[swampplanet]

When I first read about Zediva and how they planned to work it, I laughed. Are they going to have tons of people going around changing dvd machines. I pictured a huge warehouse with people running around putting dvds in machines.

[jerf]

"Are they going to have tons of people going around changing dvd machines[?]"

In the short term, maybe. In the longterm, this can be automated with robotics, and not even very difficult ones. Certainly feasible today, if not something a startup can quite just run out and buy.

And of course, if they buy a hundred DVDs, why not shortcut the entire process and send a "cached" stream? What's the difference between a "cached" DVD and a DVD?

This is one particular manifestation of something I've been saying for a decade now, which is that like it or not and regardless of the challenges sooner or later the law is going to have to give up the idea that the mechanical source of content has any meaning, because whatever rules you draw can be gamed. The only question you'll ultimately be able to ask is whether you have the rights to view a movie or not.

And let me just underline the one particular manifestation bit one more time. Once the kind of people who frequent this site start really thinking about how to game the system in this style you can generate a dozen ideas in an hour, each of which the law really has no current answer to. One immediately obvious example is that if this is legal for DVDs it obviously ought to be legal for CDs, right? Why not a library that takes video of a book two thousand miles away and physically turns pages? (It wouldn't take much post-processing of a video stream to make that feasible.) Why not add caching of the streams to any of those things? If caching in general is wrong, is it OK for me to go ahead and advance the book one page while letting the reader read the previous page, so they don't have to wait for the robot to turn the page laboriously? What if I mix in some P2P, can I stream my neighbor's copy of something? And so on and so on for dozens of questions resulting in hundreds of lawsuits and brutally conflicting and downright gibberish precedents for decades, until someone finally manages to sit down and really straighten this out somewhere around 2050.

[checker]

Why not use late model computers or DVD players with some sort of digital input to control playback without mechanical input? It's not the player that's limited by the law, right?

[modeless]

No sillier than warehouses of people stuffing DVD envelopes, and an army of postal workers delivering them.

Also: http://www.amazon.com/Sony-DVPCX995V-400-Disc-Changer-Player...

[michaelbuckbee]

If they're going to stick strictly to playing a DVD disk in a machine as a legal end run I would imagine they would purchase large "tower" external drive cases holding 10 Bays or more and slave them to servers. Then they would write some custom software to handle managing the streams / playback, compression.

However, they may claim they are "backing up" or "caching" the drives by just mounting ISO images of them and doing the actual reading and serving of them from there relying on a 1:1 ISO to Disk ratio to hold the lawyers at bay.

[biot]

DVD drives (IDE/SATA) are under $20 each retail. If they're not running things virtually using ISOs, it's cheap enough to buy a few thousand, hook them up to various systems, and keep the most popular ones in there, only having to swap out when a movie is requested that isn't already in a drive.

[bradmccarty]

I'm taking the wild guess that there are towers with DVD readers, sending the signal. The question of how these logistics all come together though is puzzling.

[nitrogen]

From the article: At its California data center, Zediva has set up hundreds of DVD players. They’re automated, jukebox-style.