Apple's new pixlet video on demand services

mi5moav

mi5moav

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Would it be possible for Apple to create a service similar to video on demand/pay per view where they could use pixlet to download lets say a movie to some form of decoder that would pull 1MB - 3MB a minute where it could be possible to view a broadcast or movie on your tv. Unlike pay per view you would be able to pause or replay the feed and view the movie at your convienence. I'm assuming if they use pixlet with quicktime it should be possible to do this. I think one reason that apple doesn't want to actually have movies per web is that most don't want to watch movies on their pc but on there tv. Who wants to spend 5 hours downloading a movie and checking in on your system. With this system you just choose the movie the system automatically downloads the movie to the box and notifies you when it is complete. Of course if you have a 3MB per second connection it would be real time streamed with a few minute buffer. Of if you have a slower connection you could probably still start playing the movie within 30 minutes of starting the download to the box. This way Apple could sell this technology to cable/broadcast companies as reverse tivo on the broadcasters end. Pay per view is great but is so limited. I have maybe 15 or 20 pay per view channels with maybe 100 different movies a month, mostly newer titles. With this service Apple could sell millions of dollars of xserve where companies could store compressed movies that could be pulled by customers when needed to their box top. This way HBO or Showtime could archive all there movies and when I wanted to watch jaws, spiderman or some old charlie chaplain movie I could just pull it from their servers. Unlike with movies on demand I don't have to deal with the hassle of downloading from a congested net and then trying to pull it off my computer onto my tube.
 
First of all, just for clarification, Pixlet is a professional codec meant for video professionals. It is so people like Pixar have a codec to transfer their footage between different computers at high, relatively lossless quality and a relatively low file size. It's not meant as a format for streaming movies. For this, Apple would use MPG-4.

Second, I don't think online pay-per-download or pay-per-stream movies are really set to take off for quite some time. Okay, people may pay to stream a movie, but I doubt anyone is going to want to pay to download and save movies to disk. Full-quality feature films, even in MPG-4 format, take up a lot of disk space, and people would either have to fill their drives or burn it to DVD. Plus, people listen to their favorite music a lot more than they watch their favorite movies. It's a lot easier to get DVD's than to download the whole thing and only be able to watch it on your computer.

Just my 2% share of a Washington.
 
I was working on a project where users would be charged on a data packet basis where it would buffer the data and charge by the MB to an end user streaming video. Pixlet is great for that live stream at present, but you would also most probably have to tie in the charging method either into the packets when encoding or somhow into the algorythm, then decrypt the packets/codec and add the data to an accounting application ran as a plugin/update for QuickTime, etc.

I didnt have the ultimate resourses nor the proper education in the development cycle. I accually somehow won an apple seeding grant for the idea and sent to cupertino. I discussed it with many people and i felt like i was on to somthing really good.

Originally not knowing a thing about code I completed some interesting programs where it was monitoring dataflow of a network through a port where these streams were being broadcasted well some times it worked and then sometimes it didn't.

I loved building it but I needed a rest, it is a big job that needs a really good team of programers I just had the idea and new its processors inside out/back to front. thankfully apple saw my idea and sponsored me for it, they must have my notes somwhere;). On my part all I can say is thankyou apple youve brought the coder out of me, an xcoder.

The future is definatley exciting with all this happening with set-top box's soon to become a major part of a true convergence between "live tv" and the home computer. I believe the computer will be king of the two with the computer playing the administrator/controller of all devices at home.
 
I definetly don't think that people want to use their computers to download movies. The set top box solution is the way to go. I have played with Disneys movie beam product and really like there solution. It's almsot a virtual video store. When you purchase the set top box it already contains 100 movies and then every day a new movie is downloaded and another deleted. The only thing I didn't like about it is that you really don't have much say in what movie you want to download into the box. I doubt we will ever see obscure or older movies downloaded since it seems to be based on some sort of polling. As HD prices go down and data speeds go up I think this will really take off. As long as the prices are equal to that of video stores. I also belive that Apple has something up their sleeves and something will come out very soon. Last year when Apple met with Universal it had nothing to do with a buyout I believe it had something to do with movie distribution. Also, does Pixar have any right to distribute it's movies or does Disney actually control those now?
 
How does a library/rental store go about lending out videos? What are the costs associated with purchasing a video to rent out. What laws out there prevent me from lending out my home videos for others to watch? If I were to purchase a video from universal for $500 would I then be allowed to rent/download it to others?
 
mi5moav: Copyright law prevents you from lending out your video cassettes. Unless you mean 'home videos' as in "I've made them myself with my video camera". But on every movie video cassette or DVD you buy, rental is strictly excluded.
 
mi5moav said:
How does a library/rental store go about lending out videos? What are the costs associated with purchasing a video to rent out. What laws out there prevent me from lending out my home videos for others to watch? If I were to purchase a video from universal for $500 would I then be allowed to rent/download it to others?
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Yes, but you would have to contact Universal about a rental contract, and then you'd also have to pay them a portion of your profits every time you rent a video.
 
I talked to local video store that purchases most of their videos from whatever distributors they have for between $100 and $300 bucks. and they are allowed to rent them out as many times as they like. I don't understand why someone doesn't just buy a dying video store and encode there stock and put them on the net for download. I can't believe there would be any difference. I could purchase this stores stock for about $30,000 for about 6,000 different movies spend maybe $100,000 to encode these tapes and maybe 20 to 30k a month to stream these videos. As long as the individuals sign a contract stating that after 3-7 days they will delete/return the rental one would easily expect to recoup profits fairly quickly. If one could create some form of CD media substrate dye that would deteriorate at and excellerated rate there would be no need to even have any form of DRM built in. Once they download the video to a computer they could either watch it on their small screens or burn it once to these self destructing dvds. Of course who would go out and buy these discs if they would cost more then 25 cents each. But then again 80% of house hold goods are disposed.
 
I don't understand why someone doesn't just buy a dying video store and encode there stock and put them on the net for download. I can't believe there would be any difference.
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Ask a lawyer. Or a movie studio executive. Honestly, don't you think someone would have tried it by now if it were possible? And what about international copyrights? Someone in Canada, for instance, would be bound by different laws.
 
(I like it how you just ignore that Canadians are also reading this forum.) You probably _could_ do it in a country with less effective copyright controls, but someone in the USA, for instance, could download the video and would break the law, maybe... Well, would have to read the license for those 'for rent' videos. But they probably include something about digitally distributing and/or copying them.
 
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