“Universal expects to be able to offer movies online by the end of the year or early next year, company chairman and CEO Bob Wright said Tuesday. Speaking at a conference on piracy in London, Wright described the studio’s entry into online movie services as “something we have to do.” However, he cautioned, the studio’s entry into the Internet sphere must be accompanied by fail-safe methods to prevent the films from being copied and redistributed. ‘These movies are so expensive, we have to be careful,’ he said,” IMDb reports.
Full article here.
No other info on Universal’s plans (partners?) is yet available. Let the speculation begin!
Related article:
BBC 6 Music reports Apple video iPod to be unveiled in London next week – October 05, 2005
This has *got* to be what Apple is up to.
“However, he cautioned, the studio’s entry into the Internet sphere must be accompanied by fail-safe methods to prevent the films from being copied and redistributed.”
Oh…is that like the fail-safe copy protection currently on DVD’s?
Stealing a little of Apple’s thunder are you Universal?
That’s ok, I look forward to downloading and paying for reasonably priced content instead of these frigging Netfix dvd’s which 90% are scratched anyway.
I think online movies will be less pirated than music, people watch a movie once and that’s it, music is listened to over and over.
Movies take longer to decrypt, burn to dvd etc and the rewards are mimimal.
Music is easier to copy and distribute due to it’s small size and the rewards are greater.
Just make it an awesome experience and the money will pour in. The value added extras that could come with such a service would make it irresistable to both movie buffs and average Joes I’m sure. No doubt Apple is competing with MS and Sony for the living room, now is not the time to rest on the iPods success.
Umm, there is absolutely no such thing as “fail-safe.”
Why doesn’t anyone understand that the only way to protect content is to make the distribution ubiquitous? If you can distribute content in a way that customers can actually use it, then your shiat won’t get stolen and turned into a format that people actually use.
If they want to make money they will be talking to Apple – they get a huge benefit from Apple’s dominance in this (entertainment) area.
One thing that I keep thinking about is that the majority of the potential customers will not have a video iPod and won’t for a fairly long time – me included.
If I’m going to but the price has to be reasonable (like $1.99 for a rental that allows 3 viewings and is then automatically trashed) AND I have to be able to play it on my Macs. Before a business trip I would be happy to download a few movies that interest me for the hotel rooms. I have an 80GB portable HD that would work nicely. Hitting me with a $5 charge means I keep going to the used DVD/CD store to see what’s there.
Will those looney tunes at Warner Brothers follow suit, or will Bronfman the Barbarian try to kill the movie download market before it’s even born? It must be awkward for Apple to be romancing the film division while fighting with the music division.
“One thing that I keep thinking about is that the majority of the potential customers will not have a video iPod and won’t for a fairly long time – me included.”
By the time Apple announces a video download service, they will also offer a user-friendly way to stream it to your home theater (they’ll have to if large numbers are to use it). Of course, you could watch it on your computer as well. There is no reason to have a video ipod if you use your content at home, as most people will.
Winston >
Actually, Warner Music (the bit that Bronfman runs) is now divorced from AOL Time Warner and the accompanying film assets.
Well, that’s a relief. Thanks for the info.
Hey…didn’t Universal just swing over to the Blue Ray side of the force earlier this week?
Could be the alliance with Apple will run very deep.
The movie companies have the music industry as an example. The question is, will they be willing to let Apple handle there content (after all, Apple got an A+ with iTMS), or will they want to make it their own to try and get more profits. My guess is that they will be greedy and attempt it on their own. And they will fail. The smart ones will let Apple handle it.
Umm, there is absolutely no such thing as “fail-safe.”” Um, actually there is:
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One thing is for sure, it will be only for Windows.
Will somebody explain to my why the #$*#&) Apple cares about DVD formats? Their future is in downloading movies over the internet to a hard drive. Surely, part of the DRM is going to be that you CAN’T burn these movies to DVDs. As far as I know, they’ve already got their format–H.264.
Anybody know what size these files will be, assuming the can be saved?
And, one can only hope the movies will be worth watching. Fewer of those in recent years.
It took over a century to wire this country for simple telephone service, and the job still isn’t finished as there are parts of the U.S. that still do not have wired phone service, let alone cellular.
I bring this up because, as it stands, this would be interesting if the infrastructure for wide spread (read; nationwide) support for it actually existed. Without it, I don’t think any type of online movie download service is going to be successful at this time. The last I read about it, high-speed broadband was available for less than half the U.S. population and that was predominately in urban areas. Considering that high-speed broadband as it currently exists is a hodge-podge of technologies and actual speeds then the per centage of real high speed broadband drops even further.
Maybe in five years or so.
Once again, nobody knows what “fail safe” means. It is systems engineering term for when a failure occurs, the resulting condition is safe, not dangerous.
“Fail safe” never, ever meant that something was immune to failure. It just isn’t going happen. Any system of any complexity has failure modes.
Consider what you would do if you approached an intersection with a traffic light, but the light was not working. You would approach the intersection, stop, and after determining the way was safe, you would proceed.
To the movie exec, fail safe should mean that if the system fails, you can’t view the movie. (Safety for him, annoying to you.)
Here’s the money quote from this story:
“However, (Universal CEO Bob Wright) … cautioned, the studio’s entry into the Internet sphere must be accompanied by fail-safe methods to prevent the films from being copied and redistributed. ‘These movies are so expensive, we have to be careful,’ he said,” IMDb reports.”
This is more verification of what I’ve been saying here and elsewhere – that these studios are strongly influencing the future of PC development, due to their unshakable belief that protecting their sacred cash cows trump all other considerations.
If you’re a PC maker, or an OS developer, or a business at all interested in profiting from digitized video content in a downloadable form (and Apple is all three), companies like Universal will insist that you do things their way before allowing access to the all-important content. Even if that means converting your entire computer line to an architecture that may not actually make for a better computer, but will be more ‘secure’ in their eyes (read: Intel x86 with DRM chips).
Furthermore, combine Wright’s statement with his proposed schedule for releasing this download service by late this year or early next year, and with Apple’s schedule of introducing Macintels, and with M$ introducing Vista in roughly the same time frame, AND with the iPod video rumors heating up (we probably won’t get it this announcement, but the next product upgrade/announcement cycle would also be within the same time frame as all of the above) … and I think you can see the pieces starting to fall into place.
Universal is leaking the introduction of a paradigm shift – and probably trying to steal a bit of Apple’s thunder to boot – with this announcement. Which leads me to believe two things:
One, that Universal is holding out from participating in an iTMS equivilent for video (whether it be by Apple, M$, or whoever). Maybe other studios are as well, but they may not have been as nimble as Universal in setting up their own infrastructure for doing it themselves. Which means there may never be such a beast as an iVideo Store – each studio will simply sell it’s own content online, and Job’s may have to be content with simply providing the hardware to play it. Perhaps the most we’ll see from Apple in the direct video download sphere will be Pixar titles & music videos on iTMS (at least for a while).
Two, Jobs definitely will be introducing some sort of video download features to iTMS next week, which will in turn be wetting everyone’s appetite for what’s coming after that. After all, you can’t ‘steal thunder’ from a storm unless it’s on the horizon.
That’s what my crystal ball says today, anyway. Yours?
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does something to work their “earth globe logo” into the actual beginning of the movie. Like in “Serenity” (SWEET movie) where it was part of a school class.
(Did the old Serenity TV show tell the same exact story as the movie? Or is it worth checking out even if I’ve seen the movie.)
Few people want to leave their computers for hours while they download movies (most movies are close to or above 4 GB in size). Even fewer have their computers connected to their home entertainment systems. The way to make this work is to have a “TiVo-like” appliance, connected to the home theater and the internet, that can download movies in the background (e.g. during the night before you actually want to watch it). This is similar to the Netflix experience where you have to order movies days in advance, but in this model the movie is saved on a hard drive and won’t suffer from scratched disks.
A beefed-up Mac Mini would fit this bill perfectly. Combined with an iTunes for movies store, it would make a great Christmas present. Maybe Apple could even partner with Netflix to make this happen.
The Universal movies will only be in Windows Media format. The file size for a full length movie will be 700 MB.
“The Universal movies will only be in Windows Media format. The file size for a full length movie will be 700 MB”
And the image quality will look like crap.
I just bought a very nice HD TV and even my “enhanced for 16×9 TVs”standard def DVDs don’t hold a candle to the quality of the broadcast HD signal I get from the three year old antenna on my roof. And I live at least 75 miles from the TV station broadcast antennas.
I have yet to see any video delivered online that had visual quality worth watching on SD TV, let alone HD TV. Universal won’t be selling me anything this way for some time.
MDN word: “say” Hmmm. As in never say never, perhaps.
It will be an iTunes video store, with a AirPort Video Express. Download movies on your Mac in H.264 with DRM, and stream to your TV.