It has been announced that soon the Walt Disney Company will be unveiling a new technology called Keychest. The technology will allow for consumers to pay a single price for access to a movie or television show across multiple media platforms.
This technology is said to be expected to cause a shift from consumers reliance on DVDs and and instead get them to rely on computers and TV more-so than currently.
Thoughts?
Source: Online.wsj.com
Keychest might just be the secret to reversing the downward overall sales trend in the movie business, from what I have read. The key is getting a diverse group of corporations on board, such as Microsoft, Apple, Intel, Sony, cable companies, cellular network companies, etc. That is the challenge. I hope it works out.
That’s assuming you have access to high speed internet, which only 42% of all Americans have. I’m not one of them. DVD’s still deliver for me.
If they had thought about the design, they would not need any cooperation from any other business.
Here is a description of what they proposed.
You pay your money, then you get to download from the distributor again and again until their bandwidth bill sends them bankrupt. You can then continue downloading from from other distributors until they go under too. In the mean time, your internet service provider is peeved because he sold bandwidth in the hope that most customers would not use it. When lots of people start downloading films on demand, their bandwidth bill puts the ISP in the red too.
If Disney sold digitally signed licenses for less than the costs of a DVD, people could use peer to peer software to distribute films only to people who have bought a license. The money they save by not buying a physical DVD goes to internet service providers so they can provide the increased bandwidth needed for downloading all the films.
At present, storing lots of films on a home computer costs about £0.60 each. That includes repeatedly replacing the hard disk with the next generation of hardware when the disk gets old. If films are stored in an open format like ogg/theora then they can be played on any device.
The biggest barrier to films being watchable on multiple devices is Digital Restrictions Management. DRM is a complete waste of time because anyone with a clue can work around it, and anyone who does not have a clue can buy from a criminal who has.