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General discussionIntroducing GOG.com DRM-Free Movies(632 posts)(632 posts)
(632 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted August 27, 2014
Cause there's no business like show-business!

Our DRM-Free approach to digital distribution has been the foundation of GOG.com since day one and we're convinced it is now firmly rooted in the gaming industry landscape. More and more users start to expect and demand the digital content they paid for to be free from any kind of restrictive mechanisms that limit access to their collections and get in the way of enjoyment. We think this is a good time to take the next step in our quest to make digital entertainment better for everyone. Today we set out to spread our DRM-Free ideas across the movie industry! That's right: GOG.com now offers DRM-Free movies.

Our goal is to offer you cinema classics as well as some all-time favorite TV series with no DRM whatsoever, for you to download and keep on your hard drive or stream online whenever you feel like it. We talked to most of the big players in the movie industry and we often got a similar answer: "We love your ideas, but … we do not want to be the first ones. We will gladly follow, but until somebody else does it first, we do not want to take the risk". DRM-Free distribution is not a concept their lawyers would accept without hesitation. We kind of felt that would be the case and that it's gonna take patience and time to do it, to do it, to do it right. That's quite a journey ahead of us, but every gamer knows very well that great adventures start with one small step. So why not start with something that feels very familiar? We offer you a number of gaming and internet culture documentaries - all of them DRM-Free, very reasonably priced, and presenting some fascinating insight into topics close to a gamer's heart. Now, what do we have in store for you?

- There's a whole new Movie Catalog for you to browse!
- All the movies we sell are priced at $5.99 (that's a launch promo price for a few of them), and we aim to have that as the main price point for most of our future releases
- Two of the movies - The Art of Playing and TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard are available for FREE, so that you can test our new movie distribution features
- Most of our movies are in Full HD 1080p quality, some in 720p. With those of you with limited bandwidth or download quota in mind, we also supply much lighter 576p versions.
- Apart from downloading your movies you have the option to watch them streaming online, right here on GOG.com
- GOG.com is famous for its bonus goodies - each movie will come with as many of them as we can muster
- You can expect subsequent movie releases each week

That's it. GOG.com Movies is a go, time to get some popcorn!
Posted August 27, 2014
Amazing work guys!
Posted August 27, 2014
just gog being gog

AWESOME!
Posted August 27, 2014
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phaolo: [...] Anyway, I just hope that GOG will use MKV + X265 + DTS\AAC + multi languages (ex: eng + original + mine) + soft subs.. and not some weird old container\codec maybe put in archive\pieces :P [...]
They're most likely completely identical to the creator provided files. You might argue with my opinion, but I think that it's best to leave them as untouched as possible.
Posted August 27, 2014
GOG, you need to just keep being awesome. LOVE the idea of DRM free movies. Lets hope you don't encounter too much trouble getting a decent sized catalogue. Prove to the world that DRM is not needed! Ignore the naysayers who say you're diluting your brand, expansion is good.
Posted August 27, 2014
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CharlesGrey: Some 5+ Euros to watch nerds rant about video games? Somehow that doesn't sound so enticing. Mostly because there's plenty of ( legal ) sources on the web where you can get that sort of thing for free.
I don't know any of the documentaries myself so I can't judge. But just because they are about videogames doesn't neccesarily mean that they are of inferior quality.
Post edited August 27, 2014 by KasperHviid
Posted August 27, 2014
The option to stream, is the browser's player flash or HTML5?
Posted August 27, 2014
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triock: I would rather see ebooks here. :I
All in due time... ;)
Posted August 27, 2014
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BJWanlund: Why is everyone being so down about this? I've wanted this exact thing for YEARS now.
Ditto. Two thumbs up from me for this move! Naturally I am not expecting new blockbuster movies to appear here, but it is the thought that matters.

I haven't browsed the movie catalog yet, so no idea if there is anything interesting (yet). But this is EXACTLY the way I'd like to buy movies (as well as music): fully DRM-free, letting me freely watch them on any device I want (offline), without authentication needed.

Someone mentioned DRM-free e-books. Yeah, that'd be fine too, albeit I wouldn't buy them, simply because I don't buy much (e-)books. Not enough free time to read them. I'd still welcome them also.
Post edited August 27, 2014 by timppu
Posted August 27, 2014
I'm all for DRM-free movies, but this line-up of only documentaries does not excite me.
On the plus side, most of the documentaries here are about game-related subjects, which makes them related to the orginal core subject of GOG in a way. Others here have already mentioned it: watering down the formula and allowing all kinds of side-tracks can water down the attention to (until now at least), the core of GOG, Good Old Games. Please keep your focus GOG,
I used to fiercely root for Humble Bundle, They even managed to convince some makers to release their source code! But my enthousiasm for them has diminished from a raging fire to a barely smouldering cinder now that they are pumping out more and more spin-offs of the original core idea and loosing any sense of Quality Control in the process,

You have already bled your colours out of your logo, please, don't go down the proverbial slippery slope and end up like a DRM Free Humble Bundle.

The movie formats offered here are burdened with copyright issues, limiting the choice in player applications.
Matroska is just a container which can contain any format of video and audio stream. Ogg Movie and FLAC audio are examples of truly open formats. Then again, you are limited to those formats which are published by the publisher of the movie.
Post edited August 27, 2014 by jorlin
Posted August 27, 2014
I think this is a VERY cool move, even if it's going to take some time to build up a decent catalogue. For years I've been wanting a service like this to throw my money at. Now as long as GOG can attract some of the types of movies I actually want to buy, I can start looking at paring down my big wall of DVDs and tapes.
Posted August 27, 2014
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phaolo: I just hope that GOG will use MKV + X265
Why should GOG use x265 instead of x264?

While the development of x265 is showing good progress it's not a replacement for x264 yet
It's not optimized yet and takes a lot more time to encode
It's much harder (and therefore slower) to decode which could be an issue for some people with slower computers
The quality is actually worse than x264 at the moment

The quality is worse than x264 because x265 lacks psychovisual optimizations.
It's not worth it until x265 gets psy optimizations or the picture quality otherwise beats x264.
Posted August 27, 2014
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Redfoxe: Next stop: music and mobilephone games ;)
Yes please! It irks me that Humble Bundle often offered both PC and Android versions of many games in one package (e.g. Anomaly Warzone and many others), while GOG gives you only the PC version.
Posted August 27, 2014
Color me both very interested and slightly worried, worried only in the sense of what kind of 'video productions' will end up on catalogue, i definitely recommend caution with 'video productions' of questionable worth regardless of hype.

It's a good move in any case, here's hoping that in 6 years time there will be as many movies on catalogue as there are games today.
Posted August 27, 2014
I know this is a can of worms, and difficult to do in a global context, but how about [content] ratings? I know Indie Game had some... moments... you could maybe link to the IMDB "Parent's Guide" or Common Sense Media if the listing is there. It'd just help purchasers make a better-informed decision.
Posted August 27, 2014
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Gandos: As weird as this may sound, I'm rather disappointed about this move. Would it be great to have a DRM-free movie service? Sure. But if CD Projekt wanted to go into movie distribution, they should have created a separate service for it.

GOG still has so many ways in which it still needs to improve and enhance their distribution of games. Bringing movies into the mix is just wasting valuable resources that would be better spent on improving its existing services.
Keeping up two similar services would actually waste even more resources. Think if CD Projekt would move half of the GOG.com staff to the new GOM.com movie service. Then we would get new (old) games in GOG.com twice as slow as today! ;)
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionIntroducing GOG.com DRM-Free Movies(632 posts)(632 posts)
(632 posts)