Kingston, Paramount to deliver movies on flash drives

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pioneerx01 said:
FINALY. You would nor believe how long I awaited for movies to be released on Flash drives. Think about it... Flash drives are reaching speeds of 30MB/s or more (faster than needed for blu-ray), Sizes are ever increasing, and the chance of data corruption is lover that getting your disk scratched. Plus 0 seek time. I think that is the future of movies.
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I agree it is a superior medium, but there are a couple of issues.

The primary one is price (for now). To fit a *real* Bluray movie onto a flash drive, it needs to be 32GB. That's going to be one expensive movie. It's going to be several years before they become cheap enough to compete with made-for-pennies pressed optical discs.

The second reason is waste. I don't have any numbers, but polycarbonate and aluminum is abundant. Germanium, silicon, gallium etc.. that's used in flash drives is used like crazy already. Can we expect to keep up with demand? Flash prices sometimes go up because of 'shortages' and I wonder if replacing every new potential optical disc in the world with flash devices is a reasonable goal.

I still think digital distribution is the ultimate goal. An awesome pipe to every house with unlimited access to digital media based on whatever model they use to fund it.. be it subscription, ads and such. And perhaps in the not-so-distant future, instead of having your movies each on their own flash drives, you could have hundreds of them on a single flash instead.
 
$30 is a lot to pay for a novelty item such as these. Until flash memory space is large enough to accomodate high definition, and cheap enough to rival discs, they should hold off on releasing movies on flash
 
Agreed. I wouldn't pay that much for something that wasn't HD. I'll be content with Blu-Ray until there is a more cost effective solution.
 
I got to agree with most, $30 for a standard def movie is steep. I can't say I'd be on board.

How would the flash drive be reusable? Does that mean you can download the movie from the flash drive onto your PC. But then your utilizing space on your hard drive unnecessarily as far as I'm concerned in return for just another flash drive.

Plus I think most people, aside from those who are tech savvy, don't have a DVD player with a USB port yet and some people including myself prefer to watch movies on my TV and not my PC.
 
Awesome, about time someone made a move to do away with freakin discs!

I can't see it catching on too quickly though, it's a massive change. From what I've seen in my 21 years of existance, unless the actual end product (in this case the movie) gets better in quality, the masses wont adopt it so quickly. For me, the price needs to come down, assuming $30 is about £20 (am I right??) that's still more than most Blu-Ray films, bring on the uber mass production of pen drives!!
 
Assuming you're using the right codec, you could fit a whole season dvd box set onto one of these drives. I'd pay for that.
 
this has to be the biggest looser marketing idea i've seen in ages,.. honestly what morons are in charge of this crap and WHY have they not been fired for sheer stupidity.
 
You can fit a very good quality movies into 4 GB, a lot of BD(blue ray disk) rips are only 2 GB and are still have awesome video and sound quality
 
Well, the 4gig flash drive is ok to begin with, and adding a movie on top of that would just be an added bonus to me! Well, aside from the fact that the movie, Transformers 2, was utter crap.
 
I think this would contribute to piracy. I think people would stick to dvds vs this considering how not everything has a usb.
 
Q. Would you pay $30 for a film stored on flash memory?
A. Nope. This may be a concept that's "before it's time". Will 8GB drives cost a $1 in bulk a couple of years from now? Will these sell at airports - definitely. Prices will come down, USB 3.0 is coming, this could be the next big thing .... it's just too early and too pricy for me.
 
How many flash drives am I going to have? It would be great for travel with but put my whole collection ...no but as an option yes, sounds cool. Will they be write protected?
 
Nah, $30 for SD movie is a no no, even if it's a 4GB drive. So what? I'm suppose to stack these up? Imagine having like 40 of theses, where are you suppose to store them? I like the discs, or maybe a new format? Like SD cards?
 
Movies on flash drives are like collectable items, these should be made in limited quantities and with some special USB drive, I mean there should be a special, custom made case for every Movie-On-A-USB-STICK, otherwise, it is just plain wrong to buy a USB with a movie, and if the movie is un-movable then the only reason for me to buy it would be that the USB would scream the movies name out loud with its design and shape....
 
I'd bye one of these in a flash (corny pun lol) But dont you think paramount would be worried about torrent sites getting a hold of these, no saying theyre not already on there, but more worried?
 
Seems overly expensive; and those flash drives look sketchy, I don't like Kingston.
I would adore having a worthless stockpile of flash drives which I bring everywhere and use to watch movies whenever I see a computer, and spend $30 each.
Piracy made easy?

EDIT: I bet those flash drives are too iffy to play the movie smoothly anyway!
 
4 Gigs , and a non HD movie ? A bit overpriced , but it depends if you even want it , i say why not just download it from the net ? Way simpler :)
 
Call me a skeptic, but I picture Paramount putting some sort of DRM software on the flash drive as well to prevent people from transferring it and sharing it. The more tech savvy will undoubtedly figure out a way around the copy protection, yet the movie studio will fight to keep their product copy-proof. I don't think the drive will be reusable, and I believe $30 is way too much because of this.
 
If they didn't sacrifice too much video quality then i might actually but it. 30$ for an 4GB Kingston and a movie isn't much.
I actually expected movies on flash drives to appear much sooner, but i'm just glad they finally actually did appear. Better latter than never.
 
That's a very good idea! It will start off quite expensive to see if it is worth progressing. The only thing with this is that you would have to burn it onto a DVD if you wanted to watch it on a DVD player and what copyright would be on it! They probably wont allow you to burn it onto a DVD and if this is the case then its way too much for the film specially in standard def!
 
Didn't Ubisoft already try this with PC games?
I think it was a 4GB drive and you had to choose between Rainbow Six, Brothers in Arms, Splinter Cell and another one I can't remember. Games are generally more appealing than movies (to me at least) and still they didn't last on flash drives.

BONUS:
Transformers flash drive picture (don't know if is real or fake):
http://www.maximumpc.com/files/u69/Ravage_USB.png

Very funny FAQ about the last Transformes movie:
http://www.toplessrobot.com/2009/06/bonus_robs_transformers_2_faqs.php?page=1
 
To me this seems like a bad idea, their target market is a person who wants a 4GB USB drive AND someone who wants to buy a Transformers film. Also once the film on the flash drive gets outdated, they're going to have overstock issues.
 
Firstly the idea has merit and they are not the first to think about putting movies onto media other than DVD's and Bluray disks.

I was recently working on a project to use any portable media (ipod, portable hard drive, usb stick,...) to load with movies at a video store, user would chose to rent movies X,Y and Z and also get other recent release movies added at the same time, loaded with DRM of course. Unfortunately the company had financial problems and some in-fighting at the board level which ultimately led to the company going into receivership. The movies were to be encrypted on the media and pay-per-view, paying for the right to watch via an internet connection (ADSL/3G) and watching from the already loaded portable media. A user would use a media device that would come as part of a membership, like getting pay tv, and plugin the media from which the device would copy the movie to be played. It would be like a PVR that also played rented movies. A later revision would allow downloading movies over the internet, which I don't think is likely until Internet speeds allow fast downloads of bluray quality movies. So as an interim solution loading onto portable media was the go.

So this has merit but I would give the option to use your own media device rather than wasting all the material needed to produce these usb sticks. Have a kiosk that sells movies using a USB, esata, firewire, etc.. connection to the users own device. The movies should only costs a couple of dollars, and requires no operator. Just think of it, just a few kiosks and someone to sell them a packet of chips/popcorn and a beverage, that is the video shop of the near future. They could even offer to sell the user a permanent copy after they have watched the movie and charge the difference between the rental price and full price. Rent with the option to buy.
 
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