Vudu Set-Top Box Weds Legal P2P and HD Movies 121
prostoalex writes "The New York Times is running a story on a Silicon Valley company that is planning to revolutionize the movie business. It's no secret that the movie-going experience has been deteriorating, while the number of HDTVs sold has been rising steadily. A company called Vudu, run by a guy who started TiVo, is now building a box for peer-to-peer download of movies straight from the studios. That could enables the movie studios to make movies securely available to viewers on the day of release, and improves on the download experience offered by other shops, like Amazon Unbox, MovieLink and others: 'DVD sales began to stagnate because studios had finally plowed through their entire backlog of movies that could be released on the shiny discs. The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners. And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.'"
How long? (Score:2)
I don't think film studios are going to be particularly happy and enthusiastic about it. Plus of course it will need to use DRM. Which one? Most of them are already broken, or will be in not-so-long time. And royalties will need to go to someone.
As always, idea is brilliant, but there's a chance that MPIA will block it before it actually starts. They're just too scared of any new technologies...
Just my 2c.
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Re:How long? (Score:5, Funny)
From one end to another...
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"Nope. I'm a frayed knot."
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int stringLength = string.length();
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Buffer overflow!
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I don't think film studios are going to be particularly happy and enthusiastic about it."
Who cares? I'm still wondering why I can find a Redbox anywhere (nine less than 5 miles from me) and rent a new DVD for $1 [redbox.com], a DVD with DRM that has been broken a million times over and I can duplicate easily, but I still can't frickin download one to watch on my PC or TV?? Hello? Consumer to movie studios, what ar
Bad copy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Am I missing something? Is this really revolutionary? (Not that the Apple TV is either, but it's probably the best-known set-top box with podcast support.)
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Re:Bad copy? (Score:5, Funny)
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Wow, you better run out and tell Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony!
All of them have put closed hardware in peoples living rooms and NONE of them have been hacked!
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Sure, there was a hole which enabled people to run unsigned co
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Re:Bad copy? (Score:4, Insightful)
See my
Michael
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Firstly, thanks for the post. Its clear that you know alot more about cryptography than me. I actually have some problems with the use of Alice, Bob and Charlie, it makes it harde
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Your description of a problem is also inaccurate.
Charlie in your case, to make it analogous to the DRM scenario, is not a "paraplegic living in Bob's house", it is a device to which Bob can apply any technique, including destroying it, in his efforts to compromise it it, at will. Unlike Charlie, torture and piece-by-piece decomposition of whom would be, we hope, out of range of the "attacks" Bob can employ. Your liking of the Bob "attacks" to "rummaging through Charlie's quaters" is purposefuly designed to
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Which is obviously a true statement, since 1 + (1/1) = 2, thus the first equation doesn't hold, while the second one trivially does.
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Opps.
That example equation in my previous reply was supposed to read: "1 = 1 + ( 1 - 1 )"
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To further the argument, another angle has to be considered: the fact that Bob is in fact both the recipient and the attacker after the message has already passed out of the DRM device.
In this scenario, the message for Bob has to be composed in such a way that Bob is able to understand it, in case of a TV signal this means human-readable image and sound, which message in that form is now widely open to rebroadcast to yet another party, James, who was not an intended recipient of Alice's message.
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You've answered your own question genius! People want their device to just work, not have to fuck round setting up a PC for it to hook into.
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I still think the AppleTV is poor value for money though.
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But, the AppleTV is by no means perfect. It seems to be underpowered for much HDTV content. Their specs limit HD to 720p @ 24fps at up to 5Mbps. That is not enough to be very flexible with HD. But, it's still hard to say how good it will be, because Apple doesn't have any HD content available.
Hopefully the Vudu has a more capable video chip, which offloads more of the decoding process. Those chips are available, I'm surprised Ap
Costs for the user? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Properly formatted answer. Ignore the duplicate. (Score:2)
And by the way, Do you know how long it takes to copy gigabytes of redundant movie data to an iPod?
I believe most of broadband users have download speeds of 1.5Mbps or more. That's more than enough to comfortably stream a 480p movie using an mpeg4 codec (h264 if the box is able, XviD equivalent if not). There is absolutely no reason the movie couldn't start playing within 10 seconds
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Let's say it is 2GB per movie, and everyone has a share ratio of 1.0 before they stop seeding. So that is 4GB
5,000 videos of rubbish (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have a simple 800X600 projector (so movies are standard def) showing on a 7' diagonal screen, and it's nearly as enjoyable as going to the theatre. I can enjoy much better seating, all the treats I want, and not have to worry about random people ruining the experience. If I had the money for a nicer (1080p) projector and high definition movies, I can see going to theatres e
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This stuff really isn't that difficult to set up. These days I can even run it from my macbook pro, if you don't want to have a dedicated computer in the room.
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Yes, I always do when I go alone. Well, the second row, anyway; I like to scoot down and rest my knees on the backs of the front row. For the last few Harry Potter and Star Wars movies, I've gone with my wife shortly after it opened, and then again by myself a week or two later -- usually on a Sunday morning before she's awake.
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Oh, and let's not forget not being able to go to the bathroom for the entire movie without missing some of it.
I'd take a 42" LCD TV over the theatre any day of the week.
Oh, and btw, there's a reason the front 3 rows of the theatre are rarely taken. The reason for that is because when you have a screen that huge, you don
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You begin precaching chapters of the movie at the same time they get sent off to reproduction for theater distribution, and push them over the course of 6 to 8 weeks to all of the set-top boxes.
Even at the worst broadband speeds, a high definition movie could be easily streamed to one of these boxes.
Throw a cheap 1 tb RAID0 in the machine and you've got enough space to store 20 fu
Do people care? (Score:3, Insightful)
I see statements like that and wonder if it is truely rising or if it's just that HDTVs are comming down steadily in price and so rather than wanting a HDTV they just buy the best set of features (aka what the sales guy says) which happens to be the latest TV. This would explain why more HDTVs are slowly being sold while the interest level (as far as I can see) is very low even among people with HDTV consoles which would benefit from them.
But I suppose HDTV is much like Vista. We have no real control over the market, we have a market for both (HDTV and normal TVs/Vista and XP) until the makers decide the pull the plug and we're forced to one option even if we hate it.
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HDTV's are getting affordable and people are buying them. Problem is they ignore the other facts.
1 - SD tv from your cable company looks incredibly bad on a HDTV. All that blockyness was smudged into an acceptable picture on your 32" Tube TV set. that nice crisp 720P display shows all the digital cable glory of blocks and artifacts. The HD channels that they do get and their DVD's look better, but the 90% of the channels they watch look crappier now.
Oh they also notice their Tivo looks crappy and
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All that blockyness was smudged into an acceptable picture on your 32" Tube TV set. that nice crisp 720P display shows all the digital cable glory of blocks and artifacts.
Maybe you never watch cartoons, but I can see the artifacts all the time on my 20-something inch standard-definition TV in my room over here. We have Dish Network, but I've seen worse (e.g., Comcast Digital Cable). I blame the fact that they're still using MPEG-2 video encoding; they could up the quality quite a bit and still save bandwidth if they were using MPEG-4 ASP or AVC, VC1, Theora (VP3), or VP7 to name a few modern video codecs.
It's like the people that claim that XM and Sirius sounds as good as a CD... These people must be blind as the sattelite radio people must be deaf.
Maybe you haven't listened to XM or Sirius on a car stereo, but I d
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Oh they also notice their Tivo looks crappy and the 40 hour unit become a 8 hour unit as they have to up the record quality to maximum to not get disgusted
So.... (Score:3, Informative)
Something seems off here... (Score:4, Interesting)
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I rip all my kids shows and put em on a server so I don't have to replace dvds every year.
The only movies that we buy are kids shows. I don't watch movies repeatedly but the kids sure do. Even if we do, the prices should be a LOT less. $10? American money? They're nuckin futs! Stil
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On the best screens. Movies like Pan's Labyrinth and Serenity that go on the side screens are completely underwhelming. A decent projector and a decent surrond system, and you're pretty much there.
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Deteriorating? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's no secret that the movie-going experience has been deteriorating
How so? What has changed? Are the seats less comfy? Is the pop corn less crunchy? Is the sound less ugh-please-turn-the-bass-down-or-i-am-going-to-bar fy? Or is it that the home theater experience is improving with respect to the real theater experience so it makes you say it's deteriorating?
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When I was younger me and my friends would go to the theater and watch a few movies. Sure we would talk sometimes, but it was always humorous and appropriate.
These days all the punk kids just sit around the theater talking and ruining my movie. Don't even get me started on the ones on my lawn (kids, not movies).
See, I showed you how the movie-going experience has been deteriorated and the audience has gotten ruder (ruder? more rude?).
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These days all the punk kids just sit around the theater talking and ruining my movie.
Well, I never got that. Maybe because of the area I'm from, and I'm sure it's not a global trend. Is it? Are kids globally worse behaved than before?
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As kids we didn't care or did it ourself. As adults, who can't go everyday or to every move and who don't have two months of summer vacation, we just want to watch the movie and not be annoyed by bored kids.
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Re:Deteriorating? (Score:4, Insightful)
- People chatting instead of watching the movie. The entire length. (happend to me more than once)
- Whining kids.
- Doors not closing automatically when the movie starts, so either you try to ignore the outside glare (really great if the opening scene is quite dark) or you get up and close the door yourself. Which is usually reopened a few minutes later by late people who are looking for a seat. They do this either chatting, either blocking your field of view. Or even worse, they ask you to move from your seat which you have occupied for the last half hour because you were in time and wanted to have a decent position in the theater (relative to the screen) in a chair that is not falling apart.
- One of the sound boxes fails half way, and keeps churning throughout the remainder.
- They start playing the wrong movie.
- Sound system is badly adjusted. Or it's so loud, your ears ring for hours afterwards.
- The sound from the theater above,below,right, left is seeping through the walls.
- Misaligned picture.
- Subtitles (with DVD I can finally turn them off)
- Toilet fee.
- Overpriced food and you are not allowed to bring your own.
- Overpriced tickets. Spend a few euros more and you can buy the dvd after a few months.
- 20 minutes of commercials, and that amount just keeps rising.
- etc.
You're right. Nothing has changed. It has always been crappy. But now we finally have a choice. We can watch at our home theater. I don't want to go to the theater anymore. And when I do, I go with friends. I see it then as a social event and just hope the theater experience that evening isn't too bad. Dinner, movie and bar. Most of the weeks we just skip the movie.Re: (Score:2)
Well, I've only had to complain about the two last points you provided, other than that I've hardly ever had to deal with any of that. Anyways, I agree with you, it doesn't seem like it has deteriorated, it's just that home theater is more interesting now. I'm not a movie person anyway, movies are way too long, I'm totally into series. I mean I never even found the time to watch 300 on my computer, as much as I wanna see it (in spite of its long duration).
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* People chatting instead of watching the movie. The entire length. (happend to me more than once)
Tell an employee. (Never happened to me, but then... The few times I was annoyed more than a few minutes, I told an employee and they 'fixed' the 'problem'.)
* Whining kids.
Tell a
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The country I live in has a population equal to New York city.
We have one chain (one of the largest if not the largest in Europe) of theater. And at some point I lived near one of the largest theater complex in Europe.
So I can go to the chain, or to the alternative movie house (more cultural, not main stream) if there is one. And sometimes I just want to see hollywood main stream.
No, english is not my native language, so yes I have to suffer the subtitles.
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You guys have american movies in english an subtitled in your language? That sucks, what country do you live in? Here in France the american movie dubbing industry is huge, and every american movie is properly dubbed, and most of the time it sounds better in french than in the original version.
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lol, wtf, is the guy who modded this Troll is retarded? How on Earth is that trolling?
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So you don't have a home theatre yet. Don't use that as a reason to keep paying them money. Find something else to do for a while. Read a book, play a game, build model rockets... Anything. If
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That's what I am doing. I only go when invited, because of the social setting. My dvd collection has expanded tremendously the last 2 years. There are also shops I don't go anymore because they treat me as a criminal. You know the routine, no backpacks allowed. Open your bags please. No, you can't take your 1200 euro laptop with you in the store. You have to leave it in the locker and no, we assume no responsibility if something happens with it.
Books are great. My book collection
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I thought by the name that I'd read that series, but apparently not. I'll have to find it. Thanks for the pointer.
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It's a set of books you won't be able to put down. So If I were you, I would wait until a few weeks before the next one comes out in november before reading them. Nothing as worse as having to wait months or years before the next one.
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he sound from the theater above,below,right, left is seeping through the walls ..... a chair that is not falling apart ..... Toilet fee
Is this a third world country you're talking about, or are theater operators outside the US actively attempting to kill their own business?
Toilet fee? Please tell me what country this is in so that I may avoid it. If it's not free to urinate, it is surely going to be costly for me to ever visit.
Maybe my experience is biased from living in a reasonably prosperous part of the USA most of my life, but the theaters are good quality, the seats are always in good maintenance and clean, the bathrooms are cl
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Nope, it's Belgium (11th richest country in the world). Yes, I think they are trying to kill their own business. They certainly have run me away.
Ah, and in some theaters the floors are indeed sticky or not cleaned (well) after a bunch of bored teenagers have passed through.
Don't get me wrong. Most of the time it's agreeable, but sometimes the exper
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Some DVDs are starting to do the same thing (unskippable adverts) and that "deteriorates" the experience for me there as well.
I contrast that to the experien
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You know what's the weirdest about their ads? It's that, as you pointed, they're local ads for stuff like a local comic books store, but worst part is that you see the same ad before every movie you watch at that theater for about 10 years! Which makes me think that these stores musn't pay that much money for their advertisement, with respect to the price of the ticket (often around 7 euros around here). Wouldn't they attract more people and thus make more money if they completely gave up on the ads?
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You'd think so, wouldn't you? I dunno
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Have you tried showing up later? Around here, those slide shows are dying off, but they never went past the announced start time of the movie. Previews do, but those are more interesting.
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Maybe I've been lucky, but the few times I do go to a movie, I have had a very good experience, no phones, no babies, no (or few, but quiet) weenies talking, no sticky floors, comfortable seats in stadium arrangement.
I don't think DVD sales began to stagnate because they cut through the
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On top of all that, the cost of movies (and especially concessions) has skyrocketed. I think tickets are now 10-11 in my area for a prime ti
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Sound quality is still pretty damn good, but video quality could definitely improve. I believe it's an issue with the
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And I think it is all the splotches etc. At least DVD is still clean.
Apple's a bad example. (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is crap on both fronts. Peer-to-peer has hardly "consumed" the music business, last I heard they were still in business and making money. Unless he means that P2P has consumed an unreasonable amount of attorney's fees lately. I'd agree with that.
This guy is just trying to make this appear to be a proactive solution to a problem the movie houses really aren't experiencing yet, hoping that one or more of them will jump on the bandwagon.
The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners.
No, the success of iTunes has, if anything, taught the movie industry that the very last thing it wants is content distribution run by a high-powered technology company with both the money and the balls to tell the studios "here's the deal - take it or leave it."
Both the music and the movie industries have long shown themselves to be anti-technology control freaks. Unless they can own this technology they'll never go for it, and if they did own it they'd lock it down so tightly that we would never go for it.
I can't argue that the DVD was a phenomenal success, but that was because the average user wasn't left feeling too restricted. The reason he felt that way was because he generally just played his movies on his living room TV, and never needed to rip his data to some other format. That's changing, not to the level that music reproduction has changed but it's happening, and when enough people can't legally or practically move their movies to other devices the same problems will arise.
HD Downloads (Score:1, Interesting)
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True, but the only thing standing in the way of that Utopian vision is the typical massively under-provisioned ISP who couldn't even begin to handle that level of data transfer. The only thing that could make such a thing possible would be the big boys (Baby Bells, Comcast, Verizon, etc.) setting up edge caching of some kind to keep popular downloads within their res
"their entire backlog of movies"? Yeah Right... (Score:4, Informative)
Snow White (the pre-WW2 Disney classic)
The Real Ghostbusters (the 80s cartoon)
Tales Of The Gun (History Channel documentary series)
Other History Channel documentaries
Space Above And Beyond
Hey Dad (classic Aussie sitcom)
Even if you account for the fact that some of them (like some of the History Channel stuff) may in fact be available if you are willing to import from America, there are still plenty of movies and TV episodes that you just plain can't get legally on DVD or from ANY download service anywhere in the world.
Re:"their entire backlog of movies"? Yeah Right... (Score:4, Funny)
Voodoo or Snake Oil? (Score:3, Interesting)
1. You have to buy an expensive box. Most services like this offer the device cheap or free. Satellite boxes, cable boxes, TIVOs, all are or can be free with service plans.
2. Peer-to-peer transfers. Sure, they say they are doing this to offer instantaneous availability of content, but it is just an excuse to shift the bandwidth cost to the end user. And, it doesn't just work exactly like BitTorrent. With BitTorrent, you are only uploading while the transfer takes place. This box uses every box as a source, all the time. If your box has a copy of a movie on it, it will upload it whenever someone else needs it. It doesn't sound like this service should be any more expensive than any other. If YouTube can afford to send me internet-quality video for the few pennies they get from my add revenues, Vudu can afford to send me DVD-quality video for the 10 bucks I'm paying them to buy their movie.
3. End-to-end DRM, vendor lock-in. This is why they're so popular with the studios. While freeing people from the "tyranny" of the computer, they simultaneously give up their best chance at circumventing draconian controls.
4. No DVD burner of any kind. This is the Achilles heel. They offer the option to "rent" or "purchase" downloads. For the 'rent' option, the file obviously deletes itself after a fixed amount of time. What about the movies I purchase? If it were on a computer I could make a backup copy on another hard drive or a DVD. With this, that option does not exist. The device's hard drive, however large, has a finite capacity. Once that fills up, whoops, what are you supposed to do? I guess you have to delete one of the movies you "bought." If they address this at all, they might let you re-download movies you delete. Regardless, it is at their discretion.
5. Bandwidth. Very few people have Ethernet jacks next to their television. For many people, this will leave wireless as their only option. With wireless, I would be skeptical of its ability to cope with the massive upload/download requirements. Even if it can cope, the necessity to either lay Ethernet cables down or configure a wireless network is completely antithetical towards the plug-and-play, instant gratification consumer they're targeting. They're trying to package a computer in a format your Luddite grandmother won't recognize as a computer, while simultaneously requiring her to configure a wireless network.
In summary, to use this system, I have to buy an expensive box, I have to pay for all the bandwidth, and I have absolutely no control over the files I download. This device is about one thing, control. Control of content and control of consumers.
As much as I would like to see no DRM, I will admit that Apple figured out how to do DRM right with iTunes. The basic principle they applied was, "we will make the new format no more restrictive than the old format." Like CDs, FairPlay lets you burn as many CD copies as you want of files. It also lets you back up your files to multiple computers. Vudu's box ties all of my purchases to the lifetime of a single piece of hardware, offering no backup solutions, total DRM, and a system that's designed to screw over the consumer at every single turn.
I hope this is not the way that the industry is going. I don't think the Vudu box will be a great success. However, they may still find enough people who want something that "just works" to find a market. Regardless, it will fall upon the usual legion, the modern fighters for freedom, the hackers and crackers to break the chains of DRM and vendor-lock in. It may be easier to crack something when it's on the computer, but being a stand-alone box hasn't saved the XBox, Playstations, and innumerable other devices from being opened in the same way.
Ultimately, the studios know this. They simply want the circumvention to be so difficult that 95% of users will not attemp
THEY GOT ONE THING RIGHT! (Score:1)
Whether they've realized it or not, Vudu has chosen the perfect name for their insidious little device. Let's compare the Vudu box with your average Voodoo witch doctor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie [wikipedia.org]
1. A witch doctor surrounds himself with pseudo-mystical obfuscation and claims to raise the dead. The Vudu box surrounds itself with pseudo-mystical obfuscation and claims to do the technologically impossible.
2. A witch doctor puts his victim in a death-like-state using a variety of poisons and ve
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If YouTube can afford to send me internet-quality video for the few pennies they get from my add revenues, Vudu can afford to send me DVD-quality video for the 10 bucks I'm paying them to buy their movie.
You're ignoring some basic limitations. Say they have a million customers and they all want to watch a dvd-quality video. Assuming an average download capacity of 2 Mbs, that's 2 terabits a second you want Vudu to source. That's if they only sell a million copies of their machine. Steve Jobs was boasting about selling 100 million iPods. Sell a 100 million vudu and that 2 terabit stream just mushroomed to 200 terabits. Why should vudu shoulder that cost when the user's bandwidth isn't being used and the cos
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Yeah well... (Score:2)
One major thing they overlook (Score:2, Interesting)
I feel that they are a bit myopic here. Nice that they are trying to innovate, but what if some family likes to watch several movies in a month. HD movies will not be small files by any means, and will be a natural progression of the service I'm sure even though the article does not specifically state that they will be offering HD content. What if you download/watch several movies which you legally paid for and then get your cable cut off by companies like Comcast for exceeding their "magical" and hidden d
studios ... plowed through ... entire backlog????? (Score:2)
> of movies that could be released on the shiny discs?
Bull-f*ing-shit!!! There are hundreds -- thousands -- of movies out there that I simply cannot buy on DVD!!! Where can I buy a DVD of "Hamburger: the Motion Picture"? How about a copy of "Stewardess School"? These are a couple of the funniest movies ever made, and are in my personal top ten.
Want to talk about copyright reform? How about a provision
Re:studios ... plowed through ... entire backlog?? (Score:1)
Hamburger: The Motion Picture [imdb.com], Stewardess School [imdb.com]:
If you enjoyed this title, our database also recommends:
Bikini Drive-In [imdb.com], H.O.T.S. [imdb.com], L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies: Return to Savage Beach [imdb.com]
Are you sure the movie companies aren't doing us all a favour by not releasing those 2 on DVD.??
On the other hand, you do have a point about copyright. The studios are more likely to provide a 'burn on demand' system though.
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I wouldn't mind "burn on demand" for obscure movies with a niche market (which might well describe the ones mentioned), it is far better than "unavailable." But it has one drawback that regularly published titles don't
Here might be an actual
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The applications of DRM are not the problem (Hell, I even would support some of them). The problem is that it can never work, and attempts to force it to work are damaging other things.
Re:studios ... plowed through ... entire backlog?? (Score:2)
missing the point (Score:2, Interesting)
Find DVD on shelf amongsth the 1000s of others
Open box, fiddle with little plastic thingy that keeps disc secure
Insert DVD -> wait for drive to spin up ->
Wait for the DRM Copyright notice to go away (PITA) ->
Watch Disc manufacturers logo ->
(optionally sit through dozens of equally annoying, piss adverts or trail
I'm in (Score:1)
on second thought, this is good (Score:3, Interesting)
But, come to think of it, if a service like this legitimizes large upstream bandwidth, we all win. One of the biggest threats to the Internet is still that upstream bandwidths become limited. So, from that point of view, I'm all for commercial P2P. I can still give its traffic low priority at the router.
pics of the vudu box in action.... (Score:2)
WHAT? (Score:2)
(Emphasis mine)
OK. I'll raise the BS flag.
Digital piracy did not consume the music business. Price gouging, crappy releases, treating customers like criminals, and failure to adapt to changing technologies harmed the music business. That is, just as with so many other businesses, the cause of problems
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In my experience, you get quite a few seeders and it doesn't really matter if you are downloading from a seeder or a leecher.
The bigger issue relates to false torrents getting posted, with the idea of discouraging people who discover that the files they have downloaded are corrupted.
Michael