http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/12/flix-on-stix-vending-machine-copies-movies-to-thumb-drives/
Imagine being able to rent a movie from a vending machine by having it copied to your USB drive? Personally, I can't imagine ever actually doing this and the idea seems to tie into the antiquated go-to-a-brick-and-mortar-store-to-rent-a-movie theme. A great line from that article:
Quote from: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/12/flix-on-stix-vending-machine-copies-movies-to-thumb-drives/
while BitTorrent is fast, it?s not as fast as walking to the corner store.
Are you kidding me?
For me to go walk to the corner store requires five minutes of bundling up in coat, boots, jacket, mitts, toque, then fifteen minutes busting through snowdrifts, then _finally_ getting the movie copied to the flash drive (will still take a few minutes), then back through the snowdrifts, finally unbundling, then figuring out how the hell to _play_ this DRMed-out-the-ass movie, then probably sitting through all kinds of warnings and previews.
In comparison, torrenting Scott Pilgrim took 44 minutes (about the same as walking to that store), had no DRM, had no warnings and previews, and streamed just fine to the Xbox. And torrenting Scott Pilgrim didn't even max out my connection, as another bigger download was ahead of it.
For the record, I paid for Scott Pilgrim on Video On Demand and had constant pixelation and audio stutters. Shaw's Video On Demand is starting to suck, at least on my digital cable terminal.
In the days when my connection speed was only about 1.5Mbit this service would have sounded great!... but when my connection is 10Mbit or better and I can simply queue downloads and do other things till they are done, the value isn't there.
If there was a legit way to P2P movies the industry would clean up, the timing is right for this kind of service but the MPAA don't wanna play.
RIAA and MPAA are two groups that are utterly dedicated to backward thinking, my only hope is that when all this issue over copyright infringement finally comes to a head in the next few years that they finally collapse under their own ponderous stupidity.
Well Netflix I think has the right idea with subscriptions but they are having a hard time with the studios fearing it will kill Disc sales. However disc sales will die regardless as people get fast enough connections to make streaming far more convenient.
Exactly I think the discs are gonna fade away...