[hacker]

Originally Posted by Pride Of Lions

People are choosing to forgo the "theater experience" in favor of staying home, microwaving popcorn, wearing pajamas and watching 2-3 movies at a time (and without the annoying trailers and commercials for 20 minutes into the time the movie's supposed to start (!). Idiot moves, like condemning the audience that's actually willing to come to the theater, typify the movie studios unwillingness to confront the real problem: getting seats in the theaters.

You haven't rented a DVD recently, have you? Most of the DVDs released this year (from major studios) prohibit you from jumping past the commercials into the main menu of the DVD. You HAVE TO watch the previews and commercials before your DVD player's remote control buttons for the menu navigation work. I've tried this on 3 DVD players I have here, and its consistent.

The industry is talking about doing the same thing with regular broadcast television cable, through the use of the Broadcast Flag. That's roughly around the same time I'll be throwing my TV out on the curb and giving up on watching the news, cable, movies or videos.

(Though I suppose ripping the DVD, encoding it and stripping out the commercials would work, I'm not about to go try that with my DVDs).

Mattoquai: That's an interesting use for BT. I have a hard time believing that it'll be free and I'm concerned for the security of the phone users. Will they ask us if we want to accept the attachment? They should.

This has been around for at least 6 years (though using IrDA for the same exact purpose). A company even took our project and created an entire business model around it, specifically to "beam" content to users at tradeshows, theatres and restaurants. Pretty impressive stuff. The bluetooth angle is interesting too, but you'd have to associate, authorize, authenticate, and accept whatever it was sending you. Not a wise idea in these times. Anyone nearby could sniff, record, and play back bluetooth "conversations" without you even knowing about it.