Movies going "macropayment"....

Micropayments, Macropayments, Subscriptions, etc.

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ragtag
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Post by ragtag »

Here

http://www.upside.com/DigitalMedia_Week ... eb401.html

is an article about 5 of the big US studios going for internet distribution of movies for as low as aprox. $3-5 per view ($1 would be great..).

Ragnar
buzzard
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Post by buzzard »

Given that movies are already "sold" on a per-view basis, it's not surprising the cost won't go down that much... although yeah, it would be nice to see it compete with rental prices, since they're not letting you sit in a theater with a huge screen and THX sound etc...
lylebclarke
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Post by lylebclarke »

Bah. This is just a stalling tactic while they're waiting to get more laws in place.

The more expensive fat content like movies are the less incentive there is to race out and get broadband. So long as the majority of the public don't have fat pipes, movies are reasonably safe from Napserisation.

I.e. It is in their interest to keep the price of their broadband content high and the quality low, to discourage people from racing out and getting major bandwidth installed.
ragtag
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Post by ragtag »

I don't think so. Computer technology development is fast...in fact very fast. And even though increasing the entire capacity of the internet infrastructure and making broadband available to most people is going to take a little while....but we're not talking more than 10 years. In 10 years time todays broadband will be considered dead slow, and real time streaming of DVD quality films will be standard. 10 years ago I got my first internet connection with a 2400baud modem (that's 0.3kb/sec) today I have a T1 connection at work (aprox. 300kb/sec)....a measly 1000 times faster.

Piracy of feature length films is allready in full swing on the net (do a search on DivX with a Gnutella host and see how many films show up), but only a few people are able to use it yet. It would be stupid of the movie industry to sit on their asses and let Napster like software take a big bite out of their revenues (10% perhaps).

If they make their movies available for download themselves at a fair price, I think people will download the movies from them instead of looking for Napster like solutions. Simply because it's more convenient and you know what you're getting (and it's legal). Same applies to comics. If I had every movie listed on IMDB (www.imdb.com) available for a couple of bucks to download...I wouldn't have a life anymore. :smile:

Laws are not going to be much help. You can crack down on piracy in one country with strict laws, but there are lots of other countries that will ignore piracy within their borders. And as the internet spans the entire globe, so laws for it will always be problematic. Secondly, peer-to-peer (e.g. Gnutella) technology is difficult to control, as (unlike Napster) it needs no central server.

But this is all kind of getting off-topic... :smile:

Ragnar
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Greg Stephens
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Post by Greg Stephens »

I recently read something quite chilling regarding national borders and the virtual world.
Good morning! That's a nice tnetennba.
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