If rumors are to believed, it seems like we now know the reason for the expiration date added to media after the Fall Dashboard Update.
The Internet is on fire this morning talking of a Video On Demand service being launched November 22nd, 2006.
This service, if it's true (and many in this community have thought things could go this way as well) will let you download full HD movies to watch on your Xbox360. The rental fee is rumored to be around $4 which is in line with what you'd pay at the video store. Each HD movie that's downloaded will most likely have an expiration date and once that date is reached, the movie will delete. That's DRM working to it's fullest.
Now being a DVD ripper myself, I know that your average DVD movie today takes 5-9 Gigs. Since HD-DVD discs can hold 30 GB of data, I can't imagine that you'll be able to download the movie to your hard drive. Streaming won't work either really because of how relatively slow our bandwidth is here in the USA relative to other countries. So they will need to do some type of download (caching) / stream method to deliver an HD movie over the wire.
So the question is would people use it? Would you be better off paying $199.99 for the HD-DVD accessory and paying Netflix or Blockbuster a monthly fee for 'all you can eat' HD-DVD movie rentals? On the other hand, if you don't want to buy HD-DVD hardware or media, renting movies at $4 a pop would be cheaper than flushing what, $1000 worth of HD-DVD stuff if HD-DVD looses the 'HD Standards War'.
Everything I read about HD-DVD and BluRay suggests though that you don't really see a difference between DVD9 movies and HD movies unless you have an HDTV bigger than 50 inches. So for people gaming on smaller TV's or PC monitors, maybe this whole HD stuff doesn't really matter right now.
This service, if it's true (and many in this community have thought things could go this way as well) will let you download full HD movies to watch on your Xbox360. The rental fee is rumored to be around $4 which is in line with what you'd pay at the video store. Each HD movie that's downloaded will most likely have an expiration date and once that date is reached, the movie will delete. That's DRM working to it's fullest.
Now being a DVD ripper myself, I know that your average DVD movie today takes 5-9 Gigs. Since HD-DVD discs can hold 30 GB of data, I can't imagine that you'll be able to download the movie to your hard drive. Streaming won't work either really because of how relatively slow our bandwidth is here in the USA relative to other countries. So they will need to do some type of download (caching) / stream method to deliver an HD movie over the wire.
So the question is would people use it? Would you be better off paying $199.99 for the HD-DVD accessory and paying Netflix or Blockbuster a monthly fee for 'all you can eat' HD-DVD movie rentals? On the other hand, if you don't want to buy HD-DVD hardware or media, renting movies at $4 a pop would be cheaper than flushing what, $1000 worth of HD-DVD stuff if HD-DVD looses the 'HD Standards War'.
Everything I read about HD-DVD and BluRay suggests though that you don't really see a difference between DVD9 movies and HD movies unless you have an HDTV bigger than 50 inches. So for people gaming on smaller TV's or PC monitors, maybe this whole HD stuff doesn't really matter right now.
