Memory maker to sell films on Flash
Kingston Technology partners with Paramount
Memory specialist Kingston Technology is to sell movies on memory cards.
In a deal announced with Paramount last night, the company will pre-load the cards with full-length films.
The devil will surely be in the detail, and that's probably why neither Kingston nor Paramount provided any. Which movies will be included? When will they be included? The partners weren't saying.
They did hint that the films will come on both USB and SD cards. Some movies will be bundled with the storage - buy this SD card and get a free film - others will be offered for sale as content that happens to come on Flash rather than disc.
It wasn't revealed what format the content will use, whether it will be DRM-protected, or whether it will come in standard definition of HD.
Memory cards have been seen as a key alternative to DVDs and Blu-ray Discs for delivering movies to consumers while broadband speeds increase to the point where film downloads are sufficiently rapid for quick of-the-moment purchases.
The Shape of Things to Come?
(We prefer the 1930s version)
Back in March 2008, the chief scientist at George Lucas' THX subsidiary, Laurie Fincham, said: "By the time Blu-ray really finds a mass market, we will have 128GB cards. In the future I want to be able to carry four to five movies around with me in a wallet, or walk into a store and have someone copy me a movie to a USB device."
Later that year, Toshiba invested $20m in US digital content delivery specialist MOD Systems, forecasting that "downloading video content at high speed to an SD Card will offer consumers a quick and simple means to access video entertainment".
Not long after, memory maker PNY offered a 2GB USB Flash drive with Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II pre-loaded.
That was more a bundle offering, as other such packages have been, so it's interesting to see Paramount considering Flash as a release platform as well as a promotional tool. The real test of its keenness on the technology, however, will be what it releases and when. ®
COMMENTS
Not well thought through
So I take my nice, shiny USB drive to the store and ask them to fill it up with DVDs. Then I have to stand around the store for about 10 minutes for each DVD downloaded to the drive and up to an hour and a half for each high definition movie.
I think I'd rather wait until the inevitable moment when it appears on Freeview.
blueray...
Solid state is all very good, but dont forget an SD card can be a lot more fragile than an optical disc... scratch a CD/DVD/HD-DVD/BD and you can polish out the imperfection and keep on trucking.. yank an SD at the wrong moment and bang, all data gone! I know that is generally due to an interupted write process, but you still get catastrophic data loss... I have over 200 DVD's and BD's and the number that are un playable is pretty much zero. on the other hand Ive had USB flash drives, SD cards and Memory Stick all corrupt in an unrecoverable way...
on the other hand, Im all for a 50gb SD card with a film for less than a tenner :)
Format...
Sounds like these will be some kind of video packaged in an .exe to run it indepentantly of system codecs/video players... just like them video postcard programmes that makes webcam video into exe for email (yes, exe and email very clever).
Mad?
Are these guyz mad, I thought we had a standard for movies, what was it again, HD-DVD or something? Did they not try something similar with music years ago?
Paris because you do not have to buy her to get by ...
Fantastic
This sounds brilliant. My Philips telly has a USB port as, obviously, do all the PC's. DVD's are a pain in the backside as they keep getting scratched (bloody kids) and I don't see the point in BluRay as it suffers all the same problems (scratching, slow start-ups). This sounds like the dream solution to me. Be interesting to see how the DRM is managed with regards personal backups.
I'm not a free-loading thief, like many around here, but I do object to copy protection systems that prevent me making a perfectly legal backup copy and force me to re-buy or find "other" sources when the kids have been playing Frisbee with Wall-e.
