Are we allowed to talk about using VPNs to access legal paid content in this forum/thread?
Didn't I ask how to access the jap PS3 karaoke app? Didn't get any replies though....
Set up a Japanese PSN account?
EDIT: Sony updated Music Unlimited yesterday. You can finally browse and listen to an entire genre of music, like a radio station. Previously, the app only allows you to listen to Top 100 music in any genre, SenseMe selected songs, or create your own playlist and library.
Wal-Mart is in discussions to provide an in-store service that will assist customers in registering DVDs they already own with the movie industry's UltraViolet system, according to several people familiar with the matter.
The UltraViolet system, which has been slow getting off the ground, is a digital "proof of purchase" system that allows a consumer to store movie or TV titles in a free, online personal library. Once a video has been added to the UltraViolet Library it can be streamed over the Web or downloaded for viewing on a computer, TV, or a range of mobile devices.
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BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield believes Walmart could be the first retailer to announce a disc-to-digital service. He said studios want consumers to frequent authorized retailers to initiate digital transfers rather than in the home due to concerns multiple users could upload the same disc.
Kevin Tsujihara, president of WHEG, Feb. 29 told an invester group he envisions big-box retailers such as Walmart and Best Buy offering services whereby consumers could bring in their discs and have them transferred seamlessly into digital files stored in the cloud.
Tsujihara said there are about 10 billion movie discs in U.S. households (about 90 to 100 discs), of which he said about 20% are Warner titles when factoring in the studio’s market share in home entertainment.
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“If consumers want to steal and share digital versions of movies, that is incredibly easy today without the need for discs,” Greenfield wrote in March 1 post. “Whereas sharing/stealing via disc-to-digital would be far more complicated than a simple Google search.”
Greenfield says studios should enable consumers to transfer discs to digital files for free rather than estimated prices ranging from $1 to $3 per DVD and upwards of $10 to transfer into high-definition.
The analyst said that for UltraViolet to work in a market increasingly shifting toward low-margin rental options such as Redbox kiosks and subscription video-on-demand, consumers need extremely low barriers to entry.
“We believe disc-to-digital needs to be done at home at no cost to the consumer, including a free HD quality upgrade, if UltraViolet is to have any hope of success,” Greenfield wrote.
Separately, he said rollout of UltraViolet has to be accompanied by the price of electronic sellthrough for new movies dropping to $10 with day-and-date theatrical premium VOD priced from $20 to $30.
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I approve !
Analyst: Disc-to-Digital Has to be Free for UltraViolet to Work
http://www.homemediamagazine.com/di...sc-digital-has-be-free-ultraviolet-work-26581
It may be a long process though. Like how the music industry went from free-form piracy, to FairPlay DRM, and then back to structured, DRM-free services again. (A) and (B) are not mutually exclusive. In their latest move, Apple sidesteps the conversion process by matching pirated and legit digital music into a subscription service.
We aren't talking about making copies of anything you rent, that's quite a stretch. What we are talking about is making copies of movies you purchased for personal viewing.
I think many people regarding music are sidestepping it all and just moving to an all you can eat Zune/Spotify type service which is far simpler to use. I think movies will have to eventually move to a similar type setup one day, because it's just so easy to copy them now and I don't think people will tolerate any of the drm laden schemes the movie industry puts forward partly because they are a pain to use and also because they are never gauranteed to work on all your devices.
That's what you think, but it's not necessarily what's happening in the real world. The studios simply want/needs a better controlled mechanism without losing usability.
For the movie studios, they are still trying to find a way to compensate for the low margin rental business. If the world goes rental completely, they stand to lose a huge chunk of their $$$. For now, Blu-ray works as a stop gap. It solves the margin problem, but is segregated from the rental world. At some point, both need to be together, since we are buying the movie, not the digital format or the disc format. Too bad, NetFlix unbundled their BR and DD offerings.