British Telecom offers free movie downloads
BT Vision is making three films available for download free of charge, provided that the viewer is prepared to watch advertisements. Mischief Night, Played and The Punk Rock Movie can be downloaded and viewed using an associated media player developed by Hiro Media. The player will show adverts from The AA, Norwich Union and Territorial Army, among others, during breaks in the films. Antony Carbonari, interactive and commercial media director at BT Vision, said: “We believe that sympathetically placed targeted advertising, combined with a viral film-sharing capability, will be attractive to customers in conjunction with free or reduced prices.”
The viewer also has to give some demographic information which the player uses to personalise the advertising. The computer being used to watch the films checks the data against an online database and downloads new adverts that could be more suitable. Films can be sent to friends who must provide the same information. The films can be viewed for one month, and the scheme will last for the next three months. This is a good direction which needs to be followed by other internet providers for sure.
Source: vnunet
Comments(23)
There heading the right way, however give us some seriouse movies to watch.
How is this “a good direction”? The movies are crap, only playable with a separate player (probably full of spyware and such), AND you’ll have to sit through several advertisements!
Give me illegal DVD-rips anytime over this shoddy stuff.
So true, the big corporate companies are fighting a losing battle. This hardly sounds like an attractive proposition to me. Hmmmm what would you rather…
- A high quality scene released XviD
or
- Some piece of crap movie probably filled with DRM that you can only watch on some unknown media player which to top it all off also has commercial breaks in it!
Give it up BT, I highly doubt this will be as successful as you think.
so they do this then one of us rip all the ads out so the we can watch it in peace =]
It is a good idea. Of course it’s not as good as downloading a DVD rip which has no commercials but as you said that’s illegal. I’m sure alot of people who are paranoid about downloading illegal stuff are keen to try downloading movies to watch but are paranoid so something like this is a good opportunity.
Plus these movies are pretty new in the UK so I’ll definitely give them points for trying.
What’s that monkeyface in the picture, lol. Human evolution missed that one.
oh well its a step in the right direction…. beside us who use torrents and various other methods we are still a minority.. this in theory is a better alternative for those who cant be bothered or are too scared of getting in trouble for downloading illegal material… look on the bright side at least B.T are finding a productive way to handle the “issue” unlike the MPAA (yes i know they are extremely different companies) who hunt down downloaders and treat them worse then drug dealers or terrorists!!!
@8
at least B.T are finding a productive way to handle the “issue”
err…don’t you mean…
“BT though that there is a good opportunity to make lots of money here…”
I’m sure it will start off ‘free’ then once it takes off and a couple of million people are using the software and services (think i-tunes), they will add advert-free versions of films…..at a price
Don’t trust them. Sure there trying to help stop us from breaking the law ! This is BT we are talking about.
It’s not perfect but they are moving in the right direction.
Off course illegal dvd rips are better but at least they are trying which is more than I see ANY other company doing. I would never put up with ads in the middle of the movie, however at the begining and the end would be a fine compremise and it better be targeted advertising. I mean I’m not putting up with another tv station where none of the ads are of interest to me. The ads could also be good for internet marketing too.
As for the player….screw that. I want to choose what software I use not what I’m told to use espially when I don’t trust branded media players of any type. Every one I have heard off has had spyware and such in it.
A common file type (such as divx) that can be played in a media player of ones own choice, good quality video and ads that are respectable enough to be accepted by the person who d/l’s the movie and we might be close to a win/win situation. At least thats my thoughts.
BT are scum and still operate with a manopoly mentality.
Scum!
This is horrible.
Yet an other DRM’d Microsoft only provider.
They should shoot all jerks who create and use crap like that.
@Martin: How can you possible call this “a good direction which needs to be followed by other internet providers”?
Some twisted form of humor?
The rest of the world should just follow up on the Netherlands. Here it’s perfectly legal to copy and download anything for personal use
“We believe that sympathetically placed targeted advertising, combined with a viral film-sharing capability, will be attractive to customers in conjunction with free or reduced prices.”
This is a more p2p friendly solution, If your movies is god i might be convince to accomodate the ads if not … to the bin it goes .. jailing me for loading crap is just not right..
this is a puny attempt.
Is this better than Halo 3?
@9: what, you want them to just give away free movies with no adverts at a loss to them? idiot.
of course you’re never going to get the same kind of deal as downloading movies. companies don’t want to lose money. the best you’re going to get is free movies with advertisements, and that’s absolutely fine. i’d actually be very interested in this if they were good movies. it’s impossible for companies to properly keep up with pirating, because it would put them out of business. this IS a good direction.
yes, It needs to be followed. Now it dosn’t offer us anything except…..hope, that they will adapt to relesing movies directly on p2p but that IS a long way off…..their method is not good but it IS a step in the right direction.
Till THEY finally get with the program we’ll just keep d/l dvd rips of p2p just as we always have done, they WILL catch on…….very, very slowly.
Crap movies. The Punk Rock Movie was rubbish in 78,and still is ,with ads as well.God help us .Iff BT want customers they will have to do a lot better..BT give nothing for nothing..
BBC has been working pretty hard on online delivery systems. iPlayer should be coming out sometime soon. No, this can’t compete with scene releases, but that’s not why it’s great. Here in north america, telecom monopolies are crappifying the industry. Once IPTV is better established, it could kill basic cable forever.
why is there a monkey in the pic
The BBC iplayer has been out for over a year and it sucks donkey balls. It installs background services that hog nearly all your bandwidth even when the prog isn’t running. It also generally takes 3-4 hours to download a 1 hour show. That might have been impressive in 1997 but it’s just an ebarassment now.
Just googled “Hiro player” and confusingly it’s a codec for Microsoft’s Media Player. Additionally, BT Vision charges for films with just a few being given away to entice idiots to plug their details in the ad serving database.
The question is why do we pay for movies at all, they are so chocked full of advertisements these days that we should almost be paid to watch them, or at least watch them for free.
This is a good idea though, it is a step in the right direction