The idea is that the DVD is already too easy to copy and that rental companies like blockbusters & film distributors must be suffering already from the online movie piracy.
What we need is an easy way for the big media companies to charge people to access whatever they want without giving them the benefit of copying the same movie and sharing it with their friends for free.
We all know that you can get DivX Jukeboxes and all that but this is different. You can get DVD quality movies off the internet in a few hours using a good connection. And the technology for temporary storage for about 1 or 2 movie (700 Mb) is cheap as chips. Why not link them together in a simple legal bit of hardware that allows you to browse all the latest movies (e.g. just released DVDs) & old classics to watch whatever you want whenever you want. For this to work you would need to have a hard disk with space for 2 movies. One being watched and the other being downloaded. A basic browsing interface to navigate the movie genres etc. And a monthly fee for access. You can watch as many movies as you like but you are limited because you can only store one movie at a time and the time to download means that you will probably only get two movies a day any way.
The royalties on these old classics must be next to nothing. And they could get some milage out of old TV series' and all that. It is kinda like ultimate SkyPlus because you could browse through a massive library of archives.
I am sure this idea has been prototyped already because it is so basic but I don't understand why it has not already been marketed.-- PainOCommonSense, Jun 02 2004 Movielink http://www.movielin...rce/home/Home.jhtmlsimilar to this [xclamp, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004] You could probably connect the box to your VCR or DVD-R, and pirate the movies this way. It would be better if you could stream the film directly to your TV, but modern internet connections probably aren't fast or reliable enough. Would imagine companies are holding out for this to become feasible.-- MikeOliver, Jun 02 2004 Yeah probably. To be frank it is kinda just a cheap hack of existing bits with a big library. But the idea of a flat fee and unlimited watching with the combination of not really being able to keep the copy seemed to me a good pricing structure.-- PainOCommonSense, Jun 02 2004 How is this significantly different than movies on demand (available on most digital cable systems)?-- phoenix, Jun 02 2004 As I understand it they are very limited to 10 or more films and charge by movie. Which also links into [Mikes] Comment-- PainOCommonSense, Jun 02 2004 i have used the movielink.com service and it works pretty much is as you describe, hooking my laptop to the tv with the s-video out. but it's a per movie rental fee. not sure of the file format though.
you can download all the films you want, store them as long as you want but once you start them you can only watch them for 24 hrs (as many times as you'd like). it's a little better than your idea because you can start viewing the stream immediately as the rest downloads. (link)-- xclamp, Jun 02 2004 Sounds like a neat service, but seems to be far more complex than the on demand service [phoenix] mentions without many of the benefits.
Our cable provider just started the on demand service, and it's great. There are hundreds of shows available for free, with pause and rewind. There are also quite a few movies (I'd guess around 50?) available for a price. I don't have to wait hours for a download - just click OK. My guess is there is no technical limit to the number of movies they could provide, it's just a buisiness decision.-- Worldgineer, Jun 02 2004 Too bad Movie link doesn't work over here (just in the states) :(
I guess I will have to wait till they go global.-- PainOCommonSense, Jun 03 2004 random, halfbakery