![]() Any sign of a Planet Earth Concert DVD? Please, please, please, PLEASE will you release a DVD of your 21 night stint in London. No use or reprinting of content without permission. Is it the first of a new breed of virtual video rental stores or just an odd little blip in the history of content delivery? P Time will tell. However, from a consumer point of view, its actually a very compelling value proposition. It seems like its very retro, says Gupta. How this type of business can compete in a sea of streaming media offerings remains to be seen. Still, it didnt stop us from enjoying Toy Story 3, all for free via the promotion, on our 50-inch 1080p plasma. We did see a few jitters, but we blame this on our web connection. ![]() Once the film started, we were extremely impressed with the image. Ater the DVD menu, we sat through maybe 30 seconds of buffering, as well as a few blips of both previews and the disc menu we opted to skip that stuff. After choosing Toy Story 3, we were asked about a few preferences, such as if we wanted previews and whether or not wed want to start from the beginning if we stopped the movie. We logged into our account, and browsed through the 106 different movie titles that were available at press time. The Zediva site does require a user name, an email address, and a password. For our testing, we used D-Links Boxee Box, as well as the Boxee Browser app. Other options to crank yankers turd in a car the service to a larger screen include Google TV and Netgears Push2TV. If you have a home theater PC, youll be set for a big-screen experience. Zediva is a browser-based service, designed for use on a PC or Mac. However, this made us even more curious, so we decided to take advantage of Zedivas offer of two free movie rentals good through March 31, with restrictions. When you first fire up a Zediva movie, you typically see the main menu for a Philips DVD player. You are actually watching the output of that DVD player. A physical DVD sits in a physical DVD player, he says. ![]() CTO Vivek Gupta says there is no actual DVD copying. P It works roughly the same way as a traditional video rental outlet used to, albeit using a different delivery mechanism. See, Zediva relies on something called First Sale Doctrine, a loophole that allows them to buy DVDs at Best Buy or even the local 7-11, and then rent them out to others. Talk about an old-school business model! P One is left with more questions than answers: How do they possibly think this will scale? P Are DVD players cheaper by the dozen? P And what about network bandwidth? Part of Zedivas business model is to keep things legit. Instead, they use actual DVD players to deliver the goods in real time. Thats because Zediva doesnt encode its movies digitally so thousands upon thousands can watch at once. In fact, when we went back around 9:30, only 30 of the 106 movies offered were available for rent. The number of copies varies, depending on the movies expected popularity. Similar to Redbox, if all of the copies of The Social Network are rented out, you may have to wait a while or watch something else. In other words, Zediva sometimes runs out of stock. Just be advised: When you return, someone else could be watching your movie, which means you may have to wait. It also allows you to leave the movie and pick up where you left off at a later date. Like your normal DVD player, the Zediva interface allows users to rewind, fast-forward and pause during playback. ![]() Rental fees are 99 each or you can purchase a package of 10 for Once you rent a movie, you have 14 days to watch it. There are no studios involved, no partnerships, and no other agreements. Crank yankers turd in a car Much like mom and pop video stores remember those?, Zediva buys actual physical DVD movies, and rents them out to viewers via a web interface.
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