chip
09-27-2006, 07:09 AM
Source: broadbandreports (http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/78394)
CinemaNow has announced (http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060926005307&newsLang=en) that it will sell a downloadable DVD version of "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" for $9.99, the same day the DVD hits retail stores. According to the company, the complete film can be downloaded and burned to DVD for "playback in virtually any DVD player." A burnable DVD on the same day it hits stores? It sounds like progress.
However the press release doesn't tell you that the company's DVD burning process has been chastised high and low as one of the most dysfunctional systems ever constructed. Dubbed "irresponsibly defective" by an engineer last month (http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/76981), the system has a bad habit of churning out defective, error ridden disks.
"I'm against people being fleeced by this kind of crap," the engineer complained to on-line 'zine Boing Boing (http://www.boingboing.net/2006/08/02/cinemanows_burntodvd.html). "How can you sell someone content on media that is so heavily compromised, especially on a format that so heavily relies upon its error correction system to maintain playability?"
CinemaNow meanwhile lauds itself as the only major label service legally offering a burn-to-DVD option. After the report, they went into damage control mode. A company spokesman insisted that internal tests showed the DVDs worked on "94 percent of DVD players," and that CinemaNow had not received complaints from customers or movie studios since launching the service.
"We cannot address vague assertions of flaws in the system except to say that if there are individuals for whom the solution is not working effectively, we encourage them to contact our customer support team so that we may help them resolve the issue," said the company.
Except in the time it took customers to resolve the errors, they could have downloaded a pirated copy of the film via Bit Torrent. Dig through the trough of media and analyst coverage of CinemaNow (or any other legit content service), and you'll find that the vast majority of them ignore the pink elephant in the room: the fact you can go to a site like Torrentspy or Pirate Bay, and download films for free.
The tech media likes to focus on whether Cinemanow can compete with services from major operators like Apple and Amazon - or whether users will flock to on-line downloads. The real question the industry should be asking is: can these services compete with piracy?
CinemaNow has announced (http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20060926005307&newsLang=en) that it will sell a downloadable DVD version of "The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift" for $9.99, the same day the DVD hits retail stores. According to the company, the complete film can be downloaded and burned to DVD for "playback in virtually any DVD player." A burnable DVD on the same day it hits stores? It sounds like progress.
However the press release doesn't tell you that the company's DVD burning process has been chastised high and low as one of the most dysfunctional systems ever constructed. Dubbed "irresponsibly defective" by an engineer last month (http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/76981), the system has a bad habit of churning out defective, error ridden disks.
"I'm against people being fleeced by this kind of crap," the engineer complained to on-line 'zine Boing Boing (http://www.boingboing.net/2006/08/02/cinemanows_burntodvd.html). "How can you sell someone content on media that is so heavily compromised, especially on a format that so heavily relies upon its error correction system to maintain playability?"
CinemaNow meanwhile lauds itself as the only major label service legally offering a burn-to-DVD option. After the report, they went into damage control mode. A company spokesman insisted that internal tests showed the DVDs worked on "94 percent of DVD players," and that CinemaNow had not received complaints from customers or movie studios since launching the service.
"We cannot address vague assertions of flaws in the system except to say that if there are individuals for whom the solution is not working effectively, we encourage them to contact our customer support team so that we may help them resolve the issue," said the company.
Except in the time it took customers to resolve the errors, they could have downloaded a pirated copy of the film via Bit Torrent. Dig through the trough of media and analyst coverage of CinemaNow (or any other legit content service), and you'll find that the vast majority of them ignore the pink elephant in the room: the fact you can go to a site like Torrentspy or Pirate Bay, and download films for free.
The tech media likes to focus on whether Cinemanow can compete with services from major operators like Apple and Amazon - or whether users will flock to on-line downloads. The real question the industry should be asking is: can these services compete with piracy?