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

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

#11

Post by pmjordan »

JoachimSchipper wrote: post #9
dtf wrote: 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.)

Loss of revenue per rented movie. Depends on the degree of saturation of the market whether it's true loss of revenue. The video streaming market in Europe has barely been touched; iTunes movie rentals only recently opened up to more regions, and at €3-4 per movie it's very expensive compared to DVD rental.

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

#12

Post by danohuiginn »

michael_dorfman wrote: post #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.

yes, but your 'rental store' can now be a warehouse in Mexico -- no need for expensive real-estate or US employees. As for putting the right DVD to play -- jukeboxes have been doing that since the '50s, it's not exactly impossible to automate.

Keeping the inventory is a problem. But you could probably play an in-demand DVD a dozen times over a weekend, while netflix or blockbuster could only rent it out once or twice.

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

#15

Post by jarin »

michael_dorfman wrote: post #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.

You'd have to make enough over time (accounting for growth) to make up for the cost of the DVD players (and video capture cards or PCs) and the cost of the DVDs themselves, plus operating costs. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they're running a few token DVD players and the rest streaming from a server (artificially limiting play count) in the hopes that they can buy time and traffic to work out some kind of deal with the movie companies.

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

#16

Post by roel_v »

michael_dorfman wrote: post #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.

With a dvd player costing $30 or less retail, it shouldn't be hard to get 500 of them at $15. Hook up some IR remote infrastructure, automated switching of the output signals and you should be ready to serve 500 customers at a time for 25k. (for an order that size or a bit bigger a Chinese outfit may even be willing to wire the IR receiver so that there is a direct control line hanging out of it, ready to be hooked up the control server) He has a very small library says the article, so not even a need to actually switch dvd's; even if he does, two high school kids @ $7.25/hour (or nearshore to Mexico for even cheaper labor) can keep up with switching those 500 machines if he has automated the ejecting and sorting of the newly to insert dvd's (that is even assuming that there are no two customers who want to the same movie, and I think the movie rental is heavily long tail, so half of those machines will probably have the same movie in them for weeks on end).

I'd think it's massively scalable. Not enough capacity? Call your Chinese guy and you can double or triple it in two weeks. Or when worse comes to worst, drive around for an afternoon and empty the bargain bins of all Walmarts in the area.

So let's say you got labor costs of $1000/day if you keep a couple of spare employees at all times and have them work around the clock. Depreciation of inventory is 250/day (very generous - 50k costs depreciated in a year). Rent a warehouse, buy paper clips, 250 a day. Thing that I'm most uncertain about is bandwidth, let's say 300 a day? (2 gb/movie, 3000 rentals a day (see below), 0.05 cent per gb in bulk) His largest expense is going to be the lawyers, let's say a full time one at full rate, 1000 a day.

Total costs 2800 a day. Now let's say he's running at half capacity and at all times, only 1/2 of the players are active (on 2 hour movies). He charges $1 for each movie, way below market rate - premium content here in the EU is 6 euros, about 8 dollars, but let's say he goes for rock bottom prices. That's still $3000 a day, putting him in the black. Including 30k+ a month in legal fees. With every additional sale being 95% profit. If this sticks, which I doubt it will, he's got a good deal.

(this assumes 3000 rentals a day. I don't know how much this really is. Netflix has 10 mil subscribers, they claim; let's say each rents out one movie a year. That's 27k a day. So you'd have to be about 10% of Netflix's size to make that).

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

#17

Post by TeHCrAzY »

pmjordan wrote: post #11
JoachimSchipper wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

Loss of revenue per rented movie . Depends on the degree of saturation of the market whether it's true loss of revenue. The video streaming market in Europe has barely been touched; iTunes movie rentals only recently opened up to more regions, and at €3-4 per movie it's very expensive compared to DVD rental.

It's also more difficult, and drastically more expensive than BitTorrent.

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

#18

Post by Figs »

roel_v wrote: post #16
michael_dorfman wrote: post #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.

With a dvd player costing $30 or less retail, it shouldn't be hard to get 500 of them at $15. Hook up some IR remote infrastructure, automated switching of the output signals and you should be ready to serve 500 customers at a time for 25k. (for an order that size or a bit bigger a Chinese outfit may even be willing to wire the IR receiver so that there is a direct control line hanging out of it, ready to be hooked u…

Why even bother having someone to switch DVDs if you can get the players so cheaply? Just assign a disk to a player and treat it as a unit, and don't touch it unless it breaks. You could even wire up the unit to be controlled by software and powered off when no one wants to watch that movie. I suppose it would increase space usage, but it would greatly simplify operations if you don't have to depend on a person to load and unload devices.

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

#19

Post by omh »

Figs wrote: post #18
roel_v wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a dvd player costing $30 or less retail, it shouldn't be hard to get 500 of them at $15. Hook up some IR remote infrastructure, automated switching of the output signals and you should be ready to serve 500 customers at a time for 25k. (for an order that size or a bit bigger a Chinese outfit may even be willing to wire the IR receiver so that there is a direct control line hanging out of it, ready to be hooked u…

Why even bother having someone to switch DVDs if you can get the players so cheaply? Just assign a disk to a player and treat it as a unit, and don't touch it unless it breaks. You could even wire up the unit to be controlled by software and powered off when no one wants to watch that movie. I suppose it would increase space usage, but it would greatly simplify operations if you don't have to depend on a person to lo…

I imagine that the AV cabling and switches could get pretty expensive with that many players.

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

#20

Post by hugh3 »

omh wrote: post #19
Figs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why even bother having someone to switch DVDs if you can get the players so cheaply? Just assign a disk to a player and treat it as a unit, and don't touch it unless it breaks. You could even wire up the unit to be controlled by software and powered off when no one wants to watch that movie. I suppose it would increase space usage, but it would greatly simplify operations if you don't have to depend on a person to lo…

I imagine that the AV cabling and switches could get pretty expensive with that many players.

If it takes off, I imagine they'll start building some clever custom hardware. It's not going to be an enormous rack of Sony DVD players with big black cables coming out the back of each.
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