While not germane to the conversation, it's worth pointing out that this is a wonderful movie with an exceptionally smart and computer-literate script that celebrates electronic culture instead of deriding it.

If the movie companies would come to their senses and release them without DRM, I would definitely purchase them via download. They also need to work on there pricing for them, I noticed many movies on iTunes are $20 for the 1080 version. I can usually get the Blu-Ray version for cheaper.

At this point it's pretty clear that video DRM and digital purchase pricing exists as they do because they'd rather you didn't buy movies, but rented them when you wanted to watch them, or (preferably) rented the capability to watch them.

Not at all true — done consulting work for some major media companies, and they vastly preferred people to buy (just think: ~$20 vs. $3.99). I think DRM is just programmed into how the industry views the world, unfortunately.

What they'd really like to do is rent it to you, but for the price of buying it, and have you think you're buying it.

Hence, the DRM.

Bingo.

If it comes with DRM, it's a rental, not a purchase, no matter how much you paid for it.

If that were true then why is every DRM play not designed around cutting down piracy, but on limiting the rights of legal purchasers?

Why hasn't there ever been key-transfer features to facilitate sales/trades/loans? Why are there always platform locks and media locks and account locks? Why is there so much effort to stop legal backups, loaning, libraries, etc?

I don't doubt individual good people or divisions exist in major media companies that would just as well sell a movie for $20 and be done with it. But the repeated DRM strategy does not jive with that at all.

Because the media companies are headed by lawyers and politicians, if people were happily purchasing content for reasonable prices then they couldn't make a whole lot of noise and lobby for awful privacy-invading and rights-withholding legislation -- that is their ultimate goal.

To be fair, they are working (slowly) on UltraViolet.

While I have no special insight, I genuinely think you're attributing to malice what can more easily be attributed to stupidity. And even really smart people can be very, very stupid.

That's totally fine with me. I'll rent movies on Amazon all day long for $1.99.

How many movies do you have that see repeat viewings?

Much less movies that you'll rewatch 9 times (bringing you to the purchase price)?

My strategy:

- no theatre[0]

- rent all movies (mostly via Apple TV and Xbox360)

- if I ever want to see a movie again, push it to a wishlist

- regularly scan for sales and buy only movies on the wishlist, and only if their price is below a given cap.

By that time retail prices have dropped a long way down from the original price, and my flat is not filled with watch-once-and-take-dust frisbees, which I happened to pay less and see much earlier than if I waited for prices to drop. And while it seems I pay for some films twice, in the end I actually pay less for those than if I bought them on the first view.

[0]: Counting theatre for two persons, plus parking/public transport, I could watch five to seven movies for the same price at home, in a more comfortable situation, with a better quality. Around here theatres are a massive social-engineered ripoff.

You must not have kids... :)

Eactly.. i'd buy without DRM, for sure! But this way i will not be able to play the movie on my media center or my (Linux) Laptop. So, great move Disney, but not enough. :(

Pricing and convenience are definitely the two factors that will have the most impact on adoption. Being competitive won't stop all piracy, but as iTunes has proved with music, there's a big potential customer base just waiting to be given what they want.

I'm really happy to see the progress digital downloads have been making, but I'll be buying Blu-Ray versions even when they are more expensive. iTunes bitrates for 1080p video are not very good yet.

I've noticed some other movies doing the same, for example Looper (great sci-fi movie btw) was on Google Play roughly a week or so before it was on DVD.

Now if only they would offer them DRM free, then we'd be getting somewhere...

As well as Amazon and ITunes, but only for purchase and not for rent...which is kind of annoying.

I've been really frustrated by the "purchase only" digital options for movies lately. I want to watch the US remake of "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" but I don't know if I want to watch it more than once.

I'm a little confused. This community (myself included) often complains about how we wish Hollywood would release their movies as DRM-free files. But then some of us say that the "purchase" price is too high and we want a "rental" option.

How exactly would this work? Would the movie studios ask you nicely to remove the file from your computer after three days? I'd love to hear a technical answer that contradicts this, but don't see how a DRM-free rental could ever be possible.

What consumers want is simple.

Ownership: My copy plays from my device (of my choosing) whenever I want.

Rental: Their copy plays from their server when they approve it.

Its the confusing of those two ideas that all these problems stem from.

I don't see in that thread anyone asking for DRM free rental movies. It started out talking about the availability of the movie on Google Play and ended with the frustration of a lack of a rental option. The topic shifted just a bit there.

I don't really see how you could rent streaming movies without some form of DRM in place. I would hope no one expects that.

Asking for DRM-free movies only makes sense in the context of purchasing.

Rental is the oldest form of DRM. That's basically how it works.

I'm not part of the "All DRM is always bad. No exceptions" consensus group. I'm in the more pragmatic "I'm OK with DRM, especially for time-limited rentals when it works well and is really cheap" group.

Can't we all just get along?

Yep, i like both the amazon and itunes rental options for movies. Most movies are a one time deal anyway, and they are FAR cheaper than going to a theater for "meh" movies.

For buying I would like the drm to go bye-bye. They can watermark it for all I care, as long as its a plain file with no drm is what I want for the purchase price so I can move it about like the songs I buy from amazon/itunes. That is basically my viewpoint as well.

Where has anyone ever asked for DRM free rentals?

> How exactly would this work? Would the movie studios ask you nicely to remove the file from your computer after three days?

Isn't that exactly what stores do that rent out movies on physical media?

No. If you don't return the physical media then chances are they'll charge you the full price, not allow you to rent again, and/or track you down because you most likely gave them your contact info.

But they don't have a mechanism in place that makes sure I remove the copy of the movie from my computer after I return the physical medium.

While true, copying a DVD to your computer is not a trivial enough exercise for most people to accomplish, for the U.S. at least.

Is DRM free really that much of an issue any more? It's an inconvenient, but not insurmountable problem for consumers. I think coders have solved for this issue, no?

My biggest concern is not now, but the future. With anything I "own", I should have a high degree of certainty that there's no dependency on any external service for it to remain useful - and I don't have this on DRMed content. If their authentication servers go offline, my movies should still be playable.

This was demonstrated oh-so-nicely by the ironically named PlaysForSure DRM scheme.

I don't give a damn about rental content having DRM[1] since I can't even pretend to own it, but what's bought to own needs to work. It needs to work today, it needs to work next week, and it needs to work in ten years. If I lose the file that's on me (just as if I lost the physical disk), but someone taking a server offline can't prevent me from using my media.

When that changes, I'll start buying content again. Last time I bought a movie was in 2005, and that was on DVD. I started buying music again when iTunes went DRM-free, and I'll happily do the same for movies too. Likewise on video games - anything with serious DRM (SecuROM, for example) will get no money from me.

[1] Assuming it works fine during the rental period, of course.

When you say, "coders have solved for this issue", what do you mean?

Do you mean that the movie industry's coders have made DRM so un-intrusive that it's no longer an issue for consumers? Many would disagree with you there.

Do you mean that "pirate" coders have been able to circumvent all existing DRM techniques, so consumers can always get DRM-free movies if they seek them out? That may be true, but it's a continuing arms race with the movie industry, so it's not an ideal solution.

Well, they have done a much better job w/ the DRM now than in the past. I don't love the stuff, but I haven't had trouble with it in recent years.

(Except for the one time I tried to play DRM video on an Eyefinity display array, at which point iTunes complained it didn't support HDCP)

So, are you saying i can buy this movie online, put it on my NAS and play it on my: media player, Linux laptop and transfer it to my iPad or Android Phone for travels? That's just a dealbreaker, and i'm sure not only for me. As long as the movie industry doesn't see that, they can complain about piracy all they want, but they won't win me as a customer. Not because i don't want to, but because i just can't watch their fuing movies on my devices. By the way, i have a slow internet connection, so all streaming platforms are a no go as well. I'd go for streaming but then again the ones i have seen (in germany) rely on MS Silverlight or some creepy stuff that also doesn't work on my media player or laptop.

Edit: A good example is, that i actually have a Spotify Premium Subscription i am glad to pay (it runs on Linux, media player, iPad, Android, that's just awesome!). I also bought a lot of MP3s on Amazon and i know i will be able to listen to them whenever and whereever i want even without internet access. That's what i pay for.

Just last night I rented a movie on iTunes and I couldn't play it. This was on a recent MacBook connected to my receiver and then TV via HDMI. After rebooting the computer and fighting it quite a bit, I found that it would play if I unplugged the HDMI cable. Now I have previously had glitches where iTunes popped up an error saying my playback device was not allowed, but I solved those by unplugging and trying again. This time it was just stuck. Then I plugged the HDMI cable into the TV instead, and used optical audio from there to the receiver. This "worked," but robbed me of true 5.1 sound.

All of these technologies ought to just work. But they are over-complicated and often break down even for obvious scenarios like "I want to pay to watch a movie with surround sound."

I'm pretty sure DRM was somehow to blame last night, because other videos played fine. I don't know why some iTunes downloads are worse than others but I feel like I never have problems with the SD versions.

Yeah, big time. I just installed Plex, and now I can stream all of my content, except the DRM-crippled stuff, to all of my devices. I'll never move files back and forth again, much less deal with moving license metadata. That means never buying any DRM content again. It's insurmountable.

Depends on the ability to transfer the media to another means of consuming it. Coders may have solved this issue for some but there are still the legal issues to deal with. Most often defeating DRM for the purposes of copying, even for personal use, is illegal in the US.

Forget that I want Paperman. What a beautiful short.

agreed ... the animation and art direction for it was superb.

4 days after the UK release date.

that sucks :( I remember going to the UK on a business trip in 2007 and we went to see a movie and all of the trailers that showed for "upcoming" films were all for films I had already seen.

That's just terrible. They should really make it a priority to get these films available everywhere right away.

It's not usually this bad, we've had a lot more releases lining up with the US release dates. A number of friends have already resorted to piracy to view Wreck-It-Ralph and the studios wonder why? With such an interconnected world (and particularly with Digital distribution with the cinema chains) there is no longer the excuses for such a difference in release dates. If they really wanted to combat the piracy issue they need to make it easier to consume the content legally.

Oh believe me, it's already available for download.