drm Tagged Articles at Cinematical

It's no secret that video retailer Blockbuster had a rough quarter. Their profits are dipping, stores are closing -- suffice to say things aren't looking good. But, the company is looking for new ways to compete with services like Netflix and Redbox and so they're getting into the digital content game. But, as some critics have pointed out, the results so far are lackluster to say the least. Blockbuster and NRC/MOD systems have announced the pilot of digital media kiosks where customers use an SD memory card to download movies and TV to take home to play on their TV with the aid of a proprietary device (provided to participants of the trial). But the kicker has to be that the content would be DRM protected and customers pay $1.99 for a movie that must be viewed within 30 days and is only viewable for 48 hours.

The digital download service is just the latest in Blockbuster's new strategy to hold on to customers by offering something other than the brick and mortar experience. Some of their other ideas have included DVD subscription services and DVD kiosks. Blockbuster is hoping these new services could reduce the effect that illegal downloading has cost their bottom line as well as open them up to new tech-savvy customers. I understand that Blockbuster needs to fight off the pirates like everybody else, but I doubt that products bogged down with DRM are going to persuade your average pirate to go legit. But on the upside, at least Blockbuster's latest scheme would mean that there's nothing to return, and you don't have to deal with receiving damaged or scratched discs -- but in the grand scheme of things, that ain't much.

If Blockbuster wants to live to fight another day, I think they are going to have to come up with something a lot better than this, don't you?

Movie download service CinemaNow has been signing deals left and right to make movies from Warner Bros., Disney and others available for purchase. Recently the site/service made headlines when it enabled customers to burn DVDs from the movies they purchased. BoingBoing, though, passes on word that the DRM the movies are embedded with is causing the DVDs to be almost completely unplayable. Apparently the DRM uses a land-to-pit ratio called the Digital Sum Value that is freaking out and causing completely unfixable errors. The problem is that this DSV is so random that when you introduce variables such as DVD burners, software, blank DVDs and ultimately players, the ratio is so fouled up as to be completely uninterpretable. So if you were all excited about this program and planning to try it out, take care, especially since CinemaNow has a strict one-copy-only restriction on burning.

Here's an interesting series of questions and answers from the BBC, which asked film industry personalities how movies will be different in the digital age. The field of questions ranges from "Will fans choose how they want to watch films?" to "Did the VCR hurt the film industry?" What's most interesting about these answers is that most of them aren't really answers. Dan Glickman, who heads the MPAA, gives the most non-ny of the non-answers, saying the decision to release films digitially is a "company by company" choice. Wow, thanks for the wisdom there, Dan. Naturally, the theaters owners have their own strong opinions on the subject, while the head of the British Video Assocation and Curt Mavis of CinemaNow are the only ones who speaks the truth: simultaneous release on a wide scale will happen once digital technology becomes more pervasive.

Beyond the issue of whether theaters are doomed, the BBC also gets some good dish on why DVDs are region encoded - the bane of every hardcore anime fan in the United States - and why more films don't receive simultaneous global release. Check it out.