Baristas Coffee Company, Inc. (BCCI)

[pmunch]

You mean this one? about DRM stripping? Unsecure

http://gear.ign.com/articles/731/731958p1.html


"The inherent difficulty in these negations is that the parties involved are each approaching the issue with highly disparate aims. The studios are desperate to protect their content via strong DRMs (digital rights management) and avoid becoming controlled by the content distributors due to the heavy influence Apple now wields over the music studios and its ability to enforce a flat pricing structure. Apple aims to leverage movie distribution to keep iTMS as the dominant source of media downloads and launch the highly anticipated 'real' video iPod. Amazon wants to get a piece of the new market before Apple can lock it up, and Wal-Mart is throwing its heavy retail influence into the mix to demand high-prices for movie downloads to protect their dominant share of the $17 billion a year domestic DVD market.

Though Apple was generally expected to be the first out of the gates with a high-profile service launch on September 12th, Amazon beat it to the punch yesterday (Sept. 8) with a surprise launch of its own movie download service, Unbox. We've put the service though its paces and discovered that, while it is able to efficiently offer users the ability to easily download movies to their PCs, the experience is much more the product of the complex compromises between the studios and distributors rather than a breakthrough in home entertainment. Even more shocking, the downloaded movies are subject to DRM security flaws that will have the movie studios jumping mad just as soon as they find out."
"

Or this one? Amazon beats Apple to the punch

http://www.fox28.com/News/index.php?ID=4038
'
Or this one? at Forbes.com "HOLLYWOOD HEADS ONLINE"

http://www.forbes.com/home/digitalentertainment/2006/09/07/movie-itunes-download_cx_df_lh0908movies....


Hollywood finally lifted the curtain on the Internet Age Thursday afternoon, when online retail giant Amazon.com opened a store that sells digital movies consumers can download onto their computers. And on Tuesday, Apple Computer is expected to follow suit with its own online movie store.

But while movie studios and online vendors hope the offerings signal the beginning of a new revenue source, there are hosts of questions that need to be answered before the digital download movie market becomes truly mainstream. Hollywood and its partners are still trying to figure out how to price the films, how to deliver them and how much freedom consumers should have to play the films once they buy them.

Hollywood has already offered consumers the ability to download movies over the Internet, via vendors like Movielink, a joint venture of major Hollywood studios; CinemaNow, which counts EchoStar Communications (nasdaq: DISH - news - people ) and Lionsgate Entertainment (nyse: LGF - news - people ) among its investors; Vongo, part of Liberty Media (nasdaq: LCAPA - news - people ) subsidiary Starz Entertainment Group; Time Warner's (nyse: TWX - news - people ) AOL; and Guba, a privately held service.

Those offerings have yet to find many takers. Now, Hollywood expects that Amazon (nasdaq: AMZN - news - people ) and Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) will give the market a high-profile push, and studio executives expect major cable carriers, including Comcast (nasdaq: CMCSA - news - people ) and AT&T (nyse: T - news - people ), to enter the fray soon.

That's heady company for Hollywood, which has been notoriously gun-shy in the past about adapting to new technologies.

"While last year has been a series of small kinds of opportunities, what you're really seeing now is some of the biggest players in the technology space and the overall broadband space getting into digital distribution," said Tom Lesinski, president of digital entertainment at Viacom's (nyse: VIA - news - people ) Paramount Pictures. "Everyone's gearing up for the fourth quarter and the first six months of '07.''

No one expects the digital download market to make a dent anytime soon in what Adams Media Research estimates is a $24.9 billion home video market. But getting in early is important, says Lesinski. "Whoever creates the early consumer relationship is likely to have a big advantage," he says. "You're not going to be jumping around a lot as you build your digital library.''

But for the digital movie market to take off, studios and vendors must make it easy for consumers to watch movies on their TVs. The easiest way to do that is to give consumers the ability to burn downloaded movies from their PCs to DVDs. Amazon's Unbox service doesn't let consumers do this, though they can connect their PC to their television--provided they have the right cables, equipment and know-how. "Please refer to the documentation for your computer hardware for more information about your machine's capability to interface with a television," the online store suggests.

Apple may have another trick up its sleeve: Its $129 Airport Express Wi-Fi router can already plug into your home stereo to wirelessly play iTunes songs on your living room speakers. The time could be ripe for an Airport Express for video, says Josh Martin, an independent media analyst. "If Apple can come up with anything, that's another market they can probably capture," he says. "They become the company that's streaming video around the home then."

CinemaNow is currently the only authorized online vendor that lets consumers burn downloads of major Hollywood films, although of the company's catalog of more than 4,000 films, only about 150 to 160 are burnable, according to Chief Executive Curt Marvis. But Marvis says CinemaNow users are four to five times more likely to choose a burnable movie over a PC-only movie, given the choice.

"Ultimately, everyone wants to get this content on the television,'' he said. "We think the PC still has relevance as a place where you can store your movies. But as a viewing device, obviously, the living room is the choice for movies."

CinemaNow's relatively small roster of burnable movies--all of them older titles--is a reflection of the studios' lingering concerns about DVD piracy. CinemaNow's burnable movies are encoded to allow only one burned copy per download. Consumers can expect to see more titles available as burnable downloads as Hollywood gets more comfortable with newly developed copy-protection technologies.

"Burnability is one way of getting the product to the television, and that's where consumers want to watch movies that they buy,'' said Sean Carey, executive vice president of digital distribution and product acquisition for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Another early challenge will be finding the right price for downloads. Apple has wanted to sell movies for $9.99, but brick-and-mortar retailers, particularly Wal-Mart Stores (nyse: WMT - news - people ), have worried that the online sales would undercut their offerings. Apple has decided to charge more for new releases, but to date, only Lionsgate and the Walt Disney Co., (nyse: DIS - news - people ), where Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs is the single largest shareholder, have signed on to sell their movies with Apple.

Amazon says it is selling most of its movies for between $8 and $15. It has signed on News Corp.'s (nyse: NWS - news - people ) 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Sony (nyse: SNE - news - people ), Universal Pictures, Warner Bros. Entertainment, Lionsgate and MGM Studios.

Compared to the pricing game, getting the movies to the living room will be less of a hurdle for Hollywood and its partners. CinemaNow, whose movies are about 1,400 megabytes in size, says they take about half an hour to download with a standard home broadband connection. Amazon says a two-hour movie will take from two to seven hours to download for broadband users. (Dial-up users are better off walking to the video store.) But because the files download in a linear, progressive order, users can feasibly start watching much sooner while the transfer is occurring.

Thanks to diving bandwidth and storage-media pricing, it won't cost Amazon or Apple a bundle to send the movies to buyers. Paul Palumbo, an analyst with Internet media research firm Accustream, says it costs about 30 cents per gigabyte to transfer a file through content delivery networks like Akamai (nasdaq: AKAM - news - people ), which Apple already uses to move music and short videos from its iTunes store. Amazon lists two-hour movies as 2.4 gigabyte files, which would cost 75 cents to transfer if it uses a host like Akamai; smaller files would cost less.

For a fledgling service with a few hundred titles, that's petty change. But suppose one of the movie download services were to grow as popular as video rental company Netflix (nasdaq: NFLX - news - people ), which has 5.2 million customers, stocks more than 65,000 titles and ships an average of 1.4 million DVDs a day. Apply those usage rates to an average 2-gigabyte Amazon or Apple movie download, and the bandwidth bill could reach $840,000 per day, or $25.2 million per month.

Or this one, from the Seattle Times?


http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/movies/2003248711_amazon08.html

With a typical DSL/cable home Internet connection, it takes 55 minutes to download a hourlong TV episode and one hour and 50 minutes to download a two-hour movie, although Amazon has a feature that allows customers to watch a video during the process.

The Amazon Unbox video player works solely on Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows XP — not on Macs or older versions of Windows. The system is not compatible with the iPod, the center of a technological ecosystem that Apple strictly controls.

Without a burn-to-DVD feature, videos can be viewed on televisions only by plugging a computer to the TV with an S-video cable — unless a computer carries Windows XP Media Center, which is designed for a television-viewing experience.

For rentals, customers must watch the video within 30 days of purchase and within 24 hours after hitting the play button.

Amazon customer Mike Perry said the rental service is inconvenient for those who start watching a rental film at 7 p.m., get interrupted and have to finish watching by 7 the next evening. "Why not a more reasonable 72-hour period?" he asked. "That's not a lot to ask."

Roy Price, Amazon's digital-video product manager, said Amazon's service carries new features that rival other services, such as DVD-picture quality on both computers and portable devices, and a feature that allows remote downloads of a video to another computer.

Amazon Unbox also includes a personal library to store and access videos online. "It's a great combination," Price said.

Amazon faces a fierce rival in Apple. The Cupertino, Calif., computer maker entered the video-downloads business last October when it added music videos and episodes from five television shows, including ABC's "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives," to its store.

One million videos



Apple Computer — which has dominated downloadable music and video sales — is widely expected to unveil a rival service Tuesday, in tandem with an updated iPod music and video player that features a wider viewing screen.

In a surprise, Amazon's service doesn't allow customers to burn videos onto DVDs — one of the viewing restrictions that hinders movie-download services such as Movielink.com and CinemaNow.

The major Hollywood film studios have faced increasing pressure to sell movies online, as box-office receipts steadily decline and peer-to-peer networks offer illegal movie downloads free.

Technology analysts had speculated that Hollywood would loosen licensing restrictions on Amazon — giving customers the ability to unshackle content from desktop computers — because of the Seattle company's brand power and ability to reach a mass consumer market.

"[Hollywood] owns the tickets to the movies and you're only allowed to use whatever [rights] they open to you," Rob Enderle, principal analyst with the Enderle Group, said of the studios' restrictions. "That's been a painful aspect of every one of the download services. There's nothing Amazon can do about that."

The movie-download business is a natural fit for Amazon, which still draws a third of its business from media sales. The company also operates the Internet's top-ranked movie site, IMDb.com, which attracted 18.7 million unique visitors in July, according to comScore Networks.

Amazon said Thursday it would charge $1.99 per TV show, and $7.99 to $14.99 for most movies. Movie rentals will run $3.99.