Seagate preloads FreeAgent Go with 20 Paramount movies

Seagate is sexing up its FreeAgent Go external drives with 20 pre-loaded Paramount Pictures movies costing $9.99 to unlock. A weekend report in the US edition of the Financial Times revealed the new way of selling drives by Seagate and quoted Darcy Clarkson, Seagate's VP for sales and marketing. He was responding to the point …

[Rick Eastwood]

Media Companies in Thinking Sensibly Shocker !!!

Surely this wont last ? It's actually a sensible idea that goes against everything the idiots in the MPAA etc have been trying !!!!!

[A B 3]

Why not rip your own?

Why not just pick up some from the bargain bin and rip them yourself. Call it a 'mix' drive. I'm little suspect as to the quality of digital content, how can something be smaller in size than a DVD and still be called high defintion?

[Doug Glass]

Surprising Quality

A full length, 2 1/2 hour, movie ripped at the proper resolution for say a Palm Pre has surprising quality. With a good set of ear buds the audio can be very good. In MP4 format expect a file size of about 550MB.

[Neil Cooper]

huh?

Whats your point? This is about external drives for PCs. The palm pre has a 320x480 pixel screen. Hardly hi-def is it?

If you showed the same movie file on a PC it would look awful.

[Jerome 0]

eh?

Sure, but a full 2 hour movie ripped at the proper resolution for say an iPod Nano has surprising quality. With a good set of ear buds the audio can be very good. The video can be removed entirely. In MP3 format, expect a file size of about 80-90MB.

[Ian Stephenson]

$9.99 or.....

You could just buy the dvd for £3 at Asda.

[Throatwobbler Mangrove]

but

"100 movies, each costing $9.99 to view. Let's say average customers unlock 40 movies per drive - that's almost $400 of revenue"

You'd have to be bloody psychic to manage to preload a HD with 100 movies and for them to have a 40% hit rate at $10 a pop, surely?

[K0de]

Wont happen

"A competing business model might be to load a drive completely with movies and sell it at very low or no cost, relying on unlock license fees for revenue. Imagine a terabyte external drive loaded with, say, 100 movies"

People would get the drive, format it, and have a 1TB drive for "very low or no cost"

[Samo]

Done Before?

I like that idea :D

Of course, if this was to be the case, it'll be done on some sort of read-only HDD, so you can't wipe it and use it for your own devices.

Also, hasn't some sort of USB key co been doing this?

[John Dougald McCallum]

Done before?

to true it has been done before when DVD s were just starting to become popular some manufacturers sold the players with 100 DVDs as a "bonus" maybe 7or8 were worth watching the rest were IMO dire straight to video quality.It will probibly be the same with these Movies/Films.

[Pirate Dave]

Shhhh....

don't tell them. Let them figure it out the hard way - like the folks at iOpener did 10 years ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeAgent Go

That external drive that doesn't stack or sleep properly.

The problem with the latest Seagate external drives is that they're nowhere near as good as the external drives they used to make before the Freeagent came on the market.

They stacked perfectly, and powered down correctly.

Seagate seem to be going backwards.

[Trevor 10]

$9.99 per drive or $9.99 per movie?

"Seagate is sexing up its FreeAgent Go external drives with 20 pre-loaded Paramount Pictures movies costing $9.99 to unlock."

or

"Imagine a terabyte external drive loaded with, say, 100 movies, each costing $9.99 to view."

Option 1 - maybe - exspecially if the disk is filled with old dregs of movies the movie distributors couldn't sell anyway

Option 2 - No chance.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the scary movies

... that don't make the drives sleep well

(sorry I know it's silly)

[Anonymous Coward]

Err....

"Both Paramount Pictures and Seagate hope people will start building digital home movie collections on hard drives..."

I think this has been happening for some time now anyway :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm?

*cough* porn *cough*

[wjake]

Need a what?

"It seems obvious that people building digital home movie collections on external hard drives will need a comprehensive labelling system to show the contents,"

Isn't that what Explorer/Finder/File Manager/insert favorite program name here is for?

I mean, when I want to see the contents of my external drive, I click on My Computer, and click on the drive. I don't stare at the case, hoping to divine the contents like Carnack!!

Tossers!!

[mark 58]

Is it still April 1st ??

"Let's say average customers unlock 40 movies per drive - that's almost $400 of revenue.."

Absolute economic fail! Here in the States we can rent a movie for a night for 50pence at a "Redbox". Stunningly stupid to even sugguest that people will 40movies at $9.99 each.

Maybe you should write for PC World or something.

[Annihilator]

*FROM* $9.99

It's worse than the report implies - trawling through to the FT report they're saying the films will be available FROM $9.99.

[Framitz]

Seagate NOT

When I purchase a hard drive I expect all the capacity to be MINE, NOT some BS that Seagate want's to sell.

Seagate . . NEVER again.

[Tom 35]

Unlock?

I expect they end up locked to one windows install by some crappy DRM system.

[Neil Cooper]

News update: movie industry still too greedy

10 bucks to unlock an already-delivered movie is ridiculous. I cant imagine any one with any intelligence paying for that, (which means many people probably would).

$2 is a realistic price, given one can rent (and rip) a DVD from netflix for around that.

I really like the proposed idea of them selling a large drive with locked movies and charging little or nothing for the drive itself. I would buy multiple drives if they did that. Of course I would just reformat the drive as soon as I got it and fill it with something actually useful.

[M Gale]

So how long..

..until some leet hacksaw finds out how to unlock the movies for free, and publishes the howto?

And what (encoding) quality are the movies? I've seen too many DVDs sold with a "and you can also get a digital download version FREE with this disk!" Hang on a minute.. I run OGMrip, and I have a "digital download" version for free, without having the end result look like I'm trying to watch a movie with binoculars across the street through someone's net curtains.

As for whatever shitty DRM got put on the Dark Knight DVDs that are out there.. hah. That took all of a single command-line switch in mencoder to defeat. Then I ripped it and copied it to a couple of friends just because the bastards tried.

Still. Cheap terabyte drive? That'll do me. Just format, and replace with "digital downloads" of the content I've already paid for tyvm.