Who would buy a ship when you can fly?

Open source it.

If it was opensourced wouldn't the media content (movies) still have to be purchased?

Well, yeh, of course they would legally have to be purchased. Of course that never seems to stop most people from stealing them.

With DVDs and Blu-ray and CDs the customer buys whatever they want. Then they insert the disc and its ripped automatically with no further work for the customer. All the ads and trailors are stripped so you can get right to your content. Another nifty (of many) feature is the ability for kscape to talk back and adjust aspect ratio for theaters with masking panels and anamorphic lenses. No other system that i know of does this.

Physical media means the customer has access to everything...not just whatever studio signs up. With streaming you get a netflix/partial experience.

What would be great is if you could download/purchase everything. Since hollywood seems to be ran by morons this isnt possible. Soooo...someone needs to build bit torrent software that works with kscape and we will finally have a winner.

Well, to be fair, Hollywood isn't an IT industry. Someone else who is would end up really providing such a system. But, that someone would have to make money doing it, and it's a big job, competing against rampant theft of the exact same product, and where they wouldn't be able to charge a tithe of what the actual hard media version would go for most likely, where the storage and download bandwidth requirements would be huge, and where they would deal constantly with proof of purchase problems that don't exist with hard media.

If you buy a disc and you destroy it or lose it, that's your problem. If you download something and you lose it, you probably assume you have the right to download it again. Someone has to keep up with all of that forever more, and prove that you really do have the right to download it, and that it's really you downloading it, and so forth.

And, even when not outright stealing, as someone else pointed out above, you are competing against someone just getting a Netflix subscription and ripping every disc they rent and keeping a copy.

So it's not exactly a no-brainer how it would be done or whether it would necessarily work well or whether it would make their situation any better.

Well. I have been thinking this over off and on today. Here is my take away. What's done is done. If someone comes in and buys this thing, we can only hope they do not muck it up. I am not holding my breath....they could not get anyone else to pour more money into it. And since they were in need of more money, what does that say about their state of affairs anyhow? Were they not turning a profit? Did they exhaust their resources getting the studio backing for the online store? Who knows if we will ever know the details. The writing was obviously on the wall...but apparently written in invisible ink, but it was there, since we are here. Sad that it was dropped like an a-bomb on everyone. But sometimes that is the best way....as Seinfeld would say, "Like a Band-Aid; RIGHT OFF!".

What do we do? Same thing we always do. Move on. Sell better disc players and media storage furniture? :) Between Vudu/UV, studio specific streaming services (Sony, for example), and the rental machines on every corner, there should not be a huge problem getting the content to the people, even in UHD quality (certainly not bit for bit however....but how many really care anymore?)

As Mac said though, the one thing that made the Kscape system a "luxury" item was its ability to go straight to the movie, bypassing all the crap. So that means all the people who get angry and impatient will get a bit more angry and a bit more impatient when and if they sit down to watch a movie. 1st world problems IMHO.

The auto aspect control was a nice feature, but we have worked around that with control systems for clients without Kscape forever, so no big deal there.

My honest opinion is that Kscape dug their own grave slowly. How? They marketed themselves as a luxury brand and priced their products as such. So by their own doing, they limited their sales to a very small niche market. Now, I do not know if they would have cut their MSRP in half, they could have more than doubled the customer base. But I know we could have sold at least a handful more systems over the years if that were the case.

My hope? Someone picks up the pieces and keeps the online store alive. Hopefully the agreements with the studios to provide content stay intact. The next thing would be to sell the servers/players at much lower prices. A streaming player should sell for less than $500. This box would stream content from the online store or from a local server. It only needs to be the size of an Apple TV or Tivo Mini. A streaming player/server with 12-16TB of storage should be less than $2500. This should also include a slot to play discs (available at any location with a player). A house system with say a theater room and 4 secondary locations....~$5k sounds like an easy sale. The money is now made on the sales of the content, not the hardware. Sure, I am ok paying a good bit more than a Roku since I am getting the UI, the straight to movie, features, the auto aspect, favorite scenes, etc.

So, will the grandfathered DVD servers still function? I could probably pick up a bunch of hardware now and put together a system for my kids to play movies on. :) For free! Winning!

Actually the metadata was another luxury aspect. Not so great to horrible metadata is the bane of anyone who wants to set up a 'just works' media system, particularly if it needs to control various aspects of the theater hardware based media format and features. Even fairly good metadata sources often don't have this information or if you get a slight mismatch on which specific version of a movie you have it can have the wrong format info and such. And of course for all those folks just hacking in (aka stealing) media from wherever, it's often really limited and/or wrong. Do streaming media sources provide that sort of info in their metadata at all?

Oh, you mean iTunes.

You can't download orange is the new black on iTunes.

The only place you can get everything is a torrent site.

You couldn't ever get everything on disc either. Some content, especially tv shows, didn't cone out.

I would just like to have one box that can do every service instead of needing multiple devices to be able to get everything.

In many respects, this is a web browser. At this point a browser is the lowest cross platform common denominator. Unfortunately, everyone's business model requires some sort of lock-in and browsers are a bit too open. There may be some opportunities when ipv6 becomes pervasive because each device will have a unique IP address and a service can restrict delivery to a list of authorized addresses. It remains to be seen how hackable this scheme might become.

IPv6 has built-in features to enable device privacy, which most OS's have enabled by default.
[Link: internetsociety.org]

Encryption provides far more robust security than an immutable per-device address.

But that doesn't solve the problem he was talking about, which is guaranteeing that content is being delivered to the rightful owner. You can of course encrypt the stream for each individual recipient. But, the overhead would be stupidly high. And, all that a thief needs to do is to get a key for himself (or steal someone else's) and then sell it, or post it. So you still need to be able to have some reasonable assurance the person on the other end actually paid for the content. Suddenly your legitimate access gets cut off because people all over the world start connecting using your encryption key.

One way you could do it is the reverse of what happens when you connect to a server using HTTPS. It involves verification of the identity of the machine based on public key certificates. But, that requires that every machine publically visible have not just an assigned IPV6 address but also an assigned DNS name (and dynamic DNS names probably wouldn't be accepted since they would also be subject to easy abuse.) In that sort of scheme, you'd have to get a certificate for your machine's DNS name, and register it with a well known certificate authority. Then they could be sure they were connecting to you (sans some unlikely situation such as a massive DNS infrastructure hack of course.)

Unfortunately that would be unlikely to be feasible, given that it's probably the only real means by which this could be done. For home machines it wouldn't be so much of an issue, but for all of those portable devices it would be rough.

And of course even then there's nothing to stop me from setting up a server with a certificate, and just re-broadcasting the content again. But at least in that case the person doing it has to take some risk by being publicly accessible.

[Link: arstechnica.com]


At the end of the day, I think KScape's Encore product line (in terms of features & performance) was positioned to be the ideal solution for integrators, but the pricing obviously would never allow for mass adoption. W/out knowing their costs re: R&D, licensing, storage and bandwidth costs it's hard to say whether they could have been more competitive.