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Agnes Varnum is a freelance writer, film programmer and communications manager for the Austin Film Society. She is the primary contributor to doc it out and Tribeca Film Institute's Resources.

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CinemaNow = CinemaSometimes

August 21st, 2006 • Related Posts • Tags

Interesting little trail of articles on CinemaNow, a download-to-own movie service. I guess the biggies have been signing licensing deals to allow CinemaNow users to download their favorite movies and burn them to a DVD – once.

Tian shares the news from a reporter’s investigation into the service on the service on Aug. 1. The DL: time-consuming, costly since you still have to buy the DVRs, and only works on Windows (as a Mac user, this screams trouble!).

BoingBoing reports an anonymous tip from an engineer that the “‘Burn to DVD’ specification and found that the system has been designed really badly — so badly that it’s likely that DVDs burned with CinemaNow are likely to fail in many commercial DVD players.”

Buyer beware.

There Are 3 Responses So Far. »

  1. Comment by Bob Alexander on 23 August 2006:

    This is really an important post. There are tons of issues raised by the Studio/Intel/Microsoft approach to copyright control. When I get a chance … (sigh) …

  2. Comment by agnes on 23 August 2006:

    Yes, I agree that the issue is a important one . Most people I’ve talked with (including myself) don’t understand how digital rights management technologies will effect them. I thought this was a good example of that.

  3. Pingback by agnesvarnum.com » Instant Gratification on 9 September 2006:

    [...] A while back, I noted some intriguing issues with a new movie download service. Self-Reliant Filmmaking’s Paul Harrill reports on downloading movies from Amazon.com. [...]