Intel and Morgan Freeman teaming up on online movie download service
posted July 7th 2005 3:14AM
Intel and, uh, Morgan Freeman (yes, that Morgan Freeman) are teaming up on a new online movie download service called ClickStar that will almost certainly offer downloads of movies starring people other than Morgan Freeman. At least that's what we're guessing, they're actually little cagey about what exactly they have cooking. They did admit in their announcement yesterday that they have yet to sign up a single major movie studio for the service (talks with the studios are "ongoing"), a competely minor detail which might make it a tad difficult for them to achieve their goal of distributing" premium movies to consumers over the Internet before the films become available on DVD." Of course, it wasn't all hazy promises yesterday: Morgan Freeman did throw down against the darknet, promising Hollywood that ClickStar would absolutely, definitely "get ahead of this piracy thing."
Doesn't Morgan Freeman own a movie production company? IIRC, he's teamed up with Intel before, to show off the CGI work for Rendezvous With Rama. (Speaking of which, that thing has been in pre-production for...what, 27 years now?)
With so many studios already signed on with MovieLink, I can't see how this new enterprise is going to get much studio support. I use MovieLink a lot and only wish they could get more content themselves.
I know I shouldn't make an arse out of myself, but dangit, I can't resist. Am I the only one who thinks Morgan Freeman's left arm looks amputated?
On the subject matter though, distributing gigs of data per user will also be a challenge.
Pfft, if it wasn't for that "piracy thing"... bittorrent.
That picture is SO ripe for a caption contest. Between the nice clev shot and Morgan Freeman, someone has got to have some good ones.
"They ended the first session of the Electric Company Survivors Group with a hug and group photo"
"Somehow Raj and Suzy convinced Morgan that they were really M Night Shamylan and Britney Spears"
What Morgan doesn't realize is that piracy does not effect him, as no one in their right mind would want to download one of his movies.
Thinking about this deal, old Robert X. Cringely's theory that Intel is buying Apple doesn't look as crazy as it did the day he wrote it.
Downloading movies before they hit DVD? Make sure they're in HD and not a single pixel less and that they have full DTS or DD surround and you may have a good idea (if entirely unoriginal). Primary problems: Bandwidth is not cheap enough yet. Popularity will destroy. Any attempt at a peer-to-peer networking solution similar to torrenting will be exploited (clients serving up random data chunks that pass hash checks but corrupt everything on the network within moments). Oh, and a lot of end-user ISPs are starting to put in bit caps because they're bastards. Who is going to tell Shaw, Yahoo, and all those other ISPs that their 40GB per month download limit just isn't going to work?
Morgan Freeman is in that picture? I'll have to look to the right side of the picture this time.
Mmmm...boobs.
Breasts > Morgan Freeman > That Guy in the Middle
Re: #4
Morgan held Phillip tightly, having just whispered to him, "Natalie is next to die."
Oh wait a minute... isn't that the actress from the Clooney verison of Solaris?
Movielink already has a foothold and are starting to get cheaper. What we need is a non-drm model that I can "buy" a movie for less than 2 bucks.
"Electronic media storage is transient and can't be expected to last! Thats why all movies should be printed on paper in flip chart style."
I would actually like a good download service for movies, because although there are many other ways to get movies for free, u know, borrowing a dvd from a friend, lol. I would like a faster service, because once in a while it takes so long to get a movie from the other sources that I hate to have to delete it to free up space on my harddrive, even if I am not going to watch it for a while. With this service if done right, I would be able to download the movie pretty quick, and delete it after I watch it, and if I ever want it again, just download it again, hopefully for free, but maybe for a reduced price covering the cost of the bandwidth used. I'll go check movie link out, how are the speeds on that?
Topmounter said: "Oh wait a minute... isn't that the actress from the Clooney verison of Solaris?"
Nope... she is a Producer and a business partner of Morgan Freeman. They have worked together on several projects.
http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0566975/