So I found HDMT this morning and I have to be honest with you, I’ve been watching stuff on that site all day.
There’s absolutely no doubt about what HDMT is: it is a bunch of movies and TV shows put online for streaming, and there’s no reason to believe that the site is operated with the blessing of the copyright holders of all these works. That much is clear to anyone. (It is also practically a poor copy of YouTube graphically.) But it is also the first real celestial jukebox for movies and TV shows.
The idea of the celestial jukebox has been around for ages: instant access to any piece of music ever created, no matter where you are. We’re gotten a fair bit along the way with iTunes and other non-DRM music stores like Amazon’s, but it’s still not quite there. There’s been precious little effort to move in this direction with video, however, maybe because it’s consumed differently. (I’ve listened to my favorite songs more than hundreds of times; how many times have you seen your favorite movies or TV show episodes? Even if you account for the changes in duration, the difference is disproportional.)
Even most of the people that download everything they can get their hands on, have the bandwidth to make that viable and reside in a locale where they are not in permanent danger of being arrested haven’t seen anything like this before. Other players, like Hulu, may have delivered something close to this with ads, which is okay, but only to some parts of the world, which is not as okay. But by and large, this is something entirely new, and it took several years of the broad availability of the technical requirements for this to happen, and it had to happen by a bunch of people organizing this on their own, putting it online and probably waiting to get sued or land in legal hot water (justifiably, I might add).
It is ridiculous that the free market hasn’t been able to deliver this to us yet. With just two fact changes, this is one of the best new products of the Internet era: “HDMT is a web site where people can view TV shows and movies without the consent of the copyright holders in high quality, streaming over the Internet, for freea monthly fee.” That’s it. This isn’t rocket science.
Navigating the sea of licensing and agreements that you people invented to squeeze every market out of more money may be what you’d call a pain in the ass, yeah. Tough luck. Stop your yammering and get back to producing a way of distribution that makes us all happy, and you’d cut the propensity for checking The Pirate Bay in the general population by at least 98%.
You’ve been shown a way of distribution that makes customers happy and that will eliminate most of the “piracy” you spend more money limiting than you supposedly lose from enduring. I won’t wrong you for shutting down the site, but I will say that it’s going to take a special kind of moronic resistance to change to completely ignore learning any lessons. The same thing you people showed with regards to radio stations, gramophone records, video recorders, mix tapes, walkmen, Napster, Kazaa, Direct Connect and Bittorrent, yeah, maybe, but a special kind nonetheless.
Or, to put it shorter and in a way that is more likely to make the penny drop for the average media executive: the one thought that stuck with me for the whole afternoon was “this is great; it’s a shame that it’ll be shut down shortly, because I’d pay a small fortune every month just for this kind of thing to stick around”.
ninjavideo.net has been around for awhile.
By Phil Nelson · 2009.11.15 00:26
“Click here to launch the NinjaVideo Helper Beta 0.3.10
You must click yes on the security dialog
The NinjaVideo Helper Beta 0.3.10 is required to view videos on NinjaVideo.net”
I’m thinking ‘no’.
By Jesper · 2009.11.15 00:36
Living in the UK, we have the iPlayer for BBC content, which is pretty much the main way I watch TV these days. Which is, of course, paid for by our TV licence, which is a v.different way of funding production – and far too ‘socialist’ a solution for the US.
The one thing that does make me think, though, is how much a universal (i.e. global) system means just that – it requires a universal agreement on how production should be funded.
The obvious one is simply income from subscription / program audience. While on one level that reduces program making to a popularity contest, I think it would encourage a flourishing of independent production, in the way that advertising revenue (a la YouTube) doesn’t.
(For Americans who think that surely program making is already a popularity contest for ratings, the BBC have to balance ratings against producing non-commercial content – ‘to educate and inform’ – i.e. their existence is based on producing TV and radio programs that the commercial networks provably don’t).
By JulesLt · 2009.11.15 10:40
SVT, the Swedish public service television company, has for a few years been making available large chunks of its back catalogue for free in several formats, and with public service radio shows it’s more of a rule than an exception, even before podcasts came. They are both restricted by copyright laws with regards to some musical content and most TV shows produced by other firms.
A simple example of what I want is two tiers: $20 monthly for 15 hours, $80 monthly for unlimited viewing. A small amount (not above 2%) goes towards simply keeping the system itself alive, the rest is distributed proportionally across the items you viewed, including some sort of dampening on repeat screenings.
The reason I’d take this instead of “renting” is because there would be an expectation for them to continually provide the best encoding quality video that is available, breaking the pattern of selling the same damn film or song in new format after new format.
Being a “popularity” contest isn’t necessarily bad in this case. A second leg on the whole idea is the concept of opting into showing up as a cross-referenced data point in anonymized statistics. They can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that there’s a lot of people who like both X and Y, or that still like Z, and make it easier to continue production of such a series.
The state of the art among the larger established companies today for anything in this direction remains “webisodes”, which is code for “wringing out the franchise one more time, for a negligible amount of spent money, effort and attention”. That’s a disgrace.
By Jesper · 2009.11.15 15:30
This is the kind of service we have all been waiting on, and for the first time it is available to the whole world and not restricted to the US. Unfortunately it will be shut down within days because of legal problems I guess. My hope is that they have based the servers in some obscure country where the “suits” can’t get to them :) Good thing for us is that streaming something is never illegal, downloading is. Sucks to be the owners though when they get caught ;)
By Arvid · 2009.11.15 16:23
Unfortunately, it’s likely to take an Apple-size player to reshape the industry (and I still think Americans have too much of an appetite for the free-to-air ad-model, although I may be wrong – plenty of people pay for cable).
I think it would work well for popular programming (there should be more income from being the most popular program on a fixed revenue than may be possible under pay per view).
I suspect we’ll still need a ‘pay for content’ model to meet the gap for things that are relatively expensive to produce, but not especially popular.
By JulesLt · 2009.11.15 16:57
Looks like it didn’t take long, HDMT is down, we were apparently using the site before in its “trial run period”.
I’d happily pay a monthly fee letting me watch new episodes of 30 Rock, Family Guy, True Blood… the same time as our US friends, and not a year later in the UK on obscure digital channels.
By Adam Wilcox · 2009.11.20 17:40
Ninjavideo is the shit! HDMT is a paid service which doesn’t even compare to the selection at Ninja. And for anyone who is skeptical of the beta app you have to open in order to watch videos, it’s only there so no one can link to their web page and leech off their servers. THIS SHIT IS NINJA!!
By LRS · 2009.12.12 23:44