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spotcatbug
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Clayton, NC
 
2011-09-19, 10:49

It really feels like there's still another shoe that's going to drop, re. Qwikster, and we're all going to be like, "Whoa! Now it all makes sense."

Could the Zediva* business model work into Netflix's plan somehow? I mean, if Netflix wanted to start doing what Zediva was doing (streaming directly from actual DVDs), they'd need to jettison the DVD side of their business first (right?). Once they have DVD streaming going, they can say to the studios, "Hey, whatever you don't let us pay you to stream directly, we're just gonna stream off a DVD, so you might as well play ball with us."

Yeah, Zediva got shutdown, but I believe that's mostly because they aren't big enough to really fight the studios on the legal issue(s). They only stayed in operation while they were under the MPAA's radar. I think Netflix could actually fight the MPAA.

*I guess since they got shutdown, the Zediva web site doesn't give too much info about what they were up to. What they did was have a whole bunch of DVD players connected to the Internet. You would rent a particular movie and then, instead of them sending it to you, they'd pop it into a DVD player and stream directly from that player to your home. Basically a long distance DVD rental. Apparently (at least they believed this), that doesn't infringe on any copyright laws.

Ugh.
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