Comment by eadmund
1 year ago
This is an awesome example of the kind of innovation which overlong copyright prevents.
There’s no particularly good reason that it should be legally impermissible for someone to build and sell a system like this loaded with movies from before, say, 2010 (or 2000, or whatever), but instead what the prospective entrepreneur would be legally able to include would be … Steamboat Willie, and other films of that vintage (as an aside, while Disney’s had a pretty rough couple of years, I’m pretty sure that Steamboat Willie being out of copyright has nothing to do with any of that).
This sort of experience shouldn’t be limited to children of high-tech folks with access to 3D printers: it should be possible for any child — or adult!
That kind of innovation is quite common abroad. No one is paying for content or cares about copyright in poorer countries.
There is more content now then there are eyeballs or time available to consume any of it.
What happens to value and price of product when there is more of it produced than consumed?
Keep an eye on the financials of the streaming services; at the moment few are profitable, and they will increase their prices and/or decrease their spending on new productions.
If there's a business case to be made, companies like Netflix might release a physical product for this... but I doubt they would, because of the investment and time required vs the revenue. Spotify tried something with an in-car device, but they cancelled and recalled the product pretty quickly.
Streaming services rely on volume; for them, hardware just isn't worth it.
If not for excessively long copyrights, streaming might not have taken off in the same way. You could instead buy e.g. $250 HDD that's loaded with 2,000 movies from 20+ years ago or whatever. A company could sell a NAS-like appliance that's designed to slot in drives that are pre-loaded with tons of media along with a card library like this to play them. Since they'd be out of copyright, there's no need for DRM and HDCP and all that, so the system might actually work without tons of fiddling. You wouldn't need high-paid techies to maintain a gargantuan delivery platform; you just clone drives at manufacturing time and ship them.
There's definitely a business case to be made with this if it were legal. There's sketchy Chinese pre-built mini PCs with emulators + 50k-100k ROMS that you can buy for ~$100 on Amazon right now, so basically following this exact business model. I'm actually surprised that there aren't similar products for movies (from what I can tell anyway).