We're as good as our word. Goodbye!
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Seagate ships drives with movies
STORAGE VENDOR Seagate has announced an unholy alliance with Paramount Pictures to distribute its titles by loading them onto Freeagent Go drives.
The hook-up will see the film studio that brought us such celluloid classics as Pootie Tang, Crossroads and Drillbit Taylor load a select number of its back catalogue onto Seagate drives that will require the user to purchase an activation code in order to view the films.
Seagate for its part not only has agreed to further lower the initial 'plugged-in' capacity of its drives by loading content that the user doesn't want but decided to partner a web store for Paramount titles to flog the activation codes required to view the movies on the drive. Seagate says that about 10 per cent of the hard drives that it afflicts with Paramount media content will be taken up by the bundled films.
For the pleasure of doing without a physical copy of the movie, you'll be asked to fork over between $10 and $15. Of course as this is all run by a film studio your basic rights are violated at just about every stage in the process.
The list of requirements and restrictions runs long, so if you aren't a Microsoft Windows user with Internet Explorer installed, forget it. Even then you need to have Microsoft's Silverlight ready and waiting in order to view the website correctly. Paramount Pictures will bestow upon you the right, after paying top whack, to play the film on three devices. If you lose the data you're allow one extra download, so you had better hope that your Seagate hard drive doesn't give up the ghost.
Unlike going into a shop and purchasing the same movie on an actual DVD disk, Paramount doesn't even allow you to supply your own DVD to create a hard copy of the film. Of course all these restrictions will help, if you are to believe the blinkered thinking of film studio executives, to curb nasty copyright infringement.
According to figures supplied by the film studio, a 150 minute film comes in at 2.5GB. That's hardly the type of sound and picture quality most people want after spending $15 for a film. Coupled with the absurd prices of theatre tickets, it's not surprising that all but the most indiscriminate of punters are forced to source the same material elsewhere rather than get ripped-off for a below standard visual experience.
Quite how long it takes for some smart hacker to beat Paramount's DRM system purely for kicks remains to be seen, but we'll hazard a guess that it'll be quicker than the time it takes for the film studio's executives to realise that their unwise and futile attempt to curtail their firm's losses due to their own excessive greed will suffer a Failure to Launch. µ
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I think that the concept of pre-loading hard drives with marketing crap is actually a good idea. I don't agree with this implementation though.
On the other hand, the paranoid side of me doesn't like the idea that *somebody* put *something* on my new hard drive before it got to me.
Use firefox with user agent switcher (to IE8) and you can order any movie.But keep your money...for something not DRM infected.
I bought two in HMV, mainly because I wanted the memory for a Freeview digital broadcast video recorder, which works. (Flash, including ReadyBoost and video-player grades, isn't always fast enough.) Officially you can back up the video file (although you can only play it on the stick) but not the executables for the player, but I used Linux to partition-image and format one complete; didn't seem to work when I repeated it on the other, I forget why, so I left the executable on it. That's an Integral 4 GB stick with [Terminator 3] on it; the one I didn't have a problem with there is [Ghostbusters]. So blame Skynet, not the spooks.
Wheres my savings. If Seagate is doing this, they are being paid, so has the price of the drives come down since.No doubt you will also have to veiw all the previews that come with each movie.It wouldn't be the first time trogens some how materialize onto the hard drives down the road. The loses from the pirates must be staggering that the industry can pay Seagate to do this.
... but what a stupid fucking idea. Absolutely stupid.
no doubt the activation software will include acrobat reader, an update manager, gamespy arcade and countless other unwanted bloatwares.
why do half decent companies make foolish decisions like this? have they been duped by hollywood with their hollow promises and unrealistic forecasts?
Not only has Seagate soiled its reputation as a quality provider of hard drives, but now they've descended to hawking shitty movies for the MPAA (and equivalents), that aren't even free? Then they take efforts to reduce the appeal of such content even more by forcing you to watch it using Silverlight and Internet Explorer?
Another nail in the coffin.
What is Seagate thinking? They're already behind Western Digital in pretty much every aspect of the hard drive industry, and now they want to make their customers dislike their company?
This "plot" of theirs and Paramount will fail harder than the ipad! And that's a pretty big FAIL!
A) Should pack the drives full -- having warned before purchase that it is and is easily cleared -- without lingering executables, that don't seem to present here anyway.
B) Shouldn't be charging any more for viewing than they get for a DVD rental. $10 when trying to squeeze the last income from a bit of schlock is far too much.
Although I love WD Caviar Green.