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."
Stretch that anus! (Score:4, Funny)
Bend over and take it boys! Hope your anus is been pre-stretched!
Re:Stretch that anus! (Score:5, Funny)
Bend over and take it boys! Hope your anus is been pre-stretched!
I'm a Comcast customer. I can assure you that my anus is more than capable of taking anything at this point.
Re:Stretch that anus! (Score:4, Funny)
Hmm. Something about that just doesn't quite ring true.
LETMEWATCHTHIS (Score:2)
Projectors? (Score:5, Interesting)
Will they be able to tell how far away I have my projector from the wall?
Re:Projectors? (Score:5, Insightful)
Pay per pixel? (Score:2, Insightful)
I think basically, he's proposing pay per pixel. If you have a phone-sized screen, you have lower resolution, and they aren't sending you as many pixels.
Re:Pay per pixel? (Score:5, Informative)
Except more and more phones are higher resolution then most HDTVs already. A lot of people will have a 55 inch TV at 1080p but a smartphone with 1440p at least in just a few years. So paying per pixel or per size is pointless as neither tells you anything...
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Except more and more phones are higher resolution then most HDTVs already. A lot of people will have a 55 inch TV at 1080p but a smartphone with 1440p at least in just a few years. So paying per pixel or per size is pointless as neither tells you anything...
If you have a bigger screen you are probably going to want a higher pixel count.
A 128k stream might look ok on a 4 inch screen but would look terrible on a 6ft display.
Likewise you probably can't tell the difference between 1080p and 720p on a cellphone screen
so would be unlikely to pay the price difference. The only problem I see is that if you are
6 feet away from a 6 foot screen you probably want the same resolution as someone
25 feet away from a 25 foot screen as distance also plays a part as a 25ft scre
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Go to the apple store. They already do this. Buy a standard def and buy a high def version of the same movie and see which one you prefer, even on a small screen. (Hint: I always buy HD)
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You do, but others might prefer to save money and get the crappy-quality version. Obviously, a bunch of people already do, or else Apple wouldn't bother selling that version in their store. This is the way things should be: give people a choice, and let them choose what they're willing to pay for, less $$$ for low-quality, or more $$$ for high-quality. Some people prefer the high-quality version and are willing to pay extra, others are unwilling to pay extra, or have poor vision and think the low-quality
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Yeah, but $4 for a single movie on my TV screen? That's half a Netflix subscription. They need to get realistic about pricing. $2/month for unlimited streaming movies, or $0.5 for a full HD download of a recent release falling to $0.05 for older stuff. Must work on my smart TV of course.
If that sounds low keep in mind that they are competing with free. FTA TV, borrowing from friends/libraries, YouTube, BitTorrent etc. This is all for rentals of course (DRM crippled files), if the downloads are DRM free they
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He explicitly says "pay for the inches you watch". Furthermore, my current phone is 1080p, same as my TV. There are 4k phones in the works right now (despite the questionable quality gains). There are still movie theaters in my area that are limited to essentially 1080p. Pay per pixel does not produce the market that he is describing.
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.
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He explicitly says "pay for the inches you watch".
So, streaming porn is going to get a lot more expensive...
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.
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Yes, it's definitely doable from a technical perspective, the question is whether these greedy fucks will do it the simple way, or try to use DRM bullshit to determine our actual screen size and charge us accordingly.
The simple way would be to charge by resolution and image quality. Ultra-high-res with high-quality compression gets the highest price, low-res with excessive compression gets the lowest price. No need to use any DRM (at least for determining what kind of device you're playing it on) because
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Oh great, now Terry Pratchett's books are priced by the page? Sheesh, Alzheimer's must be expensive!
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> Samsung is planning a 2560*1440 cell phone.
The Oppo Find 7 already *has* one :-)
http://forum.xda-developers.co... [xda-developers.com]
For those who've never heard of it, it's the phone everyone at XDA-developers.com has been having wet dreams about for months -- a top-shelf, best-of-breed Android phone that makes no hardware compromises & ships unlocked with Cyanogenmod. There have been officially "open" phones in the past, but they were always last year's hardware or lacked important features like microSD (when you re
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Not only that, but is this pay per view on that screen or would you e.g. buy a blu-ray for $4? I might actually start buying them if that is the case (well, technically I've already started as I bought T2 on blu-ray for $5; no fucking way I'll ever spend $10 or more on a single movie disc though, and no way in hell I'll ever pay more than 50 cents for just one view.)
Or.. (Score:5, Funny)
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And I don't even pay $15 for a movie screen now. Around $8-11.
The only tiered pricing will be how it is now. Closer to release date, the more you pay. Movie Ticket > PPV > Rental > Streaming > TV (free, albet with ads).
Okay, I didn't stick DVD/BR in there which mucks up that neat formula with a higher price and ambiguities.... but the point remains. No one is going with this stupid plan.
A computer will be $X (Score:2)
and then every other screen will play it for free.
Re:A computer will be $X (Score:4, Funny)
Watch the cost of 4K cameras soar as a direct result.
Oh, excuse me, I'm the flight attendant I've noticed that you're breathing more than the other passengers. We're going to have to charge you for that.
Oh? No more limit on your credit card? Step outside, please.
Er..."pricing is alright?" (Score:3)
wouldn't they really want to charge on # of viewers? (no one cares about size of screen anymore; my kids watch everything on their tablets)
also, $2 seems pretty high for a movie in the days of Netflix...
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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.
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I was thinking the Kinect2 would be perfect for charging based on # of viewers. :)
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Well, speaking only for myself, I will never own a Kinect 2, because I refuse to connect my video game console to the interwebs.
Precisely for crap like this. I'm not installing an always on camera in my living room. Not now, not ever.
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Concept of property...
hehehe, try not paying your property taxes and see how long you still own that "property".
Property is a fallacy in the modern world of IP and big government.
value scales with screen size (Score:3, Insightful)
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How about paying $30 for a bottle of tequilla if you will drink it by the shot, but $50 if you will drink margaritas?
Ooo! How about if I only have to pay $25,000 for a Ferari if I promise to only drive it on shitty roads?
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oooo finally i can afford a Ferrari, where do I sign up for this
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right here [youtube.com]
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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 fina
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By that reasoning, if everyone were smart there would be zero new content to torrent.
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In my experience most torrented items are being torrented while they are in the top price bracket. People want to see them "now" but won't (or can't) afford to pay current prices for them now.
Except for Demonoid. Man I loved that site. It had so much out of print but still in copyright stuff on it. Too worthless to reprint but many items that were part of my childhood. I'm glad it was up as long as it was.
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.
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It's just a shame nobody makes a phone with 1920x1080 output on HDMI... oh, never mind. This post was meant for more than a year ago.
Article listing multiple phones with HDMI output in April, 2013 [chron.com]
EDID spoofers are common... (Score:5, Informative)
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I'm not sure this would work though. If you have, say, a 46 inch TV that's spoofing itself as a 4.7 inch cell phone, something tells me they will stream you a lower-quality picture. Or are people actually streaming 1080p and higher content to small screens already? (honest question)
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My Nexus 7 tablet has full 1080p.
I have no reason to doubt that people are streaming full HD content to small screens.
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I think what they'll do is offer streaming services. That'd be a lot easier for them to police because they could create their own client and force you to use it. However, I think they are vastly over-estimating their customers pain threshold. Especially when 3rd parties are starting to produce their own content and could offer a much more pleasant experience as a selling point.
The problem with all the movie industries attempts to change the dynamics of their sales model has been that they want to both rest
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That'd be a lot easier for them to police because they could create their own client and force you to use it.
Going that route is only slightly better than not offering the stream at all. I know that such an offering wouldn't be of interest to me regardless of the price point, even if the price was $0.
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I think this will not be so much about screen size as about "do you want a cinema quality, TV quality of phone quality?"
Which will be delivered using different compression algorithms, meaning 1080p on the phone will look good on the phone, but awful on TV screen where you will see all the artefacts that you wouldn't see on the small screen.
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It would be trivial to store a "fake" EDID in such a device that reports a smaller screen.
And then you'll get content at a lower resolution. I'd imagine that some services will be happy to sell you the lower-resolution content without spoofing, though I'm sure some won't.
No it won't (Score:2)
He can go F himself if that's gonna happen, I've got a projector with a 100+" screen, and I've also got a phone of 5", both are FullHD, so for one I would be paying $15 and for the other $5 even though they are using exactly the same resolution, therefore bandwidth...
I have more than 600 bluray's and well over 5000 dvd's, but if they go for such a moronic pricing for digital downloads, then I'll just go and pirate it, there is a limit to what actually makes sense, but paying according to your screensize is
We already have a unit of measure for billing (Score:5, Insightful)
Good thing I kept my CRT! (Score:3)
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Preceding parameters are important:
(B) communication by an establishment of a transmission or retransmission embodying a performance or display of a nondramatic musical work intended to be received by the general public, originated by a radio or television broadcast station licensed as such by the Federal Communications Commission, or, if an audiovisual transmission, by a cable system or satellite carrier, if—
(i) in the case of an establishment other than a food service or drinking establishment, eith
Shoot selves in foot ... (Score:2)
These clowns are just more or less determined to destroy the whole business of downloading, as well as killing their own revenue stream.
They think I'm going to pay more to download a video to my 55" TV than my 27" TV (and correspondingly more than my tablet)? All at the same resolution? How does *that* work? Can we charge him more for being a bigger idiot?
They're already gouging me to rent it, then my internet company is gouging me for the bandwidth to get it, and *then* they want a premium to play the e
Another stupid idea that flops before takeoff (Score:2)
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If they sold newer movies at 480p stereo sound for $5 each, they eliminate a bunch of pirated downloads and likely not offset any existing sales, IMO.
And projectors? (Score:2)
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And how do they propose determining the price for a projector, when a single unit can readily have a screen size ranging from 30 inches to 300 inches [amazon.com]?
Easy: they charge the maximum the device is capable of (in this case, 300 inches).
Well, I don't know about you, but I didn't buy a projector because it could project a maximum size of 300 inches... I bought it because it was far cheaper than practically every other remotely comparable large-form-factor television, even when projecting at "only" 80 inches, as I am. Thus, when the price of the hardware is factored into the equation, the amount of dough that you can expect to squeeze out of your viewing audience is dramatically impacted.
Which is to say: if Dreamworks actually goes down this
no concept of digital technology (Score:2)
This is another example in the cavalcade of lunacy...
Media bigwigs simply **do not understand the internet and digital technology**
Over and over, through things like DRM, their marketing, lawsuits they file, companies they back, the music/film/TV industry shows the faults of their business model.
Where does it all end? We can already get any "content" free virtually instantly (to watch new TV shows online you have to wait depending on your time zone)...artists are using non-standard channels more than ever..
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.
And yet (Score:3)
buying that cheap $2-$4 dvd or $5-10 BR at a pawn shop costs me nothing to watch it anywhere. I got about 1000 dvd's and 700 came from pawnshops/flea markets. You can keep your price per size hopefully it goes all digital and no more physical media so I never had to be bothered to watch anything and go for a walk instead. That movie habbit is hard to break but I'm getting there. Been cable free for over a year now which saved me $100 per month and haven't been to a movie theather since The Road.
Perhaps He Meant Resolution (Score:2, Insightful)
I think he was really referring to resolution when he was talking about screen size, perhaps he was addressing a non-technical audience. I agree with him for the most part. He's talking about expediting digital distribution to only 18 days after the initial release, as he figured the major cinemas have made about all they're going to make by the first three weekends. He sounds very forward thinking. Pay X3 for 4K, X2 for 1080P, X1 for SD.
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since a lot of recent phones are surpassing tv's in resolution, i doubt it...
And Google Glass (Score:2)
...will be 25 cents.
Why stop here? Charge for loudness too! (Score:2)
Also what about separate charges for Red, Blue and Green? This way colorblind people can benefit from low, low price of $19.99.
Last but not least, they should charge extra for Jar Jar Bink-less content. Insert him into all movies, then charge low low price of $1.99 to filter.
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No, no! Never repeat that Jar Jar idea. The fuckers will do it.
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He's annoying. He's really annoying. He's bad comic relief with a fake Jamaican accent and an annoying voice.
I tried to watch Episode 1 with the wife once, and shortly after he appears on screen, she said "is he in the rest of the movie?" And when I told her, yes, he was, and was in the next two, she said "I can't watch this". She then walked out to leave me to watch it myself.
Jar-Jar creates a very strong reaction for a lot of people. There's a reason people have re
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Watch the film cut of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, with Tim Curry.
Then watch something like Avengers, SWE1, or the like.
You'll notice a lot of modern acting involves standing in a pose, focusing on the active dialogue deliverer or other direct action, then delivering a line of dialogue or taking an action. Opera and theater take this to an extreme: people exchange lines and actions in grand maneuver, conveying a story. Modern acting has made this form of simple delivery more fluid; however, it is
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You answers are found in the classic Mr. Plinkett reviews Star Wars ...
* Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review (Part 1 of 7)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Much ado about nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
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Seriously, if the CEO of Dreamworks Animation doesn't know the difference, he's not qualified to hold the position.
Either way, I think this falls into the category of "just how much more can we screw the customers before they leave".
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Some would choose to phrase that "charging what the market will bear," but yeah, same thing.
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I also think this is a stupid idea. Has any customer ever looked at a DRM
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And those are few and far between.
For the most part, the content producers are making sure DRM is front and center, complicated, annoying, and extremely limiting in what you can do.
For instance, Ultraviolet -- first you sign up with Ultraviolet, then you sign up with the movie studio, and then you ask permission before you play the movie again, and if you're offline, you can't watch it because it can't call home to ask permission.
Sorr
lol (Score:2)
Once again, the movie industry reveals their complete lack of understanding of their own industry. People have no moral inclination to follow unjust and ridiculous rules/laws. Making your sales model even more ridiculous will just drive more customers into piracy.
Modified EDID possible (Score:5, Informative)
Can you fake the physical dimensions reported in the EDID block when the connection is using HDCP?
Yes. The EDID block is not encrypted.
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Whoo hoo! (Score:5, Funny)
Whoo hoo! My 51" hdtv's EDID data says it's 7" in size. Everything's coming up Milhouse!
Maybe they should just... (Score:2)
Explains the state of movies these days (Score:2)
This kind of article and thinking by a studio exec shows that nothing has changed in the way of making movies. Of course, content and story have nothing to do with it, it's down to what you're watching it on which completely takes the studios off the hook for producing anything that you'd actually want to pay for. Has anybody really seen a film that Dreamworks has produced in the last 10 years that's worth seeing again and again? Clearly the pay per view model is where this douche is focusing and I'm su
Screen size is meaningless (Score:2)
Price for Bitrate / Resolution? (Score:2)
You can have a much smaller / lower quality file (SD'ish) for a smartphone than for a 60" TV (where you want at least 720 and probably 1080).
They already charge a higher rate for HD movies than SD movies on a number of streaming rental sites so it's not even a "future" rental model.
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In other news... (Score:2)
Yep, "Pay-per-Pixel." I can see that.
In other news, DreamWorks executives can afford to smoke shit that the rest of us haven't even heard of... :)
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Can I get a discount if they keep the Jar-Jar Binks pixels?
ceo's (Score:2)
--- "i think what we have here is a failure to communicate" ---
as in the CEO has NO idea about the technology being used
px resolution is a easy one to do , and would make some sense .
the SIZE of the screen is just a phallic reference .
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Der JohnVanViet,
You have used a misquote from "Cool Hand Luke". Please pay Warner Brothers the sum of ONE MILLION DOLLARS for a license.
Thank you,
Takeda, Monet, and Runne
Attorneys at Law
summary is misleading (Score:5, Informative)
Jeffrey Katzenberg might have said "you pay for the size", this does not mean he explicitly meant physical dimensions and not resolution. This suggestion was added in by the article submitter to make him sound more idiotic than he probably is. I'm sure if you were actually talking to Katzenberg and you pressed him on the issue, he would clarify that he used the term size as a proxy for a combination of resolution and compression quality which one would expect for a TV vs a cellphone.
Its 4K, HD, or SD explained in a diferent way (Score:2)
... I doubt they care what your screen size is. If you want to upscale the SD version onto your 4K TV, no problem -- it just won't look as good.
Other factors (Score:2)
torrent comments aside... (Score:2)
Let's assume he's talking about resolution instead of screen size, because he's probably the kind that has his secretary print out his emails and has no idea what a pixel is.
This is the CEO of Dreamworks, known for a lot of CGI movies.
After getting a retina macbook, i recently tried the 4K version of one of those Blender movies - Sintel to be exact.
I didn't see any significant difference.
I guess Dreamworks has the render farms to do a few more hairs than the Blender foundation, but still, for his products m
Also, "Newsies" will bring back the musical. (Score:2)
Tiered based on Video dimensions, not screen size (Score:3)
Rather than tiered based upon Screen Size, it;'s more likely that Katz meant it would be tiered based on Video dimensions. Many people have pointed out that it's hard for the delivery mechanism to know the target screen size. It's easy for the producer to generate a video at multiple video dimensions. The teirs would relate to standard screen sizes, increasing in cost per tier. For example:
Tier 1 - 320x240 or 640x360
Tier 2 - 640x480 or 800x450
Tier 3 - 800x600 or 960x540
Tier 4 - 1024x768 or 1024x576
Tier 5 - 1280x720
Tier 6 - 1920x1080
These are 4x3 and 16:9 resolutions. I'm sure they could make other resolutions available.
The idea is that lower resolution may be just fine for viewing on your phone or watch, but you'd want the Tier 5-6 dimensions for watching on a large TV. Try watching a 320x240 res video on your 40" display and you'll see what I mean.
Nothing to stop you from doing exactly that; you want to pay $1 and watch 320x240 res video on your 40" display? Sure, go ahead. But I'm betting it won't be as good as watching the 1920x1080 res video.
Except if it's a download of Twilight.
Could they really just mean resolution? (Score:2)
I mean then it's a straight data / cost ratio.
Say it was 50 cents per gigabyte you download from them.
So $2 for a DVD. $15 for a Blue ray. 50 cents on your mobile device unless you want to run it at "retina" level resolution in which case you might be paying $4.
Rookie security mistakes (Score:2)
One of the most popular seems to "trusting remotely entered data".
I doubt it (Score:2)
Based on the wording, he's comparing watching it on a given screen equal to watching it in a movie theater. That is, you don't get to keep it. Watch once, that sort of thing. Maybe a netflix model. At $4 bucks, 10 years from now, for a large screen tv, it sounds like it's some sort of rental, like the holy grail of DRM has promised the MPAA folks; they can only watch it _x_ times, or only until date _y_.
Of course, like all models that revolve around these sorts of limitations, you need to implement inc
Thank god for smartphones (Score:2)
That's it. I'm only watching movies on my phone from now on.
To keep things in line... (Score:2)
There will also be a 75% increase in the price of .torrent files.
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."
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Next, you stand considerably further away from a large screen, so a large screen occupies the same area on your visual field as a small screen which you hold closer to your face. The end result is the same.
Based on these facts, there is no technical merit nor reason for charging based on screen size. Inste