
Warner Bros. to Rent Movies Digitally on Facebook, Starting With 'Dark Knight' - mjfern
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/warner-bros-rent-movies-digitally-165218
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aditya
Link to watch: <http://www.facebook.com/darkknight>

Fascinating move by both Warner Bros. and FB. I wonder if this is streaming
from FB datacenters or Warner Bros? No wonder Apple hates FB, they just went
up against Apple, Netflix, Amazon and Google/Youtube (EDIT: Also, Hulu) in the
video rentals space, and social is one aspect that affects movie watching the
most. Very smart.

EDIT: Ooh, they also launched an iOS app that allows you to buy the movie:
[http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-dark-knight-app-
edition/i...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-dark-knight-app-
edition/id401016418?mt=8&ign-mpt=uo%3D4)

Also, Imagine being able to use facebook credits earned in Farmville to rent
movies...

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jamesjyu
I'm seeing an embarrassing SSL is not enabled message from their heroku app :)

[https://img.skitch.com/20110308-8ps8aam6fx8fw1eqhp67tnyss.jp...](https://img.skitch.com/20110308-8ps8aam6fx8fw1eqhp67tnyss.jpg)

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iuguy
Sadly my region doesn't support credits for Milyoni's payment system. Still,
this is very very interesting.

It's times like this when I'm sure the movie studios must at some point think,
"Streaming all this bandwidth is expensive, if only there was some way we
could put all this on the user, maybe split the film up into chunks and have
them stream it from each other in some sort of friend-to-friend way."

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naner
Out of curiosity, can anyone describe the experience for the rest of us: How
well does it work? Does it require Silverlight or some other plugin? How is
the resolution? Etc.

I think this is pretty huge. Facebook is obviously exploring several avenues
for platform use and WB can pull in a ton of demographic information from
this.

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mgrouchy
Hate this. Still region specific and on Facebook.

The Last thing I need in my life(or at least one of the last things) is more
apps/companies/etc. trying to make me use Facebook.

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jobu
Agreed. And $3 to "rent" a movie online for 48 hours is outrageous. Netflix
killed this idea before it happened.

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smackfu
Netflix has a pretty weak first-run movie selection.

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georgemcbay
That's true, but compared to a single nearly-3-year-old movie, they're way up
on this new venture.

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jadeprincess23
It's amazing how the internet allows people and companies to tap into
different markets, almost seamlessly, making the "indirect competitors" from
Porter's five forces, truly the ones with the most potential to attack a
business.

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namdnay
TIL it is correct in American to use the verb "rent" for both parties.

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ryall
Hold on just a minute, all this time/money should be spent on more lawyers and
drm. Replacing an antiquated business model, now that's just crazy!

