I bought the film and downloaded it. $10 is a fair price for a digital movie I would say and enables new producers to push their content to a large community. Will watch the movie on my way cross the atlantic on my PSP … this digital life is fantastic.

Streamburst seem to be taking quite a pragmatic view of piracy, that those who are determined to, can’t be stopped.

It mearly puts up a hurdle from making it casually easy, most ‘normal’ people will not be bothered to scan every film and find every way of identifying, those who will, would have done it any way.

It seems to be a simple elegant “why didn’t I think of that” type idea for what it wants to achieve.

It’s also drm-free in the sense that most people think of drm, you buy the content, you can do what you want with it.

It’s good that there are a whole mix of different ideas that people are trying, so just give this one a chance.

….but their is a limit to how much advertising on non-dynamic media you can have, or making movies by commitee!

Yours kindly,

Shakir Razak

The most quotable line goes to Guy Kawasaki, on the topic of evangelism. Goes something like: “First there was Jesus, then there was Steve (Jobs) . . . and not much else in-between”

I was interested in seeing it, but, even more than that, I want to support people allowing me to do whatever I like with the content. If I can burn the movie to DVD, watch it on an iPod or PMP, play it on as many devices as I’d like, etc., then I would say that my rights aren’t being “managed” at all.

Of course they use the name on your credit card. The problem is that credit card fraud happens!! Has everybody forgotten that little fact of life? With this “name and shame” model, when somebody steals my credit card, not only do I lose $10 on the movie content, but I also get fingered as a pirate and get nasty latters from the MPAA. Thanks very much, Streamburst!

I just paid the $8 to get the movie, for 2 reasons.

1. I wanted to watch it, but couldn’t justify the $18 (the netflix comment was dead on)

2. Why not support someone who is taking a risk, is this finger printing breakable…. of course it is. Anything made by humans can be broken by us.

Consider this, the movie studios with all their millions of dollars for ridiculous invasive, regional dividing, content restricting DRM have not stopped one movie from being pirated…not one. They just piss us off, so EVEN if this “does not stop pirating” it doesn’t Piss us off so its a step in the right direction.

This is the fair “DRM free” service most of us have been asking for. This service answers all the critics of current DRM and internet movie downloads.

Perhaps there’s a niche - something akin to the boingboing store. Hard to make a business case given the pirate-ability of the product.

the basic model of streamcast makes a great deal of sense. it’s not meant to be a complete solution to preventing someone from copying/snatching content. and yes, it is a somewhat poor attempt as the five second name at the beginning is easily thwarted.

a much better solution is to allow the user to download the content to the pc, and to blow the content to whatever cd/dvd is required. this allows the content to be viewed by the user where ever the user desires.

to prevent/slow down the process of illegal copying, the app that’s used to download the content is a proprietary app which is used to embed key sensitive user information within the content stream. the information is in plain text, able to be read if a user could single frame through the content. this isn’t that big of an issue, as the human eye isn’t really able to distibguish a single frame.

the process should also embed every few secs/mins a sequence id unique to the user. the app does a hash of the segment of the content, and returns this back to the CDN.

this overall process pretty much guarantees that the user has a unique copy of the content, and one that’s pretty easily recognized if it gets released to the p2p networks.

the app also contains a hash of the user’s computer. this is maintained to prevent the user from being able to use the network in the future for downloading if the content is determined to be illegally found on some p2p network.

other parts of the solution further minimize the spread of illegal copying.

however, it isn’t meant to completely deter the process of illegal copying, just to put a reasonable dent in the mix.

peace..

-bruce

ps. this overall approach has been discussed in other pervious threads.

it’s lame and DOA.

Here’s a recent example at work:

- Loaded up iTunes
- Located, purchased, and downloaded

“Porroh Man”, from Big Country’s live compilation “Come up Screaming” (2000)

- Transferred to the iPod for portable listening at home, in the car, and gym.
- All for a buck.

A buck. That’s the same I would pay to listen once on a juke box. Maybe two if I opted for “Play it Now!”

If it takes DRM for the record companies to allow iTunes to provide me this convenient access to songs, I’ll take it.

The Big Country song was an impulse buy. I never would have taken the time to hunt down the CD and buy through Amazon.

-Stan

That sentence doesn’t make sense. DRM kills convenience.

however in this case, it seems like the purpose of the branding is more of a “we know who you are” threat.

for my use model, which is all about convenience, i don’t mind DRM.

-Stan

It is DRM-free. Try playing the mpeg4 on any device. It just works.

We had a lot of people asking for a download but we couldn’t find any “long tail” store that didn’t use Windows media DRM, until we came across Streamburst.

It might not be the definitive model but it’s light years ahead of Windows DRM.

The “watermarking” is secondary to us.

Of course, as everyone has pointed out already, this is stupendously easy to defeat… so, what is the point of this? Either release your material DRM free and rely on the Doctorow effect, or lock up it in iTunes and hope that mainstream availability will drive sales. I can’t imagine that niche distribution through an unproven model will turn out any better than either of those too options.

I would rent it from NetFlix though…and if they were smart, they could sell it on Tamago, and keep most of the money.

We looked at Amazon UnBox and Britghcove for example, and they both use horrible Windows DRM.

- Steve (Director)