Earlier this week, Sonic Solutions announced that they’re planning to roll out downloadable 3D movies for their Roxio CinemaNow line and today they’ve announced that they will begin selling movies on USB flash drives.
The CinemaNow USB Movie Drives will be encoded with Hollywood-approved DRM for multiplatform playback thanks to Widewine. Said USB drives will include an integrated media player and all the necessary video codec’s for playback on a range of devices that include networked Blu-ray players, networked TVs and computers. Due out in Q4 of this year.
Dell is apparently getting ready to offer a Qflix-compatible DVD burner as a $120 add-on to some of its computer packages. The technology works by burning DVDs with CSS copy protection so that they’re “functionally identical to standard retail DVDs,” according to the Qflix web site. The system is in use for many of those DVD-burning kiosks we’ve been hearing about. The drive will allow you to burn movies that have been downloaded from the CinemaNow movie service for playback in a standard DVD player. If it sounds dumb, it’s not – especially for “normal” people.
For instance, ask your parents to get a movie they’ve downloaded to play on their TV somehow. This drive ought to make things a bit easier. Wait, no. Ask your parents if they know what Qflix means and if they know how to download a movie to their computer. On second thought, Dell’s either going to have to upsell this drive like crazy or hope that there’s a segment of people smart enough to download movies and work a DVD burner but too dumb to know how what the word “torrent” means.
[via Ubergizmo]
TiVo and Disney-ABC have forged an agreement to allow users to rent movies from the Walt Disney Studios catalogue later this year.
Some of the movies will be available in high definition, although it’s unclear just how much of the catalog will be hi-def versus standard definition. Rentals will be facilitated through CinemaNow and will work on all Series 2 and Series 3 TiVo boxes.
Full press release after the jump.
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Want to watch 3,400 movies on Windows Media Center? Well, you now can. CinemaNow is now a direct plug-in to WMC, allowing you to download and play first-run titles like Juno (you go girl!). Pay-per-view titles costs $2.99-3.99 while download-to-own costs $9.99-$19.99. You should be able to add the new feature in the WMC dashboard.
