DVDGuy’s Blog @ Digital Digest

A few more ideas that popped into head following my blog entry the other day (Legal DVD Quality Downloads – Dream or Reality?).

I think it would be great (if not somewhat ironic) that legal DVD downloads be distributed using bittorrent technology. It really is the best and fastest way to distribute large files, and it saves money for the distributors.

Digital downloads would also make distribution of hard to find/out of print titles possible. It is often not worth it commercially for studios to release old and rare movies, but if they do it online, there is no production cost involved.

And once bandwidth becomes faster and cheaper, perhaps HD titles can be distributed in the same way.

And since everything will be delivered digitally, why not allow customizations? For example, I could choose a different style of main menu, which language and subtitle tracks I want to be included in the download, and also which extra features to have (discounts available for choosing the movie only version perhaps). Exclusive material not found on the physical DVD version might also be made available, to be downloaded for an additional fee. The possibilities are endless, and I really shouldn’t be doing the studio’s work for them by coming up with these ideas (will sell ideas for money!!).

To be able to download a full DVD quality version of the latest Hollywood movie, and for it to be completely legal, for now seems like just a dream. Hollywood studios are always talking about how much money they are losing to illegal movie downloads, yet they offer no alternatives to the traditional optical media, or when they do, it’s DRM’d crap that’s nowhere near DVD quality (but as expensive, if not more so).

People who have been using media centers are well aware of the ease in which digital content can be played back without having the physical (optical) media. Everything is organized and easy to access, and searching is much easier. No discs means less clutter, and the loading time is greatly reduced.

Kaleidescape – The ultimate system (if not a bit too rich for my wallet)

Up until now, many people have been doing the “illegal” thing and copying their own DVDs to media centers. Kaleidescape, for example, is a commercial solution for keeping your DVDs in a digital library, and they even went as far as winning (at least for now, before appeals) a lawsuit bought against them by the DVD Copy Control Association.

Is it really too hard for the studios to start allowing legal DVD quality downloads? The price, the risk of piracy, the technical problem have all be quoted as reasons for not having legal DVD downloads.

I theorize that if DVD quality downloads are available for $10 per movie (with sub-DVD quality versions at $5), then I think you will see a huge decrease in the amount of movies being pirated (plus make a tidy profit at the same time). Why pirate an illegal inferior XviD version (possibly fake, and loaded with virus/trojan executables) when you can grab the legal version with better quality and faster downloading for only $5?

DivX would be perfect for distributing legal movies in sub-DVD quality

These downloads should be also be DRM free – DRM hardly works anyway in stopping copying, but it does work quite well in making life miserable for customers by limiting interoperability. The reason why people use DivX/XviD is the wide spread support for it in hardware, and legal downloads should offer the same advantages. Free software should also be included to make it easy to burn these files to DVDs, and for these burned DVDs to be as compatible as real DVDs you buy in the shops. This will help media companies who also have investment in hardware playback devices, as improve interoperability means more playback devices being sold and used.

The biggest technical challenge is bandwidth. Most people (at least here in Australia) are on a 10 to 30 GB per month limit – this only equals 6 DVD downloads (or 3 DVD downloads if they include extra features or are overly long), and it will probably take the average user (on 1.5 Mbps download speeds) 7 or 8 hours to download a single DVD. But you could argue that if people are already downloading tons of illegal stuff, then they aren’t all that concerned about the technical limitations or have found ways around it. Certainly offering lower quality (DivX/XviD) legal downloads would solve the problem for many people.

Studios should also work together with ISPs to offer downloads that won’t eat into your monthly allowance, perhaps even investing in their own high speed network designed for DVD downloads – this in itself is worth the $10 you pay for each DVD download in my opinion.

Episodes of Lost are already available to download on iTunes, but is not at DVD quality and is DRM protected to make DVD burning difficult if not impossible (within legal limits)

With TV shows on DVDs being quite popular, there could also be a model where you download each episode as it is aired in DVD quality. Let’s say that a typical TV season consisting of 20 episodes costs $40 for the DVD box set, then if you market each downloadable episode at $2.00 (the price at which some TV episodes are already available to download), many people will be tempted to download them. In fact, many are already downloading episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives for the same price through iTunes, even though it’s not at DVD quality and is loaded with DRM goodness. At the end of the season, you should then be able to run a software and turn these downloaded episodes into a proper DVD set (complete with menus, but no extras). An offer of a discount on the DVD box set (with extras) could then be offered, and I think most people will buy that as well. The possibilities are endless, and the profits for studios and TV networks will increase.

So why aren’t studios doing this? Perhaps they are still holding on to the old concepts of media distribution, and tape/discs do offer more control in terms of who is viewing your content. Perhaps they are also afraid of opening this digital pandora’s box, afraid that a single downloaded copy will be distributed to millions of people with no profits to them. I don’t think these are huge concerns, and in the words of Michael Eisner^*, former CEO of Disney:

Wise words indeed. Let’s hope the studios are listening.

^* Thanks to Doom9.net and 2600 for the quote