Live Video Downloads more successful than Amazon download [Report]

[blakjedi]

Is the movie D/L service available with Live Silver? I think that would be a stronger sales point than anything else... however non of things compare with On demand movie services from cable companies - no wait and HD...

 

[Geo]

Most people buy things to keep them and having to delete to make room for new stuff and then redownload the old before being able to watchh again is a bother.

Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and Netflix would be amused to hear their business model is not tenable. Tho I suspect they are much less amused by the competition that mass digital delivery of entirely legal and legitimate content is going to increasingly provide.

But, sure, that HD is a bit of an albatross for this kind of thing. It'd be better if it was bigger, but its still a *rental* service at *rental* prices, and legitimate purchasers of the rental service should not be surprised that they don't have unlimited ability to keep content forever at those prices.

Personally, I think the movie theatres are liable to be out of business in ten years, which after the boom in construction of them in the last 15 years is going to mean a huge amount of commercial real estate becoming empty. . . .

 

[inefficient]

My e-pipe is fat!

How much is a high-download high-speed internet service in the states per month?

In Australia I'm paying $79 for 1.5MBit @ 40GB/month. A HD movie download service just wouldn't work with those sort of limits. I don't understand how this can take off, unless your infrastructure is just so much better.

Just for comparison. I pay about $28 a month for a 100Mbit fiber connection in Tokyo. Real world thoughput is only like 40Mbit/s though. On a good day I can upload/download at speeds around 4-5MB/s.

 

[Geo]

Most broadband in the US is not going to have download limits on it. Many ISPs do reserve the right to limit heavy, heavy users, but this seems to happen in real life more on an anecdotal basis ("Yeah, my buddy's cousin. . .") than to people you actually know. EDIT: It also seemed to happen more frequently 4 or 5 years back when broadband was still rolling out.

I think we're paying about $50/month for 10Mb/s on Comcast (wife does the bills, sorry) and $30/month for a backup 1Mb/s DSL line (need broadband for our jobs and businesses, so we went belt and suspenders).

 

[Rangers]

Is the movie D/L service available with Live Silver? I think that would be a stronger sales point than anything else... however non of things compare with On demand movie services from cable companies - no wait and HD...

Huh? How is there no wait?

The only true on demand video is when you download it yourself. That will always involve some lag time.

Unless Comcast like, preloads the beginning of all the movies to a big HDD in your box. Not sure how that would work. And it couldn't be unlimited either (maybe they'd have room to preload the top 100 titles or something?).

Plus they'd be chewing up your BW with background dling all the time, or maybe, they're bandwidth since they're probably your ISP as well

Hah, I remember what sad hack they used to pass off as on demand video years ago, they'd have a few new releases runningconcurrently on various scrambled channels at staggered start times, and you'd pay 3.95 or whatever to unscramble the next start time up, which hopefully would be just 30 minutes or less away.

 

[mrcorbo]

Huh? How is there no wait?

The only true on demand video is when you download it yourself. That will always involve some lag time.

Unless Comcast like, preloads the beginning of all the movies to a big HDD in your box. Not sure how that would work. And it couldn't be unlimited either (maybe they'd have room to preload the top 100 titles or something?).

Plus they'd be chewing up your BW with background dling all the time, or maybe, they're bandwidth since they're probably your ISP as well

Hah, I remember what sad hack they used to pass off as on demand video years ago, they'd have a few new releases runningconcurrently on various scrambled channels at staggered start times, and you'd pay 3.95 or whatever to unscramble the next start time up, which hopefully would be just 30 minutes or less away.

As he said. No wait. VOD on digital cable is transmitted just like any other channel. Software in the box communicates with the servers back at the cable co. to be instructed which freq and subchannel to tune to and to control the stream. Back when I first got my FusionHDTV3Q HDTV tuner card for my PC I could pick these channels up in the clear and watch as the person watching the show paused ffd and rewd the stream. They encrypt them now, though.

 

[Rainbow Man]

but its still a *rental* service at *rental* prices, and legitimate purchasers of the rental service should not be surprised that they don't have unlimited ability to keep content forever at those prices.

Hm I wasn't aware there was only a rental option. I thought there were both varieties available rental AND purchase. I haven't actually tried it myself. I prefer having a hardcopy on my shelf rather than just data stored on a harddrive.

That rather diminishes the appeal for me personally at least. Peole buying the same stuff over and over is hollywood's wet dream not mine..

Peace.

 

[pcchen]

I don't like rental either, but I find out that most DVD I bought are only watched once or twice. Only a few are watched more, mostly TV anime which kids like to watch over and over again.
I still buy DVD because most of the time it's cheaper than going to the movie theater. I rarely rent DVD because the rental services here are not very good, the rental version DVD are mostly 4:3 and have inferior quality.

If they do provide a Live Video service in Taiwan (with HD movies) I'd seriously considering buying a Xbox 360. The broadband in Taiwan is not very expensive (12M/1M ADSL for about US$40/month) and there's no download limits.

 

[Hanners]

Most broadband in the US is not going to have download limits on it. Many ISPs do reserve the right to limit heavy, heavy users, but this seems to happen in real life more on an anecdotal basis ("Yeah, my buddy's cousin. . .") than to people you actually know. EDIT: It also seemed to happen more frequently 4 or 5 years back when broadband was still rolling out.

Consider yourself lucky, here in the UK every ISP I can think of has a cap on how much you can download per month, and there are no signs of that changing - If anything, the caps are being tightened all the time.

I'm lucky in that my ISP has screwed up somewhere on the bandwidth monitoring side of things, and find myself with a 100GB limit every month instead of 50GB!

 

[Rolf N]

I wonder how much of the 'success' of these movie/TV downloads on 360 could be contributed to easy usage as apposed to what PC users have to go with with many standards, options, providers, etc.

Good point.
Unbox doesn't stop at using "established" DRMified codecs, no, it requires users to install its own player application. And here's another great sound bite:

Many in Hollywood had high expectations that Amazon's strength in DVD sales would spur the nascent Web download biz. But the Netco faces the same problems as competitors such as Movielink, CinemaNow, Guba and AOL that launched before it: It's difficult for consumers to burn downloads onto DVD (save for a few titles on CinemaNow), and it's tricky for all but the most tech-savvy to watch downloads on a TV.

Stand-alone is relatively fair game, but I've grown weary of installing even more shit and more backdoors on the Windows PC. Those things were once meant to get stuff done after all, and not all of the files on there are worthless junk.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Consider yourself lucky, here in the UK every ISP I can think of has a cap on how much you can download per month, and there are no signs of that changing - If anything, the caps are being tightened all the time.

I just switched from Freedom 2 Surf with a 2 GB/m limit (now upped to 5 GB) to Tiscali which is uncapped. Most places seem to offer a 40 GB limit pm. Also 2 Mb/s is the usual in the UK. There's some 8 Mb/s rollout, but it has terrible penetration. Same with cable TV too. UK is very backward

Though incidentally, after getting uncapped BB and downloading a number of HD trailers etc., I found myself only using 5 GB. Monthly usage is set to be even less than that on average as there's nothing I want to get!

 

[Geo]

Here's a case of Comcast booting some guy earlier this year. . .for doing 600GB/month.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/72450

 

[London Geezer]

My ISP (DEMON) just upgraded me (without telling me!) from 2Mb to 8Mb... One day i just noticed my dloads were MUCH faster, so i checked my modem/router and it was connected at 8Mb!! And still no limits, and no crap of any kind that i hear about from other ISPs, especially Tiscali...

 

[Tap In]

Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and Netflix would be amused to hear their business model is not tenable. Tho I suspect they are much less amused by the competition that mass digital delivery of entirely legal and legitimate content is going to increasingly provide.

But, sure, that HD is a bit of an albatross for this kind of thing. It'd be better if it was bigger, but its still a *rental* service at *rental* prices, and legitimate purchasers of the rental service should not be surprised that they don't have unlimited ability to keep content forever at those prices.

Personally, I think the movie theatres are liable to be out of business in ten years, which after the boom in construction of them in the last 15 years is going to mean a huge amount of commercial real estate becoming empty. . . .

Indeed, this is a great step forward by the X360 service in digital distribution.

Very cool feature, glad to see it doing well.

 

[hongcho]

$50+/month for Internet... I might have paid it several years ago, but I am happy with $20/month, 3Mbps/768kbps from AT&T/SBC...

Anyway, I am not renting any movies on XBLVM unless they come with a better fixed [monthly] pricing. I am also not happy about my dinky 20GB disk.

Hong.