My friends showed me this last night. Nicole and I don’t watch enough movies for it to make sense for us, but it’s an interesting idea. MovieBeam is a spin-off from Disney that is offering a set-top box that downloads movies over analog NTSC bandwidth and lets you “rent” them for around the price that you’d pay at the video store.
The MovieBeam receiver comes with 100 movies already stored inside. Every week, up to 10 movies are replaced with new movies. So you’ll always have 100 movies — a combination of major new releases and popular favorites — ready for viewing anytime.
Apparently it downloads movies using Dotcast’s datacasting technology which makes use of plentiful spare bandwidth in analog NTSC television channels. Apparently there is a ton of bandwidth available, much more so than your DSL or cable modem – it’s just that it’s inherently multicast; not on-demand. However in the case of movies, most of what people want are a small number of new releases, and so there is no need for on-demand, because you can predict what they will demand and thus high-bandwidth, multicast makes total sense.
My wife and I, we watch a lot more TV shows than movies, so TiVo makes a lot more sense for us than this. But this is an interesting idea nonetheless.