Harry Potter Offered For Download

from the in-as-painful-a-way-as-possible dept

Just like with music, it seems the movie industry is working hard to offer you "downloadable" entertainment under the worst possible set of restrictions. Warner Brothers has announced that they're making the Harry Potter movie downloadable online. However, it costs $4 to download (about the same as it would cost to rent the DVD at Blockbuster), is a 700 meg download with copy protection, and will only work for 24 hours. Knowing the flakiness of most people's internet connections, it's going to take most people half a day to download the damn thing anyway. All that, just to watch it on your tiny computer monitor before your time runs out? I'd rather run down to the local video store and rent it.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    Michael Armstrong, 10 Sep 2002 @ 8:33am

    It's just a game...

    on the part of the big dogs to drive legislation their way. A weird sort of lobbying effort, if you will.
    By putting out these lame schemes, they can say to congress "See, we tried to offer download service, but nobody used it. those nasty pirates still went around us an gave it to people for free."
    Never mind the fact that nobody will use it because it's too restrictive or otherwise doomed to failure. Never mind the fact that pirated versions were no easier to get WITH their scheme in place than without.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.