David, you should have pattened your downloadable DVD idea............................
zdnet.com
By John Motavalli, Yahoo! Internet Life
May 28, 1998 5:23 PM PDT
In the year 2000, when you want to see a movie, will you simply download all four gigabytes of the film using your cable modem?
This may sound like the usual "interactive TV" bluster but there's at least one experienced Web-trepreneur who's claiming he'll make it happen -- and soon. David Friedensohn, former CEO of the music service SonicNet, has launched a home video sales site called Big Star, which has a searchable database of 100,000 titles. The "killer app," he says, will be downloadable DVD technology. Essentially, using MPEG video technology and the high speed cable modems that will be deployed in the U.S. and internationally in the next couple of years, viewers will be able to download files even those as large as 4 gigabytes into their recordable DVD players in a relatively short time. Friedensohn says he has a test of this very model coming up with an overseas partner who has a distributed base of 150,000 cable modems. He declines to name that partner.
We'll see if all this turns into a big market. A few years ago, all the telephone companies thought they could deliver movies through copper telephone lines, and most of those big plans are in smoke now.
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