Pay-Per-View to Provide DVD After Viewing? 179
Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that Comcast is entertaining an idea that would allow digital cable customers to purchase a pay-per-view movie for roughly $17 that would also include a hard copy in the mail a few days later. From the article: "The only snafu in the entire idea is the fact that only 40% of Comcast cable subscribers have the required digital box at this point in time. But still, that is 40% of 21 million customers which is not too bad. DirecTV and Dish, are you listening?"
Re:Burners (Score:2, Informative)
Brilliant idea, oh wait, the burner would have to burn in "real time". Well we'll just ship hd's with the units, turn'em into tivo's. Let's see, let's take a $10 cable box, add a $50 in burning hardware (more powerful cpu + actual burner), add $30 for a hd all to save $.50 in postage on an as needed basis.
Re:In my experience... (Score:1, Informative)
the first two lines....
"Would you pay your cable provider 17 dollars to watch a movie in your home in a pay per view form? What if it was not released on normal PPV yet and wont be for over a month?"
that would imply that you could watch it in PPV form when the DVD is released, as long as you order the disk as well....
Re:Burners (Score:2, Informative)
Building upon its award-winning Explorer® 8300(TM) digital video recorder (DVR) platform, Scientific-Atlanta today announced its new MCP-100(TM) Media Center DVR with a built-in DVD burner. This market-leading product will combine all of the great features of the current Explorer 8300 platform, including multi-tuner DVR, optional high definition DVR, DOCSIS (DSG) and Multi-Room(TM) DVR capability, with a new built-in DVD player and burner.
The new MCP-100 Media Center will add DVD burning functionality for standard and high definition content that will give consumers the ability to simply and securely record their favorite shows and movies onto writeable DVDs. The MCP-100 Media Center will support the majority of writeable DVD formats and will also play off-the-shelf DVDs and CDs. In addition, the product is being designed to respect key content protection flags including 'copy freely', 'copy once', and 'copy never' tags.
Read and learn boys and girls. Scientific Atlanta has this product which should be available to Cable Customers early next year. I saw a demo of it at a Cable Show here in KC about 2 months ago...
Re:Market Prices, eh? (Score:3, Informative)
Monoplolists don't have the "ability to absolutely set the price to whatever the producer wants". If Microsoft charged a million dollars for each copy of Windows, would they sell any? There's still a supply and demand curve, and the producer still optimizes profit by setting the price where the curves meet. The only difference with a monopolist is that the supply curve is further out (higher price at any quantity) than in a market with perfect competition.
And the DVD market is far from a monoploy. There's more than one producer of DVDs, and movies are as good substitutes for each other as lots of other items (cars come to mind...).