Studios Set Up DVD Download-and-Burn Plans To Fail

from the missing-the-point dept

Wed, Jul 19th 2006 8:25am — Carlo Longino

Earlier this week, Movielink, the movie-download site that's owned by a number of movie studios, said it had licensed technology to allow users to burn downloaded movies to DVDs, but couldn't yet offer the service as it still needed to license some encryption software as well as get approval from the studios that their movies could be used for the service. Much to Movielink's chagrin, its major rival, CinemaNow, says it will start letting customers burn some movies to DVD, with the studios' blessing. It's slightly odd that the studios would let CinemaNow introduce the functionality before a site in which they have a financial stake, but they apparently feel somewhat comfortable with the technology the site's been using to let users burn porn DVDs for several months. Of course, there's a catch -- only about 100 movies are initially available to be burned, none of them new releases. According to BusinessWeek, the studios want to see if the movies "end up littering the nation's piracy sites" -- which, as usual, is completely pointless, since the movies will have long been available on pirate sites. It almost sounds like they're setting the system up to fail, perhaps to protect physical DVD retailers, or to once again put forth the nonsensical "you can't compete with free" argument. Perhaps in one sense they're right: you can't compete with free if you don't offer consumers anything worthwhile.

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14 Comments

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Mr Shag, 19 Jul 2006 @ 8:48am

Or,
It could be that the just-released older movies are watermarked, and they will be able to see what ones are being pirated. Maybe the DRM scheme might also be diffrent, and they might want to know if they have to change it. They could be letting another company take the risk, while they sit back and see if it works.
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Sexton Lovecraft, 19 Jul 2006 @ 9:08am

Crooked features.
Why download and burn with DRM cripples when you can just join the long tail and burn on demand?

Seems to be selling quite well, cult status in parts of London:
http://www.lulu.com/content/174173

The old style regional licensing fees (= megabucks) is being challenged in this time of the latest iteration of Chomksy's global village.
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sickboy76, 19 Jul 2006 @ 10:24am

weak ass link
number 2 has a weak ass link that shouldn't even be in this thread. has nothing to do with downloading hollywood movies. just put it there to trick people into hitting the site. don't go there unless you wanna buy a book. what an a-hole. get the f off of this site cockgobbler.
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Lord Sparhawk, 19 Jul 2006 @ 10:26am

DVD Burn or get burned
I recently downloaded and burned the CinemaNow Dvd sampler that they offered for free. Burned nicely, and plays just fine. My complaint, however, is that what if it doesn't burn just fine? The quality isn't as good as a retail DVD, and looks absolutely horrid on my HDTV (Regular DVD's look ok, but just barely.) So, as long as they are charging $8 or $9 for a movie that's not at a higher bitrate and won't let me burn an additional back up DVD, I'll just go to Wal*Mart and spend the $5.50 and buy two. :P
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SeaCaptain, 19 Jul 2006 @ 10:40am

Arrrr
I still agree with the movie companies... you can't compete with free... all the people who are pirating movies aren't doing so because the movie industry doesn't "offer consumers anything worthwhile". They're doing so because it's free. This site seems to think that Holywood can magically start making quality movies all the time when the fact of the matter is that they've produced the same filth ALWAYS and occasionally come out with something worthwhile. It just what they do. If there's a band in which 99% of its songs that it puts out are crap and 1% is good, can you expect them to suddenly start making albums that are 100% top notch quality? No. It just can't happen. And as a pirate of the digital sea myself when I find a movie I actually enjoy, Fear and Loathing and countless animes, I buy it, but I don't (and rightly so) expect holywood to start making quality movies (which is the ONLY thing they can do to improve sales... innovations of distribution techniques will NOT work because people who don't pirate movies now are the only ones who will go for such a thing [the porn industries success is an entirely different subject altogether]).
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- U Know Who, 19 Jul 2006 @ 1:36pm
  
  Re: Arrrr
  Dammit Randy !
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Pariah, 19 Jul 2006 @ 11:00am

You certainly can compete with "free" when FREE=relatively crappy quality like wht you find on P2P.
All one has to do is look at the multi-billion dollar bottled water industry to see people making lots of money competeing with "free".
Quality files, served on a fat pipe, burnible to media and most importantly, priced fairly...That would sell and sell well.

The content cartels are just incredibly stupid and short sighted.
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- Sea Captain, 19 Jul 2006 @ 11:29am
  
  Re:
  Apparently you failed to notice you can download the .vobs and .ifo files through torrents... the whole 4.5 gig dvd... the extra footage might not be there for some movies, I don't know if I've ever seen a 7 gig torrent for a dvd... but you can get dvd quality torrents...
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milkmage, 19 Jul 2006 @ 3:23pm

@ Sea Captain

I've seen more and more 8-9GB files.. probably because DL DVD media is getting cheaper and DL burners are quickly becoming standard..

but yeah Pariah needs to find some better torrent sites if all he's seeing are the camcorder copies.
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Arr teh booty, 19 Jul 2006 @ 6:53pm

and Pariah needs to take note of some of the awesome HDTV-res TV episode torrents.

Why pay for tiny video files that has DRM that beats you to death when you can get top-notch quality for free?

The best way to compete would be a reasonable profit margin (cheap files) and combine a sort of holy trinity of distribution: excellent upload speed.. used with paying customer-only bittorrent swarms.. to sell the highest-res files, HD quality or better only or whatever the best format for that movie is available in. I'd pay for that.
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Arr teh booty, 19 Jul 2006 @ 6:56pm

Oh! And I almost forgot: I wouldn't install a darn thing from these companies! What do they think I am, stupid?! Have I learned nothing from corporate rootkits?

Forget it. Whatever scheme they have needs to be compatible with commonly available third party trusted software. Let me burn my own goods with my own programs, please. And yes, I know that might require yet another program like VSO's ConvertXtoDVD, but thats cool with me. No rootkits or other spyware for me.

Lacking anything like that I think they can fully expect piracy to continue amongst the technically literate.
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neil, 26 Jul 2006 @ 4:16am

help
Can someone tell me a fast & easy way to burn downloaded movies THANKS NEIL
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Smelly Bastard, 26 Aug 2006 @ 4:57pm

Try an oven!
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don smith, 25 Mar 2008 @ 1:59pm

movies
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