Brilliant. Makes me want to become a customer to support their sheer chutzpah. I guess they must have done at least some legal homework. Not that it matters much when you're baiting the attack dogs of the content industries, whose primary fear seems not to be loss of revenue but loss of control.
And just like that, the technological world takes a step backwards. It's akin to when Concorde was decommissioned; the standard way to sell streamed movies may become to have a physical copy, with all the limitations that causes. This time it's due to legal restrictions.<p>Whilst this change will hopefully benefit customers and help lower prices, anyone can see that this is not the optimal solution.
I'm curious to see wich kind of legal weapon the movie companies are going to use to fight this one.<p>I expect something like forbid playing rental dvds on players more than 10 feet away from the TV... This is going to be sick.
I guess, it's actually like renting a digital copy (since most of the time it will be served through cache, right?), just you aren't able to serve more copies at the same time than you legally possess.<p>That's smart.
Wow, that's not a very scalable business. You need one physical DVD player for every concurrent customer, inventory of all of the DVDs sufficient to handle peak demand, and a small staff of bored employees keeping the right DVDs in the drives.<p>In other words, you still have all of the worst features of owning a DVD rental store.
Most movies have a sticker on them saying not for rental (rental ones have a sticker saying not for resale).<p>They could also claim this was a public performance.
It would be nice if they could stream a digital version (non-optical copy), but still buy the physical copies and keep track of how many were in use at one time as to not "use" more than they own.