Internet Movies Before DVD 418
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?"
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Great Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
Mod Morgan Freeman Redudant (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not very efficient.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Doesn't this just make it easier to pirate? (Score:1, Interesting)
the difference between movies and music is.. most of the times i only need to watch a movie once (usually cause it's crap).. and if it's truely worth something then i'll fork over more cash for a dvd, and if i really needed a avi/asf of it.. i could rip the dvd.
the one thing i hope they account for is.. i don't want to "stream" movies.. cause i don't want to worry about skipping, and having to sit through a thousand commercials (like ign) to see something.
Re:Piracy for the Sake of Piracy. A.K.A. hoarding (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
If they could modify the formula so that the shows with potential could get as much playing time as those that are already hits, I would be all for it right now. The crap factor is just terrible on TV right now.
Um... is that a real question? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wouldn't this just make it easier to pirate movies?
No, not really. You'd have less interested parties in your stolen warez. Of course, this all depends on the price. If the movies are going to be $20 a pop, then yes, it will just continue to get pirated. If they were only $5, most (read: all but the cheap) people would rather own a legit copy than a pirated DVD rip. Think about it this way:
If you could get an entire album of music for $5 that you had full rights to (i.e. able to play it on any device you owned and able to make a backup as well), it has been proven time and time again that people are more willing to pay for something rather than steal it (which nobody can really argue, downloading albums without permission is illegal, whether moral or not).
It should be interesting to see what price structure this thing will have, as that's about the only thing that will make it worth anyone's while. Otherwise, it will just aid piracy. As Eisner said in one of his few moments of wisdom, Price and availability are the only real combatants to piracy. The question here is whether it will be a step in the right direction, not whether it will make piracy easier. Piracy is already far from difficult.
Re:Piracy for the Sake of Piracy. A.K.A. hoarding (Score:3, Interesting)
I felt kinda like this back in 97 when I first got on the internet. Downloading and printing crap every spare moment... probably took me a year or so to realize that "THE INTERNET WILL STILL BE THERE IN THE MORNING!!" ha ha ha.
I still have tons of old programs and games I'll never use. I must have about 5 or 6 gigs of windows 95 drivers still too.
Re:Piracy for the Sake of Piracy. A.K.A. hoarding (Score:5, Interesting)
I think some of it is one giant pissing contest as to who can have the most movies, sometimes it's the "I'll get around to watching it later" syndrome, and sometimes it's just to have something to watch that you've never seen before available at all times. Sort of like saying "I've only seen this Simpsons 20 times before, so maybe I'll just finish watching Cowboy Bebop instead". And sometimes, it's because we remember waiting three days to download the first half of Blade in crap Telesync before realizing that the actual movie came out the next day. Even with the slowness, being (most likely) the first people in the community to have a movie from the 'internets' was a pretty big thing back then. Maybe some people just haven't gotten over it.
But you're right. It could get way out of hand...
Unless we're talking about Pr0n. Then it will likely never get out of hand.
I believe you're right on. (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey, what if I need that program some day? What if they stop Bittorrent and all the other stuff by requiring ISP's to only allow cached web traffic? What if?
It could happen, and in the current climate of technology things, it seems likely. In the meantime, I'm downloading everything I can get because in the future I might not be able to.
Of course, I wouldn't bother if this shit wasn't so expensive. $25 for a movie? $60 for a game? $500 for Photoshop? If movies were $5, games were $15, and Photoshop was $30, I wouldn't bother pirating any software or media.
However, I do buy DVD's occationally, because I know I can get that movie off the disc any time I wanted. I probably won't ever copy it or send it over the Internet, but I *could.*
Re:I believe you're right on. (Score:2, Interesting)
I actually have run into this problem, where I know where a utility is, and have downloaded it, only now it doesn't exist/has been replaced, and I can't get it anymore. This is starting to happen a lot with old Mac shareware/freeware (I still have a bunch of 68k and old PPC macs) and I wish I had made archive dumps of the old Info-mac mirrors.
Re:It might decrease piracy... (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolutely on the mark. Problem is, the copyright extensions Disney keep getting will always keep a lot of good material away from the public domain. If you haven't found it yet, try here for a few interesting movies which haven't been locked away. http://www.archive.org/details/movies [archive.org] The biggest section by far is the open-source movies, which shows how much creativity is being stifled by over-restrictive copyright.
Re:Piracy for the Sake of Piracy. A.K.A. hoarding (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Piracy for the Sake of Piracy. A.K.A. hoarding (Score:3, Interesting)
max out 2 8mb connections and spend tons of time burning the images to dvd, but really i just like keeping track of these things.
how many good or even decent movies, or songs from 25 years ago just disappeared? how much culture is lost? looking back sure you can get a megahit album from the beatles or bob dylan, but most of the mediocre stuff that just fills the airwaves is lost. Most people would say "good riddance" but we are defined by the crap as well as the art. It will be sad if people 50 years on look back and don't realize along with the decent music we had our britney spears and nsync, because i think that horrible crap actually defines us as a real, breathing culture more than any timeless classics we produce. how much would you know about the victorian age if all you ever heard about was the works of shakespeare and such.
this seems like such a pessimistic argument, but in school when you heard all those folk songs in music class didn't they convey a greater understanding of the people vs a symphony or the national anthem. losing culture is a crime, less so for the crap, but hey, one persons ricky martin is another persons bach.
size matters (Score:3, Interesting)
my main server has 2tb online right now, the download barrier for me is very low. if i see something online and had any interest in it at some point, click, boop, its queued. unlimited bandwith coupled with near unlimited storage capacity (like 5 dvd burners around) mean you get everything, and if the impulse comes by someday to check it out, meh. its a packrat mentality, but when the cost of acquisition and storage get that low expect everyone to have a few tb media library. the old paradigm of "buy what you really like cause you can't keep that much" is breaking down all over, and we should be happy. seriously, besides a few outmoded economic concerns what's to stop everyone from having either a copy or easy access to every movie made in the last 5 years, or every tv show. on demand is working on this, but it's terribly clunky as an interface, and has too small of a selection.
seriously, tv distribution is a model that evolved from the limitations of video broadcast. those kinda don't exist anymore, at least not the same "1 vhf channel per show per timeslot" kind of way. media is still profiting off the artificial scarcity, but that won't last forever. the first company that says "hey we sponsor tv shows for online download subscription" once broadband becomes really ubiquitous is going to be huge.
video killed the radio star, and then the net fired back.
should be fun to watch.
the revolution will not be televised... it will be a distributed torrent-cast.