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Now that a lot of people are finally listening to the advertising from stores and buying big TVs that take up most of the living room, a few companies are offering movie downloads. But of course, they won't play on your TV. Now that is timing. Over the last several weeks, we have had some large changes in the media landscape. First was Spiralfrog, the new site being launched by Universal Music that will offer music downloads completely legally and completely free. Next came Amazon Unboxed and Apple's Showtime press conference this past Tuesday. Right now, you can only download these shows in the U.S., but both companies have promised that by 2007 they will be taking their services international with Canada first on the list. Both services are similar, with recent TV shows on sale for $1.99 and movies for rent at around $4 and for purchase for $15-$19. But troubles abound. These sites look good at first glance and it is finally time that services like this are offered. It is excellent that the music and movie companies are finally understanding that their content absolutely needs to be released online for their companies to survive. People are already downloading huge amounts of content from the Net for free, so why should the companies not simply sell them online and make money? But these companies still don't quite get it, and it shows through in their DRM. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and it is the magic key that the media companies are looking to solve. For example, DRM lets you buy a song from the Apple Music Store and makes it possible for it only to be played on your iPod. Every piece of media you legally buy and download from the Internet has a set of rights attached to it. The rights attached to some files you download allow you to play that piece of media on only one device. Others allow you to move the file around to different devices, while others allow you to burn a copy of the song or the video clip to a CD or DVD. But both Apple and Amazon's upcoming download services offer very strict versions of DRM, basically allowing you to download the file and keep it for a specific period of time on the hard drive of your computer, but not to burn it to DVD or CD. This means that movies and shows you might purchase are fine for you to watch, but only on your computer. You cannot move them to watch them on your TV unless you have very specific pieces of equipment. The same is true of the Spiralfrog service. Early press releases state that for people to keep their subscription alive, they will have to keep playing their music, and they will need to log in to the Spiralfrog at certain intervals or else they will lose their accounts and their free downloaded music will not play anymore. So it is interesting to see the change in the media scene over the last few weeks, but we still need some changes to occur before downloading legal media from the Internet becomes as useful as getting it from an illegal site. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
