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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

#21

Post by hugh3 »

Jabbles wrote: 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.

Actually I think it might work the other way.

At the moment Netflix can't get licenses to stream the vast majority of movies. But if this business model works and is legal then Netflix can say "Hey look, your fancy new movie is going to get streamed over the internet anyway, you might as well license it to us".

I imagine the studios make more money on average getting fifteen cents per watch from Netflix than selling a physical DVD to these other guys and letting them play it until it wears out.

So this business might encourage a shift that works out to everybody's advantage: the consumer, the studios, and the existing dominant player Netflix. Everybody's advantage, that is, except for this guy, who finds himself driven out of business as soon as Netflix starts streaming every title in their library.

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

#22

Post by hugh3 »

TeHCrAzY wrote: post #17
pmjordan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes yes, and paying for your groceries is more expensive than shoplifting too, can we please not have the discussion where people pretend that stealing stuff is just as good as buying it? Most people are law-abiding citizens.

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

#23

Post by hugh3 »

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…

Running at half capacity seems rather optimistic. Especially if business is primarily concentrated in the US timezones then there should be a heavy peak load in the evening and not much action in the morning. And if you're regularly overrunning your capacity in the evenings then people are going to get frustrated with your service (imagine going down to the local video store and having them tell you that unfortunately they're completely out of all movies...)

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

#24

Post by roel_v »

hugh3 wrote: post #23
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…

Running at half capacity seems rather optimistic. Especially if business is primarily concentrated in the US timezones then there should be a heavy peak load in the evening and not much action in the morning. And if you're regularly overrunning your capacity in the evenings then people are going to get frustrated with your service (imagine going down to the local video store and having them tell you that unfortunatel…

OK, then add another 250 a day for double the equipment. Now he only needs average occupation of 25% and he's still at break-even, without discounting for the other costs savings that will show up once you start going into that much detail (like only having to have one guy swapping DVD's at night). Like another poster remarked, for $1000 labor a day, with the numbers above, you can get 5 times the amount of dvd players (eliminating labor completely if you have one player for each CD you offer, and I guess you need a help desk...) and still come out to the same numbers.

Maybe I'm way off the mark on some of these numbers, I don't know; I'm not familiar with this industry. The 'generic' parts of it are realistic though, I think.

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

#27

Post by Quarrelsome »

hugh3 wrote: post #22
TeHCrAzY wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes yes, and paying for your groceries is more expensive than shoplifting too, can we please not have the discussion where people pretend that stealing stuff is just as good as buying it? Most people are law-abiding citizens.

Can we please not use the "stealing from a shop" analogy as it is not a parallel. Cloning and taking a copy of the groceries would be closer. IP theft is not the same as literal theft. It's similar but this analogy is terrible brain food.

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

#28

Post by pontifier »

arethuza wrote: post #13

I wouldn't mind if I could dump all my DVDs into a box, send it to someone and have them stream them to me when I want, to any device I want.

That's actually VERY similar to the system I am setting up... but with an added secret component. see an earlier post with some signup codes for the private test: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1825578

as of right now I believe only 2 of the codes on that page have been used.

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

#29

Post by IgorPartola »

hugh3 wrote: post #22
TeHCrAzY wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes yes, and paying for your groceries is more expensive than shoplifting too, can we please not have the discussion where people pretend that stealing stuff is just as good as buying it? Most people are law-abiding citizens.

Stop using the S word! Seriously. When you steal something, the rightful owner no longer has the item. You cannot by definition steal digital content. You can merely copy it. Does that result in damages to the original owner? Maybe. Is it stealing? No.

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

#30

Post by charlesdm »

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.

I agree, there should be a streaming service in Europe -- It's a huge untapped market, and I wouldn't mind a service like that.
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