Petteri Pyyny
1 Apr 2005 0:20
Cuban AfterDawn Holdings Inc, the sole owner of the Finnish website AfterDawn.com, announced today its plans to launch the world's first legal, fully DRM-less movie download service.
AfterDawn aims to provide unlimited downloads of DVD-quality movies with a monthly subscription fee of $29.95, thus competing directly against the movie industry heavy-weights such as Blockbuster and Hollywood -backed movie download services such as Movielink. However, AfterDawn's service differs from its competitors in several ways -- downloaded files wont contain any usage restrictions and all files are transferred to users utilizing modern P2P technologies.
"As Cuba's Internet connections aren't suitable for delivering DVD-quality movies to thousands of users directly, we've decided to use BitTorrent network as our main method of delivering the movies, thus cutting down the bandwidth costs by up to 90 percent compared to our competitors. This helps us to deliver the savings directly to our customers," said Jari Ketola, AfterDawn's CTO in a phone interview.
According to AfterDawn's CTO, company had to decide which format they would use with their upcoming service. "After considering our options, we felt that it would serve our customers best if we would deliver the movies using the old, but reliable MPEG-2 video encoding instead of more modern solutions, such as MPEG-4. This also eases the process of transferring the movies to the Net, as the movies don't need any re-encoding when they're transferred from DVD-Video discs to DVD images. Users will also benefit from our solution, because the files can be easily burned to blank DVDR discs and watched on a regular DVD player rather than with a desktop computer", says Mr. Ketola.
Several Hollywood studios have already expressed their concerns about the upcoming service, but as the service is based in Cuba, the odds seem to be on AfterDawn Holding's side. Legal experts say that the operation resembles the notorious Movie88's service, but as the service is hosted in a country that doesn't recognize WIPO's worldwide copyright mandates, it is highly likely to succeed.
According to the company's spokesman, James Delahunty, the new service is about to launch by the end of the year and will be available worldwide. Service will feature thousands of Hollywood movies, including all the latest blockbusters, he promises.
Source: Twisted April Fool's joke