Blockbuster Soon To Rent Movies on SD Cards
Eric Calouro | Nov 10, 2009 | Comments 1
At first it may sound silly, and then it might sound like a novel idea, but movie rentals on something the size of a stamp? It’s the future, and Blockbuster’s making it happen. The Dallas-based movie/video game rental chain is running a pilot program which will essentially allow consumers to “load” their desired movie onto an SD card via a kiosk developed by NCR corporation in partnership with MOD Systems.
The way this works is quite interesting. The user always keeps the SD card, and approaches the kiosk whenever they would like to load a new movie. Users must pay with a credit card, and from there — it’s movie magic.
For pirates, this isn’t for you, I’m afraid. The content will obviously be DRM protected, with an expiration date set so you can no longer watch the film loaded on the card.
This does raise some questions, however. How practical is it to carry around or have anything that reads SD cards? Yes, most new computers have SD readers, but not all people are using new computers. Many TVs also don’t have SD card readers. Cell phone? Micro-SD, maybe, but not a full SD card.
It’s a valiant effort, but whether or not this takes off is something time will tell.
Filed Under: Entertainment
If its DRM’ed then they will need a special reader and a confirmation (decryption) code unique to them. This can be stored on the card, but this will require all of this to be played on a computer. Despite many TVs having SD slots of viewing of pictures and sometimes playing of mpeg movies, this will not work. Its doubtful most set-top media players will work with this as well.
Basically, they’re inconveniencing the user to go walk to a kiosk to download something instead of just using the internet. Why the extra step Blockbuster? Sure, someone may want to load up a few movies before a flight because they can’t stream – by why not a “download for later” mechanism. This wreaks of an old term “sneaker-net” which is where people would load files onto removable media and transfer it that way as it was faster than sending it via modem.
While back in the days of 56k modems that may have been efficient, this just seems needlessly complex.
Just my opinion. I don’t wish any bad ilk to blockbuster, I just can’t see this working.