The French start-up MovieSwap promises to legally unlock the trove of 25 billion DVDs that have been sold worldwide in a new streaming service.
The start-up has just launched a Kickstarter crowd funding campaign, that within days already has overshot its goal of €35,000 with a total €55,351 at this moment of writing.
“MovieSwap is the first universal movie library, totally powered by the crowd, to watch and swap films without constraints,” MovieSwap claims, but we suspect rights holders might have a different opinion.
“To make such a dream come true, we worked on a collaborative and crowdsourced approach. Why? Because during the last 15 years, over 25 billion DVDs were sold worldwide. Those movies are now waiting for a second life and MovieSwap is the solution.”
“Because people already paid for them, we invented a fair way to give them a brilliant second life. That’s the logistical and technical basis of MovieSwap, which is ready to:
1. collect millions of DVDs from all over the world; 2. register them on behalf of their owners; 3. put them into the cloud; 4. store them in warehouses and 5. and remotely play them on any device across their personal libraries.”
In order to play back the DVDs, the stat-up will sell a special HDMI-SwapStick, which the viewer has to put in the back of its TV set. The service will be using the VLC streaming software for playback. MovieSwap said it will actually play every DVD that is requested from a central playback system called ‘The Monster’, and stream it to the person requesting the DVD.
The service will be available on PC, Mac, Android tablets and of on a regular TV with the HDMI SwapStick.
Broadband TV Views. MovieSwap insists that it’s prosoded DVD swap service is legal, saying that it has “based its approach on a fully legal basis, combining two legal concepts known as ‘first sale doctrine’ and ‘fair use’.”
That sounds good, and indeed it involves having a ‘proper’ DVD being played somewhere. However, streaming the content of that DVD might be considered a new form of publication – and hence subject to having to pay copyright. On the other hand, it might be argiued that once people have bought a DVD, they are free to do with them what they wan, including making a copy or streaming it to themselves.
Somehow MovieSwap reminds of another clever technical workaround – the ill-fated Aereo, that used thousands of mini antennas to record live TV off the air and save it in the cloud as a sport of personal PVR. In August 2014 a US court decided it is not a cable service, following a Supreme Court decision, that cause Aereo to ‘pause’ its services.