Digital Downloads

[Jaded]

Following up on the discussion we were having in the hi-def movie thread, there's a new product called Vudu hitting the market soon. It's a $400 box that has 5000 'movie stubs' pre-loaded onto it. You hook it to the net and and pay per movie to watch. The 'stub' will start playing immediately with the rest of the movie downloading in the background, hopefully faster than you're watching.

The movies aren't high def, but the unit is supposed to upscale if you have an HDTV. It is capable of high def movies but they're still negotiating the rights. You need a cable modem or better to use it. DSL isn't fast enough, they say.

NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/technology/circuits/06pogue.html

You *can* buy the movie for "$15-$20" or rent it from $2-$4 (after which you have 24 hours to watch it).

The rig uses peer-to-peer with other Vudu users. NY Times seems to consider this to be a "cool feature" but to me it's a drawback. I don't need my ISP barking at me because I'm uploading huge files to random strangers. And I know when I use bittorrent (at least) it sucks down every byte of bandwidth. Heaven forbid the (internet) phone should ring because I can't use Vonage and do a P2P bittorrent transfer at the same time.

NY Times seems really bullish on this product. Me, I'm not seeing it. $400 to pay full price for movies that I could play on any of my existing DVD players?

[irata]

This just went into public beta.  It's free, it gives you access to hundreds of TV channels worldwide, and they even have a Mac client:

http://www.joost.com/

[Gwyn]

In a fit of insomnia during the night, I went to Amazon to shop.  And saw this little "watch it now" button on a DVD I was looking at, so I clicked.  I'm now the proud owner of Amazon Unbox Video (for free) and my first movie ($9.99).  The movie is about 8 years old, so that's probably the same price I would have paid for the media in Best Buy or wherever at this point.  But I got to watch it now.  I like it.

[Jaded]

I *think* that if you had a Tivo, you could watch your Unbox movie on your Tivo!  If that isn't the case yet, it's something that plan for, I believe.

What was the movie?

BTW the guys here at the new gig rave about Joost. I can't understand why the MPAA hasn't shut them down yet, though. Any ideas?

[Gwyn]

Yes, download to Tivo was an option, as was a copy for a portable DVD player.  This just makes a whole lot more sense to me than the $400 version.  The only negative is there's no "hard" copy, but it seems Amazon keeps track of my media library so presumably if I changed computers all I'd have to do is download the Unbox player again.  But I didn't check the fine print all that closely, that may be a huge assumption on my part.  Still, my shelves are overflowing with movies I've only watched once and I like this alternative.

[conveniently overlooks the query about which flick I watched since it's a rather embarrassing, very girly title]   

[irata]

I've been playing around with Joost, and it's seriously cool.  They even have a channel dedicated to those cheesy Alliance/Atlantis Sci-fi shows they do up in Canada (Lexx, Total Recall, Starhunter and such.)  I'm watching Starhunter in a windows as I type this...

[Jaded]

Those Vudu people, (y'know the $400 set-top box that lets you buy/rent movies, a la Amazon UnBox or Apple TV or XBLive) have announced a new model, the Vudu XL. It comes with a terabyte of storage and costs $999.

The service does now offer HD movies, which presumably is part of the reason for the new model with the bigger hard drive. Apparently you can't rent the HD movies, only buy them, and the cost, at last for the Bourne Ultimatum, is $24.95, which seems pretty high to me, but them I'm a luddite who likes physical media.

As best I can figure (Vudu doesn't make it easy to find this stuff out) their HD stuff is 720P.

[bdaniels]

I believe Netflix is going to have a set top box that will play movies over the internet.  I think the box will be in the 400 to 500 dollar range, and the movies will be part of your monthly fee.  I think its due summer / fall 2008

[Jaded]

Yup, Netflix and LG. But Netflix seems to want to do more than just their set-top box, and wants to get their service integrated into other devices.

[Jaded]

Pioneer's Sync TV is the first digital download service to support 1080P content...

[Jaded]

Panasonic and Comcast Team for Portable DVR

Now something like this makes the whole digital download idea more palatable to me. So now I *can* (if this was linked to a download service) take my movies and tv shows with me, whether I'm going into the next room, or to the beach house. Or even into the minivan?

It still doesn't solve the question of loaning disks, though. I bet I converted half a dozen people into Battlestar lovers by lending them by DVDs of the show...

[aRGee]

Think cheap flash drive storage. That could add portability as well.

[aRGee]

The studios do not want you to lend out stuff. Remember DIVX?
In the long run the consumer may loose in all of this.

[Jaded]

Think cheap flash drive storage. That could add portability as well.

Yeah, it all depends on DRM, though. Without DRM, you could just burn copies to hard media and lend them, take them along, etc.

[splusmer]

I think we may have talked about this in another thread somewhere, but if so I can't remember it for the life of me.  Yesterday, when she was updating our Netflix queue, she discovered a number of the things we had queued up (mostly TV shows on DVD, it seemed) had a button for viewing online.  After some hopping about (it doesn't work in Mac OS-X native, so we moved over to my Windows laptop, then had to install a Netflix viewer and get some updated components for Mediaplayer, etc.), she was watching a pretty decent res, full-screen episode of Law & Order: SVU... over a wireless connection!  No real hiccups, glitches, or other funny video or sound artifacts, either--pretty sweet!

Since the laptop she uses the most now is her MacBook, so I finally bit the bullet and bought VMWare for it, then installed all the Netflix viewer stuff under Windows (under VMWare).  It was slower to come up, and if you were running Window in a window instead of full screen the calculated screen resolution would be off, but it worked there okay as well.  Hopefully, though, they come up with a Mac-native version.

Huh, looking over our queue I do see some (olderish) movies, too.  Cool!  They've got Kolchack!

Okay, yeah, the "Browse instant" says "over 7000 movies and TV shows"... which is I think what someone else posted, well, elsewhere.  So I guess this posting can just be a report of "success" with the service--definitely makes keeping our Netflix going an option.

[Jaded]

There're rumors that Netflix is working on a version of that player which would run on the PS3 & XBox360. You'd have to buy a disk from them for a nominal fee, then you're run the program on the disk and watch on your tv.

[splusmer]

Now that would be the way to go!  With the HD disc format war over, maybe we'll plunge into a system one of these days (we still have "reguble ol'  TVs").

Of course, this format war could make laptops with HD-DVDs in them plunge in price, and there's that 20" one... ;P