http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/zediva/
Zediva, a streaming movie service you’ve likely never heard of, is a most clever and useful middle finger to Hollywood — even if the site is careful to say it’s not about sticking it to the studios.
Zediva’s offering is quite simple: new release movies that you can’t get on Amazon, Netflix or iTunes that cost $2 for a digital rental that lasts for two full weeks. It hasn’t struck any deals with studios and doesn’t plan on doing so.
And the company says it’s perfectly legal for you to stream The Social Network or 127 Hours right now and are exiting their beta-test phase Wednesday morning.
So how do they get away with it?
Quite simply — the company literally rents you a DVD and a DVD player, with your computer, tablet or Google TV as the remote control. Unlike the other streaming movie services, Zediva doesn’t turn a movie into a file on its servers that it can serve to as many users as care to see it at once.
Instead, Zediva’s servers have DVD drives and actual DVDs. So when you rent a movie, that disc goes out of circulation until you release it back to the company, just like in one of those increasingly rare real-world video stores.
And like those video stores, Zediva doesn’t need to get permission from the studios to rent out discs, since once they buy the DVD they are free to rent it out or re-sell it, thanks to the first-sale doctrine in U.S. copyright law.
The company’s business plan is to fill in the gap that movie studios are enforcing on companies like Netflix: As a condition of getting streaming rights to movies, Netflix agrees not to even rent DVD copies of new releases for the first month after they go on sale.
Zediva, a team of five based in Santa Clara, California, says it doesn’t expect legal trouble over its service. The team says they are planning to spend millions of dollars to buy DVDs and hope that studios see the company as a valuable customer, not a potential defendant in an expensive lawsuit.
Launching with about 100 titles, mostly Hollywood films, Zediva is offering two free streaming movies to any user who signs up before March 31. Those who like the service can pre-pay $10 for 10 rentals.
The company’s next steps are to create an HTML5-compatible streaming service so users can watch movies on the iPad and iPhone, and to integrate with internet-to-TV devices such as gaming consoles like the Wii and specialty equipment like Roku and Boxee.
Zediva’s offering is quite simple: new release movies that you can’t get on Amazon, Netflix or iTunes that cost $2 for a digital rental that lasts for two full weeks. It hasn’t struck any deals with studios and doesn’t plan on doing so.
And the company says it’s perfectly legal for you to stream The Social Network or 127 Hours right now and are exiting their beta-test phase Wednesday morning.
So how do they get away with it?
Quite simply — the company literally rents you a DVD and a DVD player, with your computer, tablet or Google TV as the remote control. Unlike the other streaming movie services, Zediva doesn’t turn a movie into a file on its servers that it can serve to as many users as care to see it at once.
Instead, Zediva’s servers have DVD drives and actual DVDs. So when you rent a movie, that disc goes out of circulation until you release it back to the company, just like in one of those increasingly rare real-world video stores.
And like those video stores, Zediva doesn’t need to get permission from the studios to rent out discs, since once they buy the DVD they are free to rent it out or re-sell it, thanks to the first-sale doctrine in U.S. copyright law.
The company’s business plan is to fill in the gap that movie studios are enforcing on companies like Netflix: As a condition of getting streaming rights to movies, Netflix agrees not to even rent DVD copies of new releases for the first month after they go on sale.
Zediva, a team of five based in Santa Clara, California, says it doesn’t expect legal trouble over its service. The team says they are planning to spend millions of dollars to buy DVDs and hope that studios see the company as a valuable customer, not a potential defendant in an expensive lawsuit.
Launching with about 100 titles, mostly Hollywood films, Zediva is offering two free streaming movies to any user who signs up before March 31. Those who like the service can pre-pay $10 for 10 rentals.
The company’s next steps are to create an HTML5-compatible streaming service so users can watch movies on the iPad and iPhone, and to integrate with internet-to-TV devices such as gaming consoles like the Wii and specialty equipment like Roku and Boxee.
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