Internet Movies Before DVD

alfrin writes "Actor Morgan Freeman and Intel are starting a company that will sell movies over the Internet before they are released to DVD. "We're going to bypass what the music industry had to come up with, and that's to get ahead of the whole piracy thing," Freeman told reporters at Sun Valley after making his presentation, which was closed to the press. Wouldn't this just make it easier to pirate movies?"

The Intel Connection

[Anonymous Coward]

Intel is building DRM right into their chips.

Intel's Involvement?

[buckhead_buddy]

The article just barely touches on Intel's involvement in this project:

Intel spokesman Bill Calder said Intel had been working for several years with Freeman, setting up "digital home" technology in his studio and doing a long-range wireless demo at the Sundance film festival.

"It fits into our whole digital home strategy," Calder said of the investment. "One of the things we've always said is content is key."

Other than the strategy involves a multimedia PC hooked up to a TV, Intel's only part in the rest of the article is a big Uncle Penny Bags that could have equally been filled by Nabisco, Hustler, or some other big company.

It sounds like they intend to DRM this tech heavily, but it baffles me a bit how they intend to do this. The download format will be encrypted, but if it is decrypted for display there are a lot of ways to record that stream. What do they intend to do? Put intel chips in televisions themselves? Degrade the signal so any additional lossy compression will render it as unwatchable? Junk it up with video bugs to identify the original source? Maybe they just assume that Joe User will be able to steal 3 or 4 movies, but he'll soon give up if he fills up his hard disk and decides it's just easier to stream them all the time.

Any speculation or additional articles on what this plan intends to implement?

Re:Why would this help piracy?

[money_harvester]

"record the video as you play it"


I could reasure you that this is NOT out of the question, I grab overlay video frames at 30fps with FRAPS routinelly, no big deal, also with loseless compression so there is about 0.1% degradation.


Video on-demand is offered here by local Telecom at www.starzone.cz for about a year now. And is very successfull and cheap, at least the localy produced films are.

Re:Finally

[jizmonkey]

I don't think many people are going drop TV as the medium in favor of something that's unreliable. I know I sure didn't tune in to the Daily Show on TV when ShunTV was around...but now, without a consistently reliable source for it I watch it on TV.

Comedy Central has the latest show on its website the day after it airs. They seem to leave out the less-funny segments sometimes, but they always seem to have the monologue, and sometimes the whole show if it was really great.

Re:Piracy for the Sake of Piracy. A.K.A. hoarding

[Cecil]

No, you absolutely did not. The AC is wrong. DIVX [wikipedia.org] was Circuit City's DRM-disc format. Wikipedia has never heard of "DIVIX", nor has Everything2, nor any other reputable site I can find. The only reference to "DIVIX" that I can find is on random forums on Google where clueless people are mispelling the name of DivX (the codec)

Re:I believe you're right on.

[mmkkbb]

is MIT's hyperarchive gone? try http://hyperarchive.lcs.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]