DreamWorks Animation CEO: Movie Downloads Will Move To Pay-By-Screen-Size 347
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Jeffrey Katzenberg, the head of Dreamworks Animation, speaking at the Milken Global Conference in California, opined that the future pricing model for movie downloads will revolve around screen size. In his view, larger screens will incur larger download prices. As he says, 'It will reinvent the enterprise of movies.' Unclear is how physical dimensions, rather than just resolution matrix, will be determined. Will we soon be saying 'hello' to screen spoofing?"
Can you fake the physical dimensions reported in the EDID block when the connection is using HDCP? Aside from the implication that this would mean more DRM (and seems pretty unworkable, but with the rise of locked bootloaders on even x86 hardware...), the prices he predicts seem alright: "A movie screen will be $15. A 75-inch TV will be $4. A smartphone will be $1.99."
Projectors? (Score:5, Interesting)
Will they be able to tell how far away I have my projector from the wall?
Re:Er..."pricing is alright?" (Score:5, Interesting)
Long term, they absolutely want that.
If they could, when you pop in a DVD, you'd submit your credit card to pay for the view, and charge according to the number of people in the room.
They want all sorts of things where they keep gouging us for the price and keep their revenue stream constant.
But, they might find people suddenly saying "to hell with that", and go read a book.
And, of course, the book publishers want the same damned model where you pay to re-read your book, because clearly owning books and not compensating the publisher every time you read it is theft, right?
And, since they basically pay the lawmakers to give them what they want, I won't be at all surprised if the assholes at the *AA manage to make it law that every time I watch a DVD I bought I have to pay them, and also pay for screen size, and also pay for # of viewers.
This push to make IP and copyright laws drive everything we do is eroding our concept of property, and turning it into a rent-every-time model. And, I'll stop watching before that happens.
Re:no concept of digital technology (Score:4, Interesting)
No. They *do* understand it. They don't like it. They want to kill it in its current form.
Re:value scales with screen size (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, your tequila example is pretty close.
And we do charge for temporal value.
You pay $15 to watch the movie NOW.
But $10 in 3 months.
And $5 in a year.
And pennies on a cable station two years from now.
You can save a lot of money by falling back a year on the entertainment curve. And there is more entertainment than you can consume. I've been retired a year... do things like watching 14 episodes of DS9 (in between episodes of "TheNewBoston" android development... which is interesting because I may finally be regaining interest in recreational programming)... uh.. anyway... and more entertainment comes out every day than I can keep up with. I have to prioritize-- and cost is one way i do that.
This is a challenge of the content industry. There is too much content now. And as income inequality grows- I don't think 10% of the people are going to buy enough content to support the current model.
Re:value scales with screen size (Score:4, Interesting)
And therein lies the problem.
I'm willing to pay $15-$20 for a CD I own, can take home and rip to MP3,and play on whatever damned device I so choose.
Fortunately, I live in a country where that's covered by fair use.
These guys just want to change the definition to "well, no, you haven't bought anything, you've licensed it, and we will dictate how and when you use it".
At which point, they'll never get another dime from me.
Re:Pay per pixel? (Score:5, Interesting)
Phone version will likely be far more compressed. It's not the "pixels" you're sending nowadays when it comes to video, but key frames and data about changes to the frames (rough simplification of modern video compression algorithms).
So your movie version will be encoded using highest possible quality, TV size will be medium and phone version will be low. This will result in massive differences in file size.
This is doable.
dead wrong (Score:4, Interesting)
Reality is probably closer to:
"we'll try ever harsher and dumber DRM and rights constriction in order to stay the eventual decline of our business model."
Or:
"Only suckers will pay the premium, everyone else will just pirate to their little hearts content. This change will do nothing but increase the number of people paying 0 dollars."
Re:Pay per pixel? (Score:5, Interesting)
What he says and what he can do are two different things. I don't doubt that they are trying to work out a scheme where the screen identifies itself accurately, but I think it is much easier (and not unreasonable) to charge for resolution.
You want to watch 720p on your 15ft screen, have at it...but we have this 4K version that you may be interested in for only a few pennies more!
I will love it when they start suing for watching the movie on the wrong screen.