p2pnet - rss feed: Major studios discover the Net
p2p news / p2pnet: It’s begun. Hollywood is about to “discover” the Net, and the mainstream media are all over it as though it’s genuine news.
Yesterday Sony revealed that with its UMD discs shown up indisputably as dead dogs, it was turning to “digital sell-throughs” via the corporate movie sites.
As Bloomberg News puts it, Hollywood will for first time “allow” Americans to pay up to $27 for ‘new’ flics, and $10 to $20 for older ones - and keep them.
“The studios are turning to the Internet to cut distribution costs and counter slowing growth of DVD sales,” says the story.
It’ll also help pay for all MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) boss Dan Glickman’s trips to China and Russia where, backed by the Bush administration, he’s fronting efforts to turn the countries into corporate sales divisions under tight Hollywood control.
Punters will, of course, need Microsoft Windows Media Center DRM consumer control software to view whatever they’ve paid through the nose to ‘own’.
“CinemaNow counts as its investors Menlo Ventures, Microsoft, Cisco Systems Inc and Blockbuster Inc,” says Bloomberg News.
“Santa Monica, California-based Movielink is a joint venture of MGM, Viacom’s Inc’s Paramount unit, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.”
Also See:
dead dogs - Hollywood goes online, April 3, 2006
Bloomberg News - Major Hollywood Studios Start Selling Movie Downloads, April 3, 2006
April 4th, 2006 at 1:29 pm
I went to movielink’s site and it refused access cause I’m not American. I loaded the page through a US proxy server and voila, I could see the treasure trove.
They still don’t get it. Consumers want access, they want choice and competition, they want an internet not an intranet. They are attempting to break the web for profit in the same manner as they’ve been breaking every rule of free market competition for decades.
They want to lock me in with DRM, I’ll continue ’shopping’ for torrents.
April 4th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
My CinemaNow is called free dvd movie downloads muhahaha!!
sony and co can kiss my ass.
April 4th, 2006 at 4:05 pm
CNet’s Buzz Out Loud podcast featured this the other day:
http://dw.com.com/redir/file.mp3?destURL=http://www.cnet.com/i/pod/cnetbuzz_040306.mp3&ctype=podCast&cval=BuzzOutLoud;040306&tag=txt [direct download]
… and they didn’t have a good thing to say about it. It’s a good trashing actually.
April 4th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
Clearly the big studios will never just let people download films free of any DRM, as much as we’d love them to.
But looking at some of the small print it’s clear they still have a way to go before film downloads are accepted.
For one, the insistance on making people play these films on a PC (Windows only?) is a major stumbling block, as is the fact these films cannot be burned to DVDs that could be played on stand-alone players.
If the studios have any hope of persuading the BitTorrent-using masses to use their service they really are going to have to start TRUSTING them - people download from ‘illegal’ P2P all the time, some because they just want free stuff, but others do it because there is no viable, reliable and above all FLEXIBLE download service.
So, major studios, don’t be too surprised when BitTorrent useage continues to rise whilst your attempts fail.
April 4th, 2006 at 6:29 pm
Still overpriced. How about 7, 5, 3.
April 4th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
I agree. If I pay for it it’s MINE. When they take it away from me with their DRM they’re STEALING what I paid for.
April 4th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
only can access site with IE,
Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must use Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, which supports certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies. Click here to get the latest version of Internet Explorer.
We do not support Mozilla or Netscape. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
what a load of crock, utilized for downloading…..hahahahahahahha
April 4th, 2006 at 11:50 pm
The friggin’ music criminals are getting away with charging more for less with “purchased” (try LEASED) downloaded music, and I bet the proles are just dumb enough to pay hollwood whatever grossly inflated prices they throw at them. There’s plenty of idiots out there with more money than common sense and hollywood KNOWS IT.
April 5th, 2006 at 3:30 am
In the local supermarkets, you can purchase DVDs of films that are 3-10 years old from the 20th Century Fox catalog at 3 for $20.00. I’ve gotten collection of literally 100 movies from the 30s thru 50s for $19.99. They are mostly A-/B+ movies, but there are some classics (like Royal Wedding & The Caine Mutiny) among the collection so they can put something eye catching and familiar on the packaging.
One nice thing about this from the legal perspective is that if the MPAA ever sues someone for infringing, oh pardon me, “stealing”, a 1940s film-noire, the fair market value of that is 50 cents. $150,000 in statutory damages would seem to violate the US Constitutions “excessive fines” clause (which trumps copyright law.)
–TurboGeek