Skip to main content

How To Defeat Piracy and Conquer The Movie Industry With One Box

Some weeks ago, a friend of mine was tweeting about the crappiness of DRM and the movie industry. Well, actually I think all my friends have complained about this at one point or another. You know what the problem is (read anything by Cory Doctorow if you need more material).

Instead of chiming along as usual, I decided to counter with:
"Why don't you as a programmer come up with something better yourself?"
The discussion that ensued gave me an idea for a business/product that I'll share here. Feel free to steal the idea and build the "BetaBox"!
Imagine we built a solution for buying movies & series with all the problems of today's services removed. Imagine Hulu or Netflix, only with *all* movies and series, not just crappy old ones. It's not like Spotify is dominated by music from the 80-90's, and the newest songs are from two year's back, right?

Additionally, all content can be streamed or downloaded onto all your various devices. 

Now, the argument against building this service is that it won't float with the movie industry. They'll never allow downloading DRM-free files, and they won't release movies as early as they would hit the cinema, all in fear of losing revenue due to less people paying for cinema tickets, and broader piracy due to ease of ripping/copying.

However, I suggest that the movie industry hasn't moved to support downloading movies, for the simple reason that they can't be bothered. The majority of consumers don't want to deal with the collection of big movie files along with meta-data. Maybe you can be bothered, but my mom can not.

But what if you had a box with software that would just handle that for you, accompanied by apps for mobile devices and consoles?

Download once, and it would organize everything for you, and make it available for streaming to every device in your household. A bit like XBMC, only it is backed by a Netflix-like professional service, or rather several of them. You could also transfer files or cache for off-line viewing (bring the tablet in the car for kids watching a movie).

The BetaBox is portable, can run on car- or embedded battery power and doubles as a WiFi-router. So you bring it with you in your hotel-room, cabin in the woods, and so on.

The next challenge is to make this device useful before the movie industry agrees on supporting it. My solution for this is for the box to take in the movies you've already own. Rip them off CD's, DVD's and BlueRays. The industry has done what they can to make it illegal to rip DVD's and BlueRays, but this protection doesn't really make sense, and several countries (at least in Norway, I believe) it is allowed to rip DVDs and BlueRays for private use. In countries where ripping is not allowed, the feature would have to be disabled, but hopefully the public would rise to change these (rather nonsensical) laws over time. Maybe one could do something like iCloud's Match thing, where the BetaBox would recognize that you're rightfully own a movie (by inserting your disk), and after that you could just download it whenever.


Now, there are some open-ended questions like how to handle synchronization between multiple boxes, clustering, whether it should support copying movies from one box to another. The answers here should try to compromise for the happiness of the movie industry, I suppose. Should the concept of "renting" movies be implemented? Maybe.

Eventually, hopefully, the movie industry would have to buckle for the market, and would move to support it in order to maintain revenue, similar to what happened in regards to iPods/iTunes and Spotify. 

Of course, the concepts here are simplified, and the idea is rather utopian. But my point is that if we as engineers were able to build a concept that was so valuable and usable to all consumers that it would easily out-compete everything else on the market, the movie industry would eventually have to go along with it. And seeing how crappy the products out there are today, I think this is actually doable. 

Someone, please think this through properly, get it funded on Kickstarter and build me a BetaBox!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Open source CMS evaluations

I have now seen three more or less serious open source CMS reviews. First guy to hit the field was Matt Raible ( 1 2 3 4 ), ending up with Drupal , Joomla , Magnolia , OpenCms and MeshCMS being runner-ups. Then there is OpenAdvantage that tries out a handful ( Drupal , Exponent CMS , Lenya , Mambo , and Silva ), including Plone which they use for their own site (funny/annoying that the entire site has no RSS-feeds, nor is it possible to comment on the articles), following Matt's approach by exluding many CMS that seem not to fit the criteria. It is somewhat strange that OpenAdvantage cuts away Magnolia because it "Requires J2EE server; difficult to install and configure; more of a framework than CMS", and proceed to include Apache Lenya in the full evaluation. Magnolia does not require a J2EE server. It runs on Tomcat just like Lenya does (maybe it's an idea to bundle Magnolia with Jetty to make it seem more lightweight). I'm still sure that OpenAdvant

Considerations for JavaScript in Modern (2013) Java/Maven Projects

Disclaimer: I'm a Java developer, not a JavaScript developer. This is just what I've picked up the last years plus a little research the last days. It's just a snapshot of my current knowledge and opinions on the day of writing, apt to change over the next weeks/months. We've gone all modern in our web applications, doing MVC on the client side with AngularJS or Ember , building single-page webapps with REST backends. But how are we managing the growing amount of JavaScript in our application? Yeoman 's logo (not necessarily the conclusion of this blog post) You ain't in Kansas anymore So far we've just been doing half-random stuff. We download some version of a library and throw it into our src/main/webapp/js/lib , or we use it from a CDN , which may be down or unreachable when we want to use the application.. Some times the JS is minified, other times it's not. Some times we name the file with version number, other times without. Some

Managing dot-files with vcsh and myrepos

Say I want to get my dot-files out on a new computer. Here's what I do: # install vcsh & myrepos via apt/brew/etc vcsh clone https://github.com/tfnico/config-mr.git mr mr update Done! All dot-files are ready to use and in place. No deploy command, no linking up symlinks to the files . No checking/out in my entire home directory as a Git repository. Yet, all my dot-files are neatly kept in fine-grained repositories, and any changes I make are immediately ready to be committed: config-atom.git     -> ~/.atom/* config-mr.git     -> ~/.mrconfig     -> ~/.config/mr/* config-tmuxinator.git       -> ~/.tmuxinator/* config-vim.git     -> ~/.vimrc     -> ~/.vim/* config-bin.git        -> ~/bin/* config-git.git               -> ~/.gitconfig config-tmux.git       -> ~/.tmux.conf     config-zsh.git     -> ~/.zshrc How can this be? The key here is to use vcsh to keep track of your dot-files, and its partner myrepos/mr for o

What I've Learned After a Month of Podcasting

So, it's been about a month since I launched   GitMinutes , and wow, it's been a fun ride. I have gotten a lot of feedback, and a lot more downloads/listeners than I had expected! Judging the numbers is hard, but a generous estimate is that somewhere around 2000-3000 have listened to the podcast, and about 500-1000 regularly download. Considering that only a percentage of my target audience actively listen to podcasts, these are some pretty good numbers. I've heard that 10% of the general population in the western world regularly listen to podcasts (probably a bit higher percentage among Git users), so I like to think I've reached a big chunk of the Git pros out there. GitMinutes has gathered 110 followers on Twitter, and 63, erm.. circlers on Google+, and it has received 117 +'es! And it's been flattr'ed twice :) Here are some of the things I learned during this last month: Conceptually.. Starting my own sandbox podcast for trying out everythin

Git Stash Blooper (Could not restore untracked files from stash)

The other day I accidentally did a git stash -a , which means it stashes *everything*, including ignored output files (target, build, classes, etc). Ooooops.. What I meant to do was git stash -u , meaning stash modifications plus untracked new files. Anyhows, I ended up with a big fat stash I couldn't get back out. Each time I tried, I got something like this: .../target/temp/dozer.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/core.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/temp/joda-time.jar already exists, no checkout .../target/foo.war already exists, no checkout Could not restore untracked files from stash No matter how I tried checking out different revisions (like the one where I actually made the stash), or using --force, I got the same error. Now these were one of those "keep cool for a second, there's a git way to fix this"situation. I figured: A stash is basically a commit. If we look at my recent commits using   git log --graph --