Paramount and Kingston team up for movies on flash memory
By Donald Melanson 
posted November 2nd 2009 6:43PM
posted November 2nd 2009 6:43PM
Movies delivered on memory cards isn't an entirely new development (Sony did it back in the early days of the PSP), but it looks like Paramount and Kingston think the idea is prime for a comeback, and have today announced a partnership that'll see some of the studio's movies delivered on SD cards and USB drives. That gets started with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen on a (presumably reusable) 4GB Kingston DataTraveler I USB drive that's available right now for $29.99, and will apparently continue with additional movies offered across Kingston's full line of memory cards and USB drives, although both parties are staying mum on any further specifics. There's also no word from any other studios or memory companies just yet, but we can only presume this means slotMovies are right around the corner.
i like your idea.
one downside of having a digital copy of a movie is, you don't get all the special features that comes with a DVD/BD. such as behind the scenes, commentaries and maybe alternate endings. of course, we can get those on another digital file, if possible - but i haven't been able to find/download any extra features of any movies yet.
I've been promoting this for nearly ten years, mostly for music and video stores. Makes sense for the tens of millions of US citizens with no broadband or who simply prefer a physical buying experience (still a very large minority from what I've seen). Media kiosks in music and video stores would be linked to on-site servers containing every new release and most of the older stuff. When a new title was added to company's selection it would only need to be downloaded once to each store's server. Older titles would take much less space thanks to their lower resolutions and simpler sound, so every store could have the majority of content available. This makes a lot more sense than devoting precious shelf space to classics and twenty copies of this week's new release. You would browse the inventory via touchscreens, loading tunes/films right onto your media player by attaching it to a port on the kiosk. Naturally your hardware would have to support whatever DRM scheme the renter came up with, but hey, PlaysForSure and Rhapsody were widely adopted..why should this be any different? You know the industry would be all for it. (You'd even have a clerk on hand to assist with technical issues - something you can't say for iTunes and its ilk.) If you wanted to watch the film on a big screen you'd either need video-out capability on your device or the same DRM system on whatever HMPC you transfer the file to. Again, it would have to be either an industry standard or just a de facto one. The bottom line is that its a way to get your media without tying up a computer or internet connection and for retail stores to stay in the media game. Call me weird but I really don't want to see FYE or the Wal-Mart media section go the way of the horse and carriage. Even if they finally get broadband to the 25% of America that currently lacks service, some people aren't gong to jive with having to mess with a computer for their music and movies. Not only that, but the more we tie up the cable and DSL pipes with high-def video the more likely they are to start throttling bandwidth..and that raises the dark specter of "net neutrality". Until we get fiber to every home, I say the local neighborhood media hub makes a heck of a lot of sense for all concerned.
As for distribution via flash drive, that should be reserved for *collections* of albums or films, not individual titles. That makes far more sense than making me buy another drive to watch a single movie. Give me a huge time and space saver like an 8gb drive stuffed with every video, album and special feature from a particular band, for example - then we're talking. I wouldn't have to devote bandwidth or storage space to it - physical or digital - and it would be preserved in the safest form you could hope for. You could go a step further, allowing me to use the internet to update my flash archives with director's cuts or new music singles (as long as there was room, of course). iTunes and similar software would be ideal for this.
You've been promoting it for over 10 years? 10 years ago I was just discovering CD-R's
They're going to fast to try harder if they want to beat the pirates...which should be about as possible as surpassing the speed of light.
I agree the idea is stupid. For $30 I'm assuming the movies will be in HD but just think how compressed they'll be with only 4GB to work with.
The reason the USB drive is silly is because Dreamworks apparently sees it as its primary distribution model for digital media. They don't have their movies available right away in the iTunes Store!
Personally, unless I can both transfer a movie to my iPhone and watch it on my Apple TV, I'm not interested in it being in digital format.
Something tells me Kingston and Dreamworks are going for the double-whammy of pain-in-the-a** and using their own player software too. Not cool.
PIRACY?
If this was a single write 32GB SDHC with a perfect digital copy for $10 I'd never download a movie again. We can all dream right? heh.
Uh, every flash drive i've ever owned lasted like 2 weeks before the USB plug got loose/broke or the disk "magically" became unreadable.
So, that'd be a big "NO THANKS" from me on this one.
someone call PETSSD (People for the Ethical Treatment of Solid State Drives), we have an abuser here.
Can we please just not do this?
For $29.99, i can buy the DVD and the flash drive seperately, rip the dvd and then put it back on my flash drive if i wanted to.
My school bookstore has $20 8GB drives. I can compress an average length movie down to around 500MB with very good quality (AVC, though not HD), so 16 movies on a flash drive would certainly be good for the netbookers among us.
I think while the idea is cool but lack in the realization.
For example, a couple of years ago, i purchased a (used) harddisk with some movies inside it. The movies was just a free plus for the purchase.
This is nothing new. I just bought a 4GB stick with a copy of M.I.B. on it. The Stick was $9.99 And The movie was just a tiny incentive to get me to buy it vs. another brand that did not have as flashy a package.
I never watched the movie on the stick... yet. But its kinda cool I think. This WONT in anyway replace movie distribution. Not that I can foresee anyway. But its just the icing on the cake for something you buy.
On a side note. The day after MJ dies Frys Electronics had a bajillion MJ Flash sticks with about 50% of his music and videos on them for $30.
hey if they made the flash disk shaped like a character in the movie, it would be cool. optimus prime flash disk, kate beckinsale flash disk, ben affleck.... nvm ...
The distributers seem to miss that the whole great point of physical media is being able to browse and manipulate. How do you easily browse a collection of flash drives?
And a person would spend $30 on a crappy 4GB version of a movie instead of buying the Blu-Ray for $20...why?
Maybe this is a sly move to make Blu-Ray seem more appealing. As in "Look honey, the Blu-Ray is only $25, and the picture quality is better than on the flash drive!"
I stick with my Bluray movies thanks.
Now you can pay twice the price of the dvd, and $5 more than the blu-ray, to get a movie in worse quality than the DVD! It's brilliant!
I like the idea of putting movies on flash drives. I really don't like optical media. It's big, gets scratched, relys on drives with moving parts prone to breaking, can be worn out in heat or the sun, and generally slow as well. Some companies are selling software on USB drives as well, and I think it's brilliant. At least for the software the USB version is the same software at the same price, paying twice the price for a shitty DRM's quality version of a horrible movie isn't exactly a good buy.
Great, a $10 premium to watch the movie..... on my computer only. Heck, if I have to use the computer anyways, might as well just download illegally.
p.s. Paramount and Kingston: make this as cheap or cheaper than DVD or immediate failure.
Totally my idea!!
It’s all about distributing to more audience; it’s a good ideal for the studios, cheap way to target more people, make more money. Not everybody has bought into Blu-Ray, probably due to economy issues, lots of people totally fine with DVD’s, plus DVD’s are cheaper then ever. They figured more people have more computers then Blu-Ray drives or Blu-Ray players, for the people that can watch a movie at work, in the home, on a laptop on the plane, train or bus, school can just pop in USB key and start watching.
My girlfriend's grandfather has a company that is pushing this same crap. It's all DRM'd and more expensive than you'd want to pay for a movie. He was really impressed that his company could make their own stand-alone movie player on an SD card. He wasn't impressed when I showed him TCMP for my palm Centro doing the exact same thing, but for free.
OMG!.!. remember that in star trek tng holomovies were on those transparent chips.. more or less like our USB pens... OMG!! THE FUTURE IS HERE!!!
About time. I hope this will replace Blu-ray and DVDs.
There would never be a format war again if everything was USB.or flash memory based. Netflix could send out their movies on 32gb SD cards.
what about when USB 3.0 becomes the standard...? ;)
A few thoughts to add to my previous post about retail media hubs:
* Retail media hub concept could free up employees to pay more attention to customers that need personal attention, like ATMs do at banks.
* Opens the door to new partnerships. If Blockbuster has on-site digital distribution, why shouldn't they sell Ziis, Zunes, even media-enabled phones? Blockbuster in particular has been open to these sorts of deals - the media hub idea could be the glue that binds it together. It would be much easier to have "Blockbuster at Circuit City" for example, if all the movies were on hard drives, ready for people to pull down to their players. It would also help if Circuit City still existed, except as a Tiger Direct brand, but you get the idea.
* More on flash drives: they could still be used to ferry rented & purchased media back home. Media stores could even sell their own branded units, but they'd have to resist the temptation to make them proprietary..we know how that always turns out. Even if a customer had filled his Wal-Mart flash drive with stuff from a competitor, that branded drive would be free advertising. Flash might actually become the preferred way to obtain purchased movies: its more pocketable than an Archos, that's for sure.
* Retail media hub still allows retailers massive savings on inventory, with a relatively small expense for the kiosk system. They would make back the investment within months at most locations, probably weeks at higher traffic stores. Imagine if you only had to stock TWO copies of GI Joe II: Serpentor Boogaloo instead of twenty. I know DVDs are relatively cheap in quantity but time spent dealing with physical inventory is a big expense (lost and stolen discs, damaged and unpopular titles, etc).
* It would give self-conscious people like me a reason to be seen with a media player in public. I know I'm not alone!
Sounds genius to me. As long as it could print worthy artwork to go along with that purchase I think you've got a winner... have you taken this idea to anyone? More importantly, have you any sort of legal claim to it before you posted it online? :-)
Question. What will hb more success this$30 or iPhone iTunes movie fir $12,,?????
Anyone. Anyone??
kind of cool... not everyone has something that has a usb drive that is hooked up to their TV tho, which might make it hard to catch on with a lot of people...
Walk into your local officemax and you can pick one of these over priced POSes up today.
I wasn't aware this was tech news or I would have tipped you guys.
Slight problem with this is that flash cells lose their data after about 10 years if they don't get some power before that time.. the charges in the cells start to degrade.
Flash memory is pretty crummy as archival media, which is what movies on physical media are, to some extent.
Not the brightest of ideas unless it's coupled with a password you can add to your online movie download account that remembers what you've bought and lets you download as many copies of a "1080p, DRM-free" version of it as you like, thereby keeping access to your movie safe and secured.
Yeah, I'm talking about that movie download service that doesn't actually exist yet, but bloody well should do.
I'd buy this.
Some of you seem to forget about the existence of devices without optical drives. This is a decent alternative for netbooks and other small form factors that have slimmed down by dropping optical drives all together.
Also, less moving parts are advantageous for certain situations where there's a lot of motion/vibration: say you go to the gym and want to plug this in to watch a movie while you jog for an hour or so (and that will likely never happen with a semi-public screen and the possibility of pornos and whatever taboo material being shown on said screen...) that movie would skip like crazy judging by how much it moves under 150lbs of me running on it.
Sure, it's a "decent alternative for netbooks and other small form factors that have slimmed down by dropping optical drives all together," but an even better alternative is ripping your DVD to your netbook with the usb drive you have at home.
With all the nightmares about copy-protect dongles back in the 90s, I think I'll pass on this one. It's not that they are difficult to use, but because when you have a lot of them around, it gets much harder to find the specific one you need, and they are not quite fit in your shelf, and books like optical discs do.
Two things: 1 - The quality will be fine and what do you really expect from dvd quality anyways? 2 - You can't get that package open. Ever seen Curb? Just put some perforations or something so we can tear it open.
Who remembers MiniDisc albums?
Anyone?