Movies Delivered Via Television Signal 274
valdean writes "Disney, Intel and Cisco have teamed up to launch Moviebeam, a $200 set-top box connected to your TV set that offers 100 movies at a time, with 7-8 new films replacing the 7-8 oldest each week. Movies cost $4 for new releases and $2 for old ones, with each payment granting 24 hours of access to that movie. There is no subscription fee and no monthly minimum. The nifty part? MovieBeam's movies are encoded in the broadcast signal of PBS stations across the United States, so you don't need a computer or an Internet connection. The bad part? The Moviebeam player also requires a connection to a phone jack -- every fortnight the box dials a toll-free number in the middle of the night to tally how much you've spent on movies so far, for the benefit of your monthly statement."
Contact homebase only once every 2 weeks? (Score:1, Interesting)
The return of the hacked box (Score:2, Interesting)
Bad?? (Score:3, Interesting)
This sounds like a fun PVR project.
Phone line tricks (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also only a matter of time before someone figures out the protocol for it to get authorization from the server over dialup and writes code to let a dial-up modem talk to the set-top box and say "account is good, authorized for another 2 weeks".
Re:The bad part ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not going to fly. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is if they've made the encryption that secure, one little glitch, and it's all over, No one can get anything and it's not likely that they'll be able to fix it.
There's a reason most products have manufacturer's codes and backdoors built-in. It makes troubleshooting possible.
Imagine you're watching a movie you've paid good money for, and there's a one bit drop in the tranmission. (After error correction) Remember, this is a shoot and forget systems. There's no oportunity to resend a bad packet like over the internet. Just one bit dropped from a really secure, compressed stream will render it useless.
My wife and I leave closed captioning on so we don't wake the kids. We recieve TV over the air, and even when reception is good, there's often errors in the stream. "To be or not to be, that is the &%%*&%*^(*"
Harkens back to Windows 98 (Score:3, Interesting)
Didn't Win98 have a downloadable content app over PBS signals? Ah yes, WavePhore's WaveTop [microsoft.com]. Since all the links on that page now go to parking "search pages", I guess that one didn't work out very well.
Could it run Linux? (Score:5, Interesting)
$49 for how big a hard drive and a bunch of other parts? If it can store 8 movies, that average 1.5 hours, that's 12 hours. Assuming the high quality mode of Tivo, that about a 40 gig drive. Not that great a price, I'll wait for these boatanchors to be unloaded at yard sales and ebay to strip them. I wonder if the processor can run Linux? Sounds like they have a HD tuner inside, so they could be cool to hack.
Lacking freedom... (Score:2, Interesting)
I have heard the commercial... and I'm not impressed with the whole concept. It just seems like a poor means of getting movies in that it also seems very limited in the choices it can give you. I have cable TV and I don't bother with having movie channels because I'd rather go to Blockbuster and rent and watch something when I feel like it and not when it happens to be on.
Re:Not going to fly. (Score:1, Interesting)
Been there, done that in the 80s: X*PRESS (Score:3, Interesting)
It was remarkable for its time. 9600 baud continuous and uncompressed was quite delightful in the days of 2400 baud modems. Megabytes a day! They had a packeted proprietary protocol. In the stream, you'd get various second-rate wire-service news stories and syndicated columns. They could also send files - you'd see a menu of files that were going to be sent over the next 24 hours, and select which you wanted, and it would grab them and store to your hard disk.
There were message boards, but the uplink was done by long-distance call to an incredibly lame BBS system running on a mainframe. I think they were aiming it at the educational market as well as stock market players. I remember late-night TV commercials for it.
They missed the boat. With better software, they could've made lots of money selling these boxes to all the people who were using BBSes at the time. Instead of a sole national head-end, city or regional co-adminstration would've made it much more interesting.
Today, I think it still makes sense for all sorts of data. Isn't this one of the issues at the core of the argument about a tiered Internet? They want to shuffle the big one-way files (like movies) into an extra tier because they're clogging the regular Internet.
There are plenty of large files you'd be willing to wait for, no? You already wait an indefinite amount of time for a large file to be delivered. What if you could go to a web site, select a big file you'd like to receive, and know that by tomorrow it would be delivered to your hard disk? Yes, that sounds exactly like FTP/torrent/whatever. You don't care how the file is delivered. You just want to know you'll get it soon. Or, like X*PRESS, the web could show a list of all the files scheduled to come down the pike, and you could choose to grab one when they go by.
Imagine if your existing cable modem not only handled your bidirectional interactive Internet connection but also one of these separate one-way data streams. You'd get more data from your existing connection. Arguably, I'd say this scheme consumes far less of the cable company's resources. It's one-way broadcast. With today's technology, how many gigs per day could you squeeze into one digital or analog channel on a cable system?
Re:Could it run Linux? (Score:1, Interesting)
They could easily broadcast H.264 (MPEG4 AVC) encoded video, which would offer MUCH, MUCH, MUCB fucking ridiculously higher quality than Tivo (at any setting) at much smaller file sizes/bitrates.
If you want Tivo-like non-quality, 500MB files should be more than enough for the average movie (again, using H.264). A 60GB drive would then be sufficient to hold 100 movies. If it's a 80GB drive, that's 800Mb a movie - which looks already quite good using older & less efficient MPEG4 ASP codecs (divx/xvid/etc).
Nothing against Tivo (PVR is great and enjoyable technology), but analog capturing is inherently low-quality and wasteful on storage space (it doesn't use "archival" codecs).
You wouldn't need a much bigger drive for High Def contents either.
I still see this thing as mostly pointless though. Most cable companies already offer a VOD service with about that many movies, as well as the old pay-per-vu model (satellite too). And the prices are way too high (4$ a movie? I pay no more than 1.50$ CAD for renting DVDs online - including new releases; and DVDs are high quality and easy to copy... and play anywhere - like on your laptop, unlike this thing) I suppose there's the odd person that doesn't have either cable and satellite, but most of those are people who can't afford it, I don't see them rushing to pay money for this to be able to rent overpriced movies.