said, "People get the government they deserve." I guess the same goes for entertainment. If we keep paying them to go see crap, they will produce more crap. ...and don't even get me started about appointed presidents and the poor quality of government. Will Rogers must be chuckling somewhere.

      "Go on, take the money Enron."

      -- Steve Miller Band (with a little help from current events.)

  • The site is awfully slow now and I think that the wise thing to do is to bookmark the page and try to visit it sometime next week.
    Also, I would like to note that this will surely not last, as the long arm of MPAA will reach them, sooner rather than later.
    Anyway, this is a great idea, but we all know what happens to great ideas if the BIG companies don't approve them...

  • Movies for less than US$1 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by grainofsand ( 548591 ) <grainofsand@@@gmail...com> on Sunday February 03, 2002 @10:57PM (#2948733)
    For what it's worth, one of the sole benefits of living on the Chinese mainland is DVD's for 7 Chinese yuan (US$0.84)! Sold at foreigner-friendly restaurants - you get to flick through a huge selection of DVDs (little prOn though) and settle the bill for food and movies together. New releases are available about 2-3 weeks before debut screening in the US.

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