After seeing that some content on Vimeo is available for DRM-free purchase (Earthlings) and some is not (Sherlock, etc...), I wonder whether anyone knows of sources for legal DRM-free movie/series purchases.

There's
https://www.gog.com/movies where I got the great movies Ink and The Frame
as well as https://groupees.com/ which rarely has movie bundles like the Devolver bundle where I got one of my favourite movies A Line in the Sand as well as the also nice Enemy Empire, Down Here and a few others (some of which seem to be region locked outside of bundles).
I haven't found a filter link for Vimeo's DRM-free offerings yet and would appreciate it if there was one since right now I still have to look through the catalogue manually.

I'd like to know of more sources, please help. I don't care whether it's "only" about indies since some of those are very good and often better than the big ones imho.
Unfortunately GOG stopped adding movies to their catalogue ages ago, is there any chance this will change and why aren't the Devolver titles in here when they are even available DRM-free elsewhere?

Link compilation so far:
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/guide/video

https://www.gog.com/movies
Ink
The Frame

https://vimeo.com/devolverdigital/videos
https://vimeo.com/kinonation/videos
The Frame (Vimeo)
https://vimeo.com/nationearth
Earthlings
A Line in the Sand
Enemy Empire
Down Here
Home, James

http://www.onlinetvrecorder.com/v2/

https://www.vhx.tv/

http://archive.org/details/movies
Sita Sings the Blues

[url=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos]https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Videos[/url]
[url=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tarzan_of_the_Apes_(1918).webm]Tarzan of the Apes (1918)[/url]
[url=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:%D0%91%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B5%D1%86_%C2%AB%D0%9F%D0%BE%D1%82%D1%91%D0%BC%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BD%C2%BB,_noaudio.ogv]Battleship Potemkin[/url]
[url=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gullivers_Travels_(1939).webm]Gulliver's Travels (1939)[/url]
[url=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Betty_Boop%27s_Birthday_Party_(1933).webm]Betty Boop's Birthday Party (1933)[/url]
[url=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Popeye_the_Sailor_Meets_Sindbad_the_Sailor_(1936).webm]Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936)[/url]

https://www.youtube.com/user/BlenderFoundation
Sintel
Elephant's Dream
Tears of Steel
Caminandes 1-3
Cosmo's Laundromat

https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=EgIwAQ==&q=e (License: CC BY)
Steal this movie II
Star Wreck
Kit Carson (1940) Public Domain Western

https://groupees.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_films

GOG originally planned on having Hollywood movies and TV shows here and had an opportunity to bring some here but not under the most ideal terms they and the customer base would have preferred. Essentially due to the way that rights ownership works in the movie/TV show industry it is rather incompatible with how the GOG community expects things to be sold on GOG. Basically, investors buy movie distribution etc. rights within a given region of interest, and completely different investors buy the rights in other regions. For a given movie it may have a dozen or more investors/rights owners just in one region and totally different ones in every other region adding up to a huge list of rights owners all whom have completely different views on business models and distribution. It is essentially next to impossible to round up some 50 or more rights owners scattered around the world in different regions and bring them to a table to discuss with them how to bring their property to market DRM-free with global distribution rights and one world pricing.

According to GOG the best they were able to do was to potentially negotiate some titles on a region by region basis, so they asked the community if people would go for that and based on feedback they received in return there are no Hollywood titles in the catalogue and that pretty much says it all. There's a video on Twitch.tv where they discuss this. Don't have the URL handy but it's here in the forums from any of several previous discussions on the topic.

I'm of the opinion that it is highly unlikely we will ever see any titles appear here on GOG due to these complex ownership rights being fundamentally incompatible with GOG's business model and customer expectations in a rather irreconcilable manner, and that selling 3rd rate niche indie documentaries most likely turned out to not be particularly profitable so they likely discontinued allocating manpower and other resources/attention to the movies section, leaving it present only to honour contractual obligations. All personal speculation of course.

The most likely scenario for the future of DRM-free Hollywood type movies and TV shows, is that they might appear on some other web based distribution platforms that do not have a customer base with pre-existing bias towards worldwide distribution and global pricing models. If some other company out there is willing to try to sell whatever they can get their hands on under the terms the movie industry is willing to offer it under regionally then it might work out if there are enough people out there willing to purchase from them, but I suspect the problems it that the number of titles available would be all too small and due to the regional distribution rights problems would be difficult to market globally at all, and would essentially be like starting up a separate business in every single region.

What's worse is that it is probably unlikely to ever change because it's unlikely a single investor or group of investors out there will ever buy out the entire global rights to a big budget movie because they don't particularly seem to want global distribution rights in the first place. So the only movies we're likely to ever see available under terms that GOG's customer base is willing to accept are likely only movies that have no real demand nor profitability to be worthwhile for GOG to pursue further.

I suspect GOG is probably rather unlikely to discuss further details publicly about this though as they'd have nothing to gain from it and it could easily turn into a PR nightmare as they'd really have nothing to really share other than bad news nobody wants to hear (which often turns into fuel for people to argue about and just want more information to then use that as more fuel to argue about etc.)

So what you're saying basically is that I'm the only one interested in indies?

I think there is a proposal in the EU to have a single digital market.
Perhaps when all this becomes a reality, in the EU it will be possible to deal with only one distributor for each content (not in US or UK).

I wonder if GOG completely gave up, or if they're still trying to bring some new movie here.
We'd need some big name brave enough to attempt the DRM-free way.
When Disney added the LA games here, for a moment I naively hoped for their old cartoons..

I'd settle for games with their cartoons characters like Cold Shadow or Ducktales remastered.

It's not an issue of polarization actually. There can be tens of thousands of people interested in something and still not be a big enough market to produce a profitable business model worthy of pursuit compared to other ventures the same amount of investment of money and human resources can produce doing something else.

If selling indie movies that they have here on site at the moment was a huge boost to their profitability then they would be regularly adding more movies instead of rejecting them. That isn't to say that indie movies don't make any money, but it is to say that this is a video game website/business and selling movies of any form here has proven itself to be less profitable of a business venture than perhaps they had hoped it might become.

Please don't take those words and put a spin of them that starts with "So what you're saying is...". What I am saying - is exactly the specific words I have said. :)

That's why I mentioned Devolver. They are a video game studio (and a good one at that) but still got into selling indie movies (yet again quite good ones), so there is a connection somehow already, maybe it was the reason why GOG tried going this way in the first place but it failed probably also due to their strong focus on gaming documentaries.
I guess GOG would need a movie nut in the house with a ton of connections to the indie film making scene (if there is one).

Somehow I just hoped there already is something like that somewhere since I discovered that even Vimeo started offering DRM-free downloads of semi-professional movies or that at least something like that is being started somewhere, I'd be a big supporter since I'm unwilling to rely on copyright infringement to solve this problem.

I've started making a little list in OP and gather whatever is out there, please add what you find.

.. I still hope that Power of Grayskull will appear here ;)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/definitivefilms/power-of-grayskull

Does VHX have their own "store", or is it just a service for other providers to set up their stores?

Whenever I see them mentioned it seems as it's the former, but going to their website it seems to only be the latter. I see "Launch Your Own Streaming Video Service", " VHX provides comprehensive technology for businesses to create custom video experiences..." and links to some hosted stores. There's also a "search" button and you can log in to see the videos you have, but I can't find any way to browse for purchasable videos without tediously going into each and every hosted store (I don't know the names of the videos I'm looking for, I want to see what's available and what looks interesting).

I am disappointed about GOG not doing more with the movies section.

Even if getting big budget movies from big studios is impossible, there's still a lot they can do.
Indies, arthouse movies, documentaries, instant live gigs, public domain, foreign movies (as in not originally in English), etc.

They could be adding a new title every day, and not need to worry about running out of new releases for years.


Even if they were to stick strictly to games and such, there are many good documentaries about games, gaming phenomena and older gaming hardware, such as "Bedrooms to Billions" documentaries.

The present situation seems as if they just chose to leave the movie section as it is, with no plans to develop it at all.

Maybe they faced the problem that they simply can't overcome: you can't do global distribution for movies like you can do it for games. There's not even any global standard (PAL vs. NTSC vs. everything), and (unbelievably) many countries prefer to have local language dubbing, so maybe things just can't work out.

Why GOG never even tried to attempt DRM-free FLAC music distribution is another question. That would be much easier than movies, presumably.

TV formats are only a problem with analogue TV. When a video is stored as a digital file, you can play it anywhere, having multiple languages is also a non-issue with most current video containers and players having the option for selecting which audio stream to use.

The problems are rights and DRM. Different distributors having the rights to the same movie in different areas of the globe, different people having rights to different translations, and distributors not trusting DRM-free formats, being afraid of the pirates having easier access to their media.

Also GOG - is the work and cost of tracking down the rights holders, convincing them to sell the movie here, and preparing everything worth the (probably rather low) income that they'll get from the movie?

They did answer that back when movies were introduced. The answer basically was that there are DRM-Free lossless music marketplaces out there, but there wasn't a service like that for movies. Tell me if you want me to go digging for said statement.