It's not about control, it's about revenue.

And when the surfer pays a monthly membership fee they get to view the content for a month - isn't that the idea? Where does it say that they should be able to keep the content and watch it indefinitely? They can, of course, if they remain members of the paysite. That's the beauty of it.

It is ALL about revenue.

DRM gives you the ability to increase revenue through new ways of marketing your content, and decrease cost as it ELIMIATES

Password Trading, Content Theft, and reduces your bandwidth.

NAz

Unless your content is protected, one customer, perhaps even signing up for a free trial to your site, can download your movies and distribute them to thousands of other people on the internet, diluting the value of those movies

It is a necessary change that was a result of the availability and mass distribution of software such napster, aimster, morpheus, kazaa, not to mention others.

Do you want them to go to your site to buy a membership/license to view the movies, or download them off of kazaa?

Yes, go before a judge on the record and say it was in the terms, right underneath the "Join now to see this jizz coated fuck slut reamed in the ass until she cries" link. It will make for some compelling legal drama.

Same thing basically, a blackmail of sorts.
You better renew, otherwise you loose what you downloaded. Whats on your harddrive.

I agree with it in principle, especially for chargebackers and trials.

But for me, I know it'll totally wipe out conversions. The customers will decide it's much better to pay for something where you get a product you can keep.

Where it says they should be able to view the content forever? Copyright law and Fair Use more or less says that.

It doesnt give them any RIGHT to do so though. So DRM is perfectly ok in theory, but really, what does the customer gain?
Those who think the surfer will signup again when he notices he can't view his movies are naive I think. He'll just never signup to a paysite again.

Why would he not go with your no DRM competitor? The only ones who will benefit from this is CCBill and Microsoft I think.

It's the surfers money in the beginning after all. Unfortunately the having a "Good Product" part has been completely missed by lots of paysites...

Exactly. Plus, everybody is complaining about low retention. The thing is, even if you have quality content that the surfer likes, why should they recur when they buy a trial, download all the videos for later viewing, cancel the membership and move on to the next paysite where the process is repeated.

You know full well they will still be able to do that. Deceptive marketing at its best. Or perhaps it's the part Microsoft did not talk about?

Anything a user can view on his screen can be copied perfectly, atleast until Palladium arrives.

I keep hearing that webmasters are worried about surfers not adopting to this platform. The fact is that surfers are adopting to this quite readily. We have some of the biggest names in the industry working with our soltuion, and have more in the pipeline.

The response they are getting from their surfers is amazing, because surfers are no longer being foreced to buy a month long membership.

If you think about it, if I buy a subscription to the GYM do I get to keep the equiment? If I rent 5 movies at BlockBuster, do I get to keep the tape. The fact of the matter is this model has already proven itself. Think of it as creating your own online block buster, where you can sell to people who are not even monthly members!!!!!

NAz

How many former paying customers are going to be generating positive publicity for you when this happens?

VOD Rippers are allready quite popular.

http://www.afterdawn.com/software/vi...eambox_vcr.cfm

50

Gruffy,

It is already happening! If you control the user experience and let them know that they only get the content for so long, and you drop the price, customers adapt readily.

Infact our system tracks users who resubscribe by tracking email, etc. And the majority of purchases come from people who have already bought content.

Again, Blockbuster takes your video back after 5 days. Does that stop you from renting videos at block buster.

DRM certainly sounds to be the wave of the future!

But will it stop hotlinking of movies? That is to say, can you make one of the conditions for viewing to be based the referring URL? If not, the largest problem with MediaPlayer still hasn't been addressed.

fiveyes

We are in the process of developing that technology as you post this. I don't want to get into details, but yes, it is possible.

naz

Well yes, if you are talking about selling movies VOD conversions kickass. Gamelink's conversions on that gives me a big woody every month.

If you are talking about applying this to paysites then again, its dicey.

Thorin,

Good point. In fact they've already done studies on this and the answer is actually yes and no. It was done with music and they issued a small quantity of DRM'ed music for $5 per CD against a Non-DRM CD for $16 that was not restricted. The restricted content outsold the unrestricted by 20 to 1. As far as what the end user expects, the ability to host extremely large volumes of content on a site without the fear of a user sucking down large amounts of bandwidth, give the end user much greater access to content while the webmaster has the freedom to offer that content while staying cost effective. Where the success is most prevalent with DRM users in the development of NEW business models.

Randall

Great idea IF every paysite use it... dream on.

With all due respect, I think that it is hardly deceptive marketing; no more so than a car alarm company stating that their product deters or prevents car theft, or a host of a thousand other examples.

I suppose that a customer can set up a video camera in front of a computer screen to copy a movie, but that would be a lot of work and result in degradation of quality, or a series of ?print screens? to save images, or get hardware that will allow you to save a movie to a VCR, again with loss of quality.

Creating software that attempts to circumvent MS DRM is a violation of the DMCA ?if somebody is able to create it, they risk a large fine and prison time

As far as rippers go, again, there is the loss of quality issue. Rippers will not normally be able to capture all of the frames in a video stream

This is a system that that allows conventional protection for content versus being able to download and instantly distribute it. Think of it as a locked house with a burglar alarm on a street of houses with the front door wide open.

Is this limited to any special video formats? Or available with AVI, MPEG, WMV whatever?

Don't be fucking naive please... you know thousands of DRM cracks will appear as soon as the system gets a bit of popularity.

Right, you will be able to get some sales from republican losers who will pay for it but the overwhelming mayority will crack the system.

There's no such thing as "unbreakable software"... ask your partner Bill Gates about it.

There are too many surfers on this board ;)

We provide a DRM solution for MPEG-1, 2 and AVI (including DivX and MPEG-4). The other guys here provide a solution for WMV.

This version of the Windows Media DRM has not been cracked yet. An older version of the software was cracked with a program called freeme.exe. However that has been patched.

The simple fact of the matter is that everything can be "cracked" however MS has 30 programmers sitting in redmond waiting for that to happen.

It is called a self healing technology as once it is cracked, it calls out, and alerts MS. Once MS hears of the hack, the software is upgraded, and the hack is stoped the very next instance you hit play on your windows media player.

So its not really a matter of whether or not it can be hacked, it is how fast can you fix it.

Naz

lets keep this thread going... I want 100 posts, and I don't know much else

Has anyone tried this?

I remember talking to RonC about this 2 years ago over dinner.
Nice to see you guys pull this baby off!:thumbsup

Does it require that you run MS server software yourself? Or does the client merely contact the DRM server for the license?

It contacts the windows media license server that is hosted by the DRM provider. You do not have to have any windows media boxes on your side.

Well you need a way to allow windows media files to download, or stream but you don't really need a windows media server for that.

If you don't like the idea of limiting your paysite member's ability to view your content after their membership expires, you don't have to.

People who would prefer to try and protect their content, can.

If people want to market their sites as "non-drm downloadable movies" they can go ahead and do that if they want.

Good stuff.

12Clicks


Yes it is going great. Here is a few of the small companies that we handle the DRM for.

Hewlett Packard
Honeywell
DHL Worldwide Express
Cisco
Price Waterhouse

Just to name a few:)))

Ron C
CCBill.com/DRMnetworks.net

Yeah but Ron, you know that no REAL business is going to go along with your scheme.
:winkwink:

You mean all those real big businesses use streaming media and haven't paid to suck on the Acacia tit yet? Amazing :Graucho

Sure except that once you have ripped down the DRM'd stream you still won't be able to open it.

Gee, if MS could make you have to reformat your computer for fucking with a DRM'd product then it would probably not hurt their market share much, but it would sure help a lot of industries.

Think about it.

12Clicks What SCAM are you referring too? Thats a bit cryptic.

... You know what I haven't seen asked yet...

What happens if your running *nix as your O/S

There is no Linux or Unix Support for MS DRM. No way to guarantee the safety of the blackbox.

The webmaster part of me thinks:

When you buy a paysite membership now, you get access to possibly years worth of updates plus 4 weeks of future updates. This is a damn good deal the first month. It's the equivalent of buying this month's issue of Playboy, and them also throwing in the last 24 months issues.

The surfer part of me thinks:

I've always been able to save stuff, and put it into my porn collection. $30 a month to look at porn is quite a bit as it is since there's so much free stuff out there already. So taking my ability to save things away makes that $30 seem even more outrageous. Lower the average paysite price to $10/mo, and I'd go for it.


Here are some other things...

What if I buy the membership on the crappy computer in my living room (and the license is issued to that computer), but then want to watch the videos on the good computer in another room?

What if I save a video to my computer, and go to watch it later. But I'm not connected to the internet. Does this mean the DRM can't be verified? If not, suppose someone else in the house is using the phone line and I can't log on.

Suppose I'm going on a trip for a week, and want to stick some of these videos on a laptop. I can't watch them, can I?



I'd also like to add that if keeping surfers from saving content was such a big issue, then how come paysites have never implemented certain scripts to prevent this? You can't keep a computer educated surfer from saving, but you can certainly keep the average surfer from doing so with some very simple scripts.

I'm not sure which turnip truck you just fell off of but you should first learn how to read and second understand tongue in cheek. if not, refrain from posting.

12Clicks................riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii iiggggggggggggght.

Was just asking.

Have never actually seen a Turnip truck though.