Live data from Hacker News

Zediva Streams Movies From Physical DVD Players, Argues It’s Legal

techcrunch.com

1–10 of 51 posts

Re: Zediva Streams Movies From Physical DVD Players, Argues It’s Legal

#2
Brilliant. Makes me want to become a customer to support their sheer chutzpah. I guess they must have done at least some legal homework. Not that it matters much when you're baiting the attack dogs of the content industries, whose primary fear seems not to be loss of revenue but loss of control.

Re: Zediva Streams Movies From Physical DVD Players, Argues It’s Legal

#3
And just like that, the technological world takes a step backwards. It's akin to when Concorde was decommissioned; the standard way to sell streamed movies may become to have a physical copy, with all the limitations that causes. This time it's due to legal restrictions.

Whilst this change will hopefully benefit customers and help lower prices, anyone can see that this is not the optimal solution.

Re: Zediva Streams Movies From Physical DVD Players, Argues It’s Legal

#4
This is absolutely brilliant. Or insane. Or both.

But how long do you think before they get sued? DVD player manufacturers might sue on the grounds that you're not allowed to bundle renting their devices with the renting of DVDs; or the reverse of movie makers suing for the same reason.

Or what about circumventing HDCP on relevant devices? If they're using the analog loophole, won't it just look like crap?

And what stops me from just recording the streams on my end, making them liable as party to me pirating? They'd be forced to layer this in some sort of DRM.

Even if they're 100% legal in every way and win all their cases, they will just file for bankruptcy anyhow when their lawyers want paid.

Re: Zediva Streams Movies From Physical DVD Players, Argues It’s Legal

#6
post #3

And just like that, the technological world takes a step backwards. It's akin to when Concorde was decommissioned; the standard way to sell streamed movies may become to have a physical copy, with all the limitations that causes. This time it's due to legal restrictions. Whilst this change will hopefully benefit customers and help lower prices, anyone can see that this is not the optimal solution.

[deleted]

Re: Zediva Streams Movies From Physical DVD Players, Argues It’s Legal

#9
post #2

Brilliant. Makes me want to become a customer to support their sheer chutzpah. I guess they must have done at least some legal homework. Not that it matters much when you're baiting the attack dogs of the content industries, whose primary fear seems not to be loss of revenue but loss of control.

> the content industries, whose primary fear seems not to be loss of revenue but loss of control.

As a matter of fact, this company is proposing to stream movies for half of what Netflix does. I'm pretty sure that the studies get less than half the money from this than they would get from Netflix. So yes, there is definitely a significant loss of revenue (or would be, if this company ever got anywhere.)

Re: Zediva Streams Movies From Physical DVD Players, Argues It’s Legal

#10
Wow, that's not a very scalable business. You need one physical DVD player for every concurrent customer, inventory of all of the DVDs sufficient to handle peak demand, and a small staff of bored employees keeping the right DVDs in the drives.

In other words, you still have all of the worst features of owning a DVD rental store.

Post reply on HN