Ask HN: How do you improve online movie purchases? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you improve online movie purchases?

3 pointsjstanley5 comments

In the physical world, you just choose a film, hand over your money, and take home the DVD. You can then watch it as many times as you like, on as many devices as you like, with no subscription fee to pay and minimal DRM (yes, there is CSS, but it is really only a token effort).

Why is there no digital alternative? I want to go to a website, choose a film, pay my money, and download a video file that I can then watch as many times as I like, on as many devices as I like, with no subscription fee to pay and minimal DRM.

Does such a service exist?

What are the barriers to setting up such a service?

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As far as downloading movies, we're at the same place today as we were with music in the middle of the last decade. You can buy a movie from Amazon Instant Video or similar stores and download a file, copy it to any device you want as many times as you want. It's just wrapped in a PlaysForSure DRM wrapper which limits what devices can actually open it. Exactly the same DRM music had before the switch to watermarked MP3s.

There's not a lot of pressure to change that because of streaming. Most people are content with streaming the movies they buy instead of downloading. There are nearly no restrictions on streaming. When you buy something from Amazon for example, you can stream it to any number of devices any number of times. You can even stream it to two devices at the same time. The video looks good, you can start watching it immediately, and you don't have to use up 25% of the free space on your tablet to save one movie.

People whose primary concern is acquiring a file rather than watching a movie are a niche market. Music in 2005 was a lot different than movies in 2013. A lot more people cared about collecting files, hoarding discographies, and transferring files to portable devices that had no internet connection. It's not the same situation, so that pressure to abandon DRM isn't there now.

The barriers are the major movie studios/distributors. They have not yet learned the lesson that the music industry did with the advent of iTunes MP3 and amazon MP3 sales, namely that providing fair-priced, DRM free music deters pirates.

Providing DRM free music has nothing to do with providing DRM free movies.

Where's the difference? I see none, except that the cost of content creation are vastly different between music and movies. But a ordinary user does not care about this.

All a user sees is "Hey, they charge $10 for a movie and I can't watch it on my iPad because I need to copy and convert it" and "Hey, this site offers the movie for free and I can dump the file on my NAS and watch the movie on my iPad, my TV and my computer without FBI warnings, unskippable ads etc"

I would pay the same amount I'd pay for a DVD, if I were allowed to do whatever the f*ck I want with the content, no matter if the publisher goes bankrupt, has server issues (online "activation" for movies IS possible with BluRay). After all, I could have the exact same movie if I'd just download a BD50 untouched rip instead of buying the BD, reading it and stripping out the DRM/copy protection with AnyDVD HD.

I agree. The models are different. While a music artist can somewhat justify piracy rates via concerts and merch, there's no concert equivalent of a $300 million blockbuster movie.

The future is probably going to be in moderate DRM, like Steam for games. I think they're getting there with something like Ultraviolet, but I'm not too familiar with the the whole scheme; I just know it allows multiple devices and players.

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