The world's first legal fully DRM-less movie d/l service

[Bronx]

Cuban AfterDawn Holdings Inc, the sole owner of the Finnish website AfterDawn.com, announced today its plans to launch the world's first legal, fully DRM-less movie download service.

AfterDawn aims to provide unlimited downloads of DVD-quality movies with a monthly subscription fee of $29.95, thus competing directly against the movie industry heavy-weights such as Blockbuster and Hollywood -backed movie download services such as Movielink. However, AfterDawn's service differs from its competitors in several ways -- downloaded files wont contain any usage restrictions and all files are transferred to users utilizing modern P2P technologies.

"As Cuba's Internet connections aren't suitable for delivering DVD-quality movies to thousands of users directly, we've decided to use BitTorrent network as our main method of delivering the movies, thus cutting down the bandwidth costs by up to 90 percent compared to our competitors. This helps us to deliver the savings directly to our customers," said Jari Ketola, AfterDawn's CTO in a phone interview.

According to AfterDawn's CTO, company had to decide which format they would use with their upcoming service. "After considering our options, we felt that it would serve our customers best if we would deliver the movies using the old, but reliable MPEG-2 video encoding instead of more modern solutions, such as MPEG-4. This also eases the process of transferring the movies to the Net, as the movies don't need any re-encoding when they're transferred from DVD-Video discs to DVD images. Users will also benefit from our solution, because the files can be easily burned to blank DVDR discs and watched on a regular DVD player rather than with a desktop computer", says Mr. Ketola.

Several Hollywood studios have already expressed their concerns about the upcoming service, but as the service is based in Cuba, the odds seem to be on AfterDawn Holding's side. Legal experts say that the operation resembles the notorious Movie88's service, but as the service is hosted in a country that doesn't recognize WIPO's worldwide copyright mandates, it is highly likely to succeed.

According to the company's spokesman, James Delahunty, the new service is about to launch by the end of the year and will be available worldwide. Service will feature thousands of Hollywood movies, including all the latest blockbusters, he promises.

Source: AfterDawn Holding Inc's press release

[BJ_M]

Castro wins in the end after a lenthy battle w/ the usa ..

but the usa has an ace card up it's sleeve .. it is not legal to do bussness with a cuban company and you can be charged for that (as many have) .. but for every other country (incl. canada) - its not an issue ..

[BJ_M]

mpeg2 as the format ?

that really doesnt make a lot of sense .. unless they are to lazy to re-encode and are just ripping the streams..

[AlecWest]

How many people, even with high-speed broadband, would even want to take the time to download multi-gigabyte files ... and how many such files could a person download before their ISP starts clamping down on usage (or "filtering" to slow down the process)?

This sounds like it will only appeal to a fringe market.

[AlecWest]

Castro wins in the end after a lenthy battle w/ the usa ..

but the usa has an ace card up it's sleeve .. it is not legal to do bussness with a cuban company and you can be charged for that (as many have) .. but for every other country (incl. canada) - its not an issue ..

The transaction ($$$) might take place in Finland, as the article suggests, with the money being shuffled off to Cuba. A lot of people and businesses get stuff from embargoed countries simply by going through a "middleman" in a non-embargoed country. It would be hard to prove a Cuban connection unless Finnish authorities came down on AfterDawn ... which isn't likely since the EU doesn't recognize US sanctions on Cuba.

[Gurm]

You guys realize this is probably an April Fool, right?

[AlecWest]

You guys realize this is probably an April Fool, right?

You might be right ... could be a joke. Typing in the two searchterms AFTERDAWN and CUBA, Google News returned only the AfterDawn.com site's blurb. If there was a movie distribution plan afoot, you'd think it would be newsworthy elsewhere.

[thoughton]

This is either a joke or just Real Bad Planning(tm). Using BitTorrent is a lousy decision. Instead of prosecuting the originators in Cuba the MPAA will just prosecute all the non-Cuban 2nd-generation seeders. Bye bye customer base.

[lacywest]

April 1st Joke ... I did a search myself and check out the bottom line.

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/6266.cfm

AfterDawn to launch DRM-less movie download service
1 April 2005 5:20 by dRD

Cuban AfterDawn Holdings Inc, the sole owner of the Finnish website AfterDawn.com, announced today its plans to launch the world's first legal, fully DRM-less movie download service.

AfterDawn aims to provide unlimited downloads of DVD-quality movies with a monthly subscription fee of $29.95, thus competing directly against the movie industry heavy-weights such as Blockbuster and Hollywood -backed movie download services such as Movielink. However, AfterDawn's service differs from its competitors in several ways -- downloaded files wont contain any usage restrictions and all files are transferred to users utilizing modern P2P technologies.

"As Cuba's Internet connections aren't suitable for delivering DVD-quality movies to thousands of users directly, we've decided to use BitTorrent network as our main method of delivering the movies, thus cutting down the bandwidth costs by up to 90 percent compared to our competitors. This helps us to deliver the savings directly to our customers," said Jari Ketola, AfterDawn's CTO in a phone interview.

According to AfterDawn's CTO, company had to decide which format they would use with their upcoming service. "After considering our options, we felt that it would serve our customers best if we would deliver the movies using the old, but reliable MPEG-2 video encoding instead of more modern solutions, such as MPEG-4. This also eases the process of transferring the movies to the Net, as the movies don't need any re-encoding when they're transferred from DVD-Video discs to DVD images. Users will also benefit from our solution, because the files can be easily burned to blank DVDR discs and watched on a regular DVD player rather than with a desktop computer", says Mr. Ketola.

Several Hollywood studios have already expressed their concerns about the upcoming service, but as the service is based in Cuba, the odds seem to be on AfterDawn Holding's side. Legal experts say that the operation resembles the notorious Movie88's service, but as the service is hosted in a country that doesn't recognize WIPO's worldwide copyright mandates, it is highly likely to succeed.

According to the company's spokesman, James Delahunty, the new service is about to launch by the end of the year and will be available worldwide. Service will feature thousands of Hollywood movies, including all the latest blockbusters, he promises.

Source: Twisted April Fool's joke

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and this one

http://www.indicare.org/tiki-view_blog.php?blogId=12

April 1st DRM Jokes
posted by RikLambers on 01/04/05 [13:10 UTC]

Yes, it's April 1st, and Google News hasn't got a filter for the (DRM) jokes that are published by different sites. Here are two for your (dis)amusement. Which one will fool the most?

1) Apple Adopts Windows Media for iTunes, iPod

"In a surprise move, Apple Computer announced Friday, April 1st, that it was licensing Microsoft's Windows Media platform for use with both the iTunes Music Store and the company's market-leading iPod music player. Apple will be replacing its proprietary FairPlay DRM scheme and AAC codec with Microsoft's Janus platform, allowing the company to leverage the more open nature of Microsoft's Windows Media platform across its burgeoning consumer electronics product line."

2) AfterDawn to launch DRM-less movie download service

"Cuban ?AfterDawn Holdings Inc, the sole owner of the Finnish website AfterDawn?.com, announced today its plans to launch the world's first legal, fully DRM-less movie download service. (...) Several Hollywood studios have already expressed their concerns about the upcoming service, but as the service is based in Cuba, the odds seem to be on AfterDawn? Holding's side. Legal experts say that the operation resembles the notorious Movie88's service, but as the service is hosted in a country that doesn't recognize WIPO's worldwide copyright mandates, it is highly likely to succeed."

[Tidy]

Castro wins in the end after a lenthy battle w/ the usa ..

but the usa has an ace card up it's sleeve .. it is not legal to do bussness with a cuban company and you can be charged for that (as many have) .. but for every other country (incl. canada) - its not an issue ..

The transaction ($$$) might take place in Finland, as the article suggests, with the money being shuffled off to Cuba. A lot of people and businesses get stuff from embargoed countries simply by going through a "middleman" in a non-embargoed country. It would be hard to prove a Cuban connection unless Finnish authorities came down on AfterDawn ... which isn't likely since the EU doesn't recognize US sanctions on Cuba.

You would be surprised. For me to download an entire 5gb file or file set only takes me 90 minutes.