Sonic to Sell Movies on USB

I love the thought of the potential this has.

As a specialty content creator, most of my budgets lack the thousands of dollars that AACS and the BDA require for disc duplication in the Blu-ray world.

Yes this USB thing is small and probably not viable, but it could be in the somewhat near future.  The drives that are big enough to hold an HD movie are still too expensive.  There are not many TV out there with USB ports.  The cheap netbook probably is the most redy market for this. There's probably a myriad of issues that something like this won't work.

But.....to me, this announcement is the starting point. This is something that Blu-ray and its nasty, out of touch, overseers should be very scared of.  If this works like other developments in the hard drive world, the price will drop, the size will increase and one day, I will be able to put my HD specialty content onto a USB thumb drive and SKIP around the hassles that an optical disc requires.  No burner, no blank media, no label printing, no case printing, no shrink wrap.

IF HDTVs start to come with a USB port and throughput is large enough - well that would just about eliminate an entire industry.  Assuming of course people buy those type of HDTVs, soon enough and in quantities large enough to keep this going.

Blu-ray needs to be a bit more welcoming or something like a small, humble USB thumb drive will come in and steal the market.

my .02

Jeff

I like the idea that you don't need to use the files on the usb to watch the movie. It's kind of like a hardware dongle for ProTools. Would you need to buy a new usb rive for every movie or would on drive be your storage and "key"?

No. Economics of this technology are orders of magnitude away from replacing Blu-ray. Not now, not soon.

VOD might prove to be Blu-ray killer, not this.

-st

I'm not sure that an alternative type of content distribution (like USB or SD cards) will really catch on with users, expecially given the prevalence of optical discs and optical disc players. But I am psyched about the concept of buying once and having content move across devices and formats. That could change the industry, if it's implemented well.

The original article was about distributing content on USB.

Two replies have morphed it into using USB like a dongle or a key. This is not the same subject.

To use a USB drive as a dongle, the thing only needs about 256 BYTES of memory.

Keep it apples to apples people.

-st

Here's the quote, from the target article, that motivated my post.

"Once consumers connect to the Internet, the title on the USB Movie Drive is added to their Roxio CinemaNow Digital Locker where it can then be viewed on as many as four additional CinemaNow-compatible devices. Rather than delivering the same file used for USB playback, a unique file is delivered that has been optimized for the capabilities and display characteristics of the selected device."

That's the origin of the key or dongle idea. The USB delivers content and opens up some kind of access to the content across devices.

That's a consumer-centric idea that is more powerful than just distributing content on USB. If we're buying the rights to watch a movie, why shouldn't we be able to access it across media, without the involvement of ripping the content ourselves? I imagine that this is a complicated system to work out but am glad someone's trying.

Content owners love to sell movies multiple times (cinema, vhs, dvd, blu-ray, whatever's next...) but it'd be great, in this cloud computing environment, to be able to buy content and watch it on your tv, laptop and phone whenever you wanted to call it up.

If information doesn't want to be free maybe it can at least be freely available to those with the right to access it.