Anyone else remember the DIVX format? The DVD player that phoned home, literally?
Like DIVX and DVD-D, this "format" isn't at all focused on consumer satisfaction, so I would expect it to be extremely obnoxious in it's refusal to work under anything but the most pristine conditions.
Nope, no idea what you're talking about.
On a similar note, I remember back when my family had DirectTV, relatively early in the days of small dish satellite television. The set-top boxes had to communicate via telephone line to negotiate pay-per-view, but our boxes didn't understand ten digit dialing, IIRC. Ours expected phone numbers to be 7 digits, and thus we couldn't get ours to dial up and confirm charges. There was no solution, just "sorry, guess you can't order movies".
I have a feeling it’s not really meant for broad consumer release, but more for early screenings or awards screenings. I can’t imagine they would think this could do well in the consumer market where the price of the device is everything. They would have to eat the price of the hardware to make it work.
I suspect that they're planning for the future, with the expectation that all the hardware they're using is going to become standard on even the cheapest of cellphones within a decade. The cellphone market is a big reason why all the existing streaming sticks are a small and powerful as they are.
Also, I think that media companies would gladly subsidize the cost of one of these machines if it gave them all the feedback they're hoping for. If one of these things has sensors and processing on par with a mid-range smartphone, they'll be able to track the
heart rate of everyone watching (and more advanced emotional state detection is being worked on). If they've got sensors on par with a Kinect, they'll be able to track head movement. I'm pretty sure that most media companies would jump at the chance to pay to put a device like that watching their audience and tracking how they respond to every program they watch.
Similar to subscription services cracking down on password sharing, I don't think this is primarily about getting money. Does Netflix really care if the half-dozen people sharing a password really live in the same house? I sincerely doubt it. They care that a dozen people sharing four profiles are ruining their data collection. Information is the currency they're after, and it's worth as much as any subscription or ticket fees they'll get. I can only hope that their greed to have it all will make the system so restrictive that people won't put up with it, because I'm more than a little scared of the future we'll face if they go all in on asking people to sell their privacy for "cheap" first-run movie tickets.
How cheap would the system have to be before people ignored the privacy concerns? How well do you think the device would sell if it cost $100 for the 4K model and let people rent first-run movies for $5 a head? What if it were $4 a ticket? $3? How cheap do you think they could get the price down if they had some pre-roll ads they got to monitor your emotional response to? How many kick-backs do you think they could get in 5 to 10 years when one of these things can do eye-tracking to see if people notice the product placement? Do you think they could subsidize an entire subscription service by selling the biofeedback that tells marketers when bi-polar customers are hitting a manic phase and will be more likely to make impulse buys?
If the hardware is just being used for DRM, then yeah, I can see it being too expensive and too finicky to squeeze a few extra bucks out of people. I'd be shocked if all that monitoring capability were only going to be used for DRM, though.
