Zombie Room

First, my apologies for late last part for those of you who were waiting for it early this week – had quite a hectic work week the both of us, and didn’t have time to finalize the text until now. But here we go! And to those new to what’s going on, this is the third part of the Video-On-Demand review – you can read the first part here, and the second part here.

If there’s one thing I learned from my last week’s Video-On-Demand test, it’s that the services available right now in Finland have high prices, limited selection and bad technology running them. Not a very good start for the big revolution – but you gotta start somewhere, right? As the last part of the research, we took a little look into the future to see, what’s out there for tomorrow, and how things should be working, in a perfect world.

Welcome to the last leg of the Voyage of Despair.

THE IDEAL SERVICE: INTRODUCING FILMIFY

The fictional service FILMIFY is a concept that’s been bouncing around my head for quite some time already. Basically, it’s a tar ball of frustration, where I stick all the things done wrong in current VOD markets, and try to make them right in my head. We even had an idea to set up a service like this some time ago, but backed out because we realized that the market is going to be flooded with very good competitors very soon, and we’re not enough startup maniacs to run through the hell to get it financed, armwrestle with the distributors and finally end up with a compromise of a service we’d not be happy with.

But here’s how I think the platform should work, and I’m sure one day a service will emerge that does everything exactly the right way. But until then, this is just a wet daydream.

THE WEBSITE

Filmify is simple. It brings together three main elements of film watching experience: wide variety of content, social experience and high quality. In short, it’s a combination between Internet Movie Database, YouTube and Spotify, connected tightly to Twitter and other social media services.

FINDING A FILM

Filmify offers the a vast chunk of data – often even meaningless to the everyday user – of every film, and makes it possible to search by every term the content. You can get a list of every film done by a specific cinematographer, or just go through the films that have won at Cannes Festivals. You can search films by keywords, by rating, or even by following individual user’s vote history. And if that’s not enough, it has a built-in suggest-a-film -system, where you need to type in an example film of the style you’re looking for, and it starts suggesting you films that are alike.

And just like with Spotify, Filmify has content. And it’s fresh, and the catalog is long. In the future, the distributors have abandoned the release restrictions because they’ve finally realized that they only fuel the piracy, so films are out simultaneously on all platforms and distribution options. So the films on Filmify are new, but the catalog goes long way back to the early years of filmmaking, making it a real goldmine for classic addicts. Thousands of titles are added on weekly basis.

PAYING FOR THE FILM

The business model is freemium: for free, you get to watch as much films as you like, but ever 20 minutes there’s a localized commercial break. “Hi, this is Jonathan from Filmify! I hope you’re enjoying the service as much as we do…” And with monthly fee of 19,99€, you get an unlimited access to all the goodies the service has to offer, free of ads of any type. Of course, if you would like to get a DVD with all the extras and shit, it’s possible – just right click, pay, and the film is on it’s way from Amazon.

All kind of transactions are made as easy as possible, and the service hosts payment options also for non-credit card holders.

WATCHING THE FILM

The quality is, of course, important. You are being served with the best possible quality available – HD by default, 5.1 sound, and a perfect streaming technology, just like with YouTube. And it’s damn easy to use, and you can even embed the films to your blog or your Facebook profile (the ad-ridden versions, of course).

THE SOCIAL SIDE OF THINGS

Filmify also realizes that film watching is getting more and more social experience. People like to rate films, talk about them online and let others know what they are watching. Hell, it even allows film viewers to throw online film watching party, with an intergrated simultaneous IRC-style channel-based chat, where you can watch all the Star Trek films for example, and comment them live to everyone. Included also is a tag mode, where you can tag stuff from the film, and a You Want To Know More -box – if activated – offering more information on things seen on screen – connected to an ever-growing Film Wiki full of trivia, info and tidbits.

SUMMARY

Filmify is a service every service should aim to become. Keep it simple, keep it social and keep it cheap enough, and the world is in the palm of your hand.

BUBBLING UNDER

But for now, Filmify doesn’t exist. Yet, there certainly is something happening. Zombie Room introduces two interesting services I’m going to be keeping a close eye on.

Voddler is – not surprisingly – from Sweden. They seem to have quite a good grasp in entertainment consuming, as proven by Pirate Bay and Spotify. Voddler wants to do what Spotify did for music – offer a “legal” solution for watching films online, that actually competes with the “illegal” ones.

Here’s their rap about the service:

“Voddler can provide unlimited video content distributed to any number of users by streaming. No limitation of content will enable you to have instant access to your old favorite movies as well as the newest blockbusters. But that is not enough for Voddler. Your entire movie experience is our main focus. Instant access, a user friendly video application and a complete network focused on film will make Voddler the obvious choice for a movie night. “

And here’s how it looks like:

The service is now in private beta, and invitations are highly valued. For the payment, Voddler has three alternative; one financed by advertising, one as a monthly subscription with unlimited access as well as a pay-per-view option.

I’m looking forward for Voddler. If someone has invites, and want to make a Zombie happy, all I can say is GIMME GIMME GIMME! My email is timo [at] ironsky [dot] net.

But in the meantime, there’s something quite interesting out there, too.

HDMT.NET

Imagine a service with the latest films and TV-serieses available for streaming in the best possible HD quality, with just one click – and for free. Too good to be true? Well, let me tell you about HDMT.NET.

I don’t know almost anything about HDMT. It’s a service that popped to my Facebook this morning, and after that I’ve been in awe of it. Simple in Google way, the service lists heaps of fresh films and TV-serieses right on it’s front page, viewable by just one click. To quote someone commenting the link I shared: “What the hell..?”

The service isn’t too talkative of it’s origins, either. Apparently, it’s based in Netherlands – only thing I was able to dig out of it is this:

HDMT.net offers best-rated movies and TV shows streaming with similar HD quality. Hosted on professional streaming servers, streaming from HDMT.net are reliable and authentic. You can never worry about broken links.

The service is obviously on the gray area, and doesn’t comment the legal issues – the only thing they talk about is offering streaming services:

HDMT.net offers streaming service for all movie and tv shows fans around the world. All videos on HDMT.net source from Internet. We respect copyrights of producers and advocate all friends here to budget legitimate DVDs to support your favorite movies and tv shows and persons who make efforts on these products.

I haven’t been able to test the service out yet, since it’s being hammered by quite massive traffic at the moment. The site isn’t too attractive, and searching options are very limited, but the quality and the freshness of the selection is indeed impressive. We’ll see how long it lasts online before the copyright hound dogs tear it to pieces – or, maybe they have something in mind! Who knows, maybe it’s there for good. Let’s hope for the best!

Thanks for following Zombie Room’s Voyage of Despair. It seems that although right now we are knee deep in gob, there is actually light at the end of the tunnel. Remains to be seen wether it’s an exit to a better world, or a big corporate train heading this way full steam.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 15th, 2009 at 22:55 and is filed under Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.