DRM Crud again - DVD / Movie downloads (legal)

[1kyle]

SKY Movies in the UK announced recently what I thought would be great.

SKY Movies is a subscription TV service - part of SKY TV in the UK - rather like CANAL+ in Europe etc.

If you are a suscriber to their SKY Movies channels you can download (legally) some movies and play them at a time convenient to you - especially if you missed the original screening and didn't record it.

http://www.sky.com/skybybroadband/faqs/0,,...141-180,00.html

However reading the faqs brings up some severe restrictions.

1) You can only watch the movie for up to 30 days after downloading

........Can I watch downloaded videos more than once?

Yes. Once you have downloaded a video, it will appear in your library, telling you the number of days you have left to watch it. This is your licence to watch the video and, for a movie, this is usually 30 days. If you do not get the chance to view the movie in this time, you should search for the movie on Sky by broadband again and download it again. For sports, the length of the licence can vary depending on the type of sports clip you wish to view. After your licence to view, or our rights to show the video, expire the video will automatically be deleted from your library.

If this has not answered your question please email us or call us on +44 (0)870 609 4508 (national rates apply)

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2) You can only view it on the same computer it was downloaded on --you can't copy it to DVD and watch it on a nice DVD player --so what's the point I'll just record off air (whilst you still can)

...........Can I save to another hard drive, CD, DVD or other device?

You will only be able to play the video on the PC it was downloaded to. Items cannot be downloaded on to DVD.

If this has not answered your question please email us or call us on +44 (0)870 609 4508 (national rates apply)

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3) quality seems a bit better than Divx --nothing like as good as original DVD quality.

......What will the picture and sound quality of the movies/sports video be?

Videos are encoded at a variable bit rate of 860 kbps, and resolution of 540x432.

If this has not answered your question please email us or call us on +44 (0)870 609 4508 (national rates apply) ...........

If I'm watching a movie I certainly don't want to be stuck in front of a computer. I want to see it on a nice large screen in my living room. Even on a computer I'd want to see it on a 24 inch screen or bigger and not in some tiny window.

OK I know if you are in a hotel / airport etc watching a DVD in a computer is OK in those circumstances but even then I want decent full screen resolution.

I think we've got shades of the crud that downloaded music has here - loads of DRM, poor compression and eventually more expensive than the traditional CD.

I hope that DVD's aren't going this way especially with High Definition TV now available.

I've got a feeling that after this service is implemented we'll get a restriction on recording movies on our own DVD recorders.

Let's hope the video industry doesn't go the way of the music industry.

Thank goodness High Definition TV is already here where you can really see the quality difference so people I believe won't put up with poor compression and crappy resolution like they have with downloaded music services.

The idea was great - download stuff and play at your own convenience - but as always the actual implementation is full of Dog Poo.

Cheers

-K

Edited April 2, 2006 by 1kyle

[mercury_in_flames]

bah, waste of time really. I;'d just record my soccer matches and stuff to one of those hard disk recoreders via the scart output on the skybox. Stuff whether its legal, its a fricking soccer game Sure its illegal for movies, but whats the difference between taping a movie back in the old days off the tv (dont tell you never did that??) onto vhs, to recording the thing to an hdd and watching it off that>? What? just because vhs tapes would be paper weights within 5 months? meh.

*edit* I;m not asking for a flame war here, I just dont see whats changed, apart from there being loads of people actually wanting to seel what they record etc. I think there should be a clause in the legality of it all that lets you record onto dvd-rw discs as these give pretty poor quality writes any way and write quality tends to degrade over a few months depending on dye. Or if they really want to go 'sony' on us, make the dvd recorded by a dvd/hdd drive only playable on that drive, there you go.