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Hard Drives Shipping with Star Trek 271

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hello-computer dept.
crimeandpunishment writes "Paramount Pictures is trying to live long and prosper by selling Seagate Technology hard drives with the latest Star Trek movie on board ... along with 20 other films. The 500GB hard drive will sell for a special promotional price of $100. It's the latest way for Hollywood to combat falling DVD sales due to piracy."
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Hard Drives Shipping with Star Trek

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  • The 500GB hard drive will sell for a special promotional price of $100.

    Oh yeah that is, of course, if you don't want to watch the titles. If you want to watch the movies:

    The other movies distributed by Paramount, including "GI Joe," ''Nacho Libre" and "Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius" come pre-loaded with a digital lock that requires a code that can be purchased online for $10 to $15 each. Even watching "Star Trek" requires registration.

    So yeah it's $100 or over triple that if you actually want to watch the "promotional" material. Otherwise you're buying a hard drive with a (presumably Windows) partition that has Windows DRM and twenty movies taking up 50 gigabytes of space. Sounds to me like a lame AOL CD that gets you working with the shit and then hopes that you just keep using their platform for buying and downloading movies.

    I guess a brave soul could buy the drive and leave the 50 gigs intact and then download the 20 movies and feign ignorance if the MPAA comes knocking at the door. I wonder if there's some consumer protection laws that states if you buy something legally you have a right to enjoy it. Because right now you're buying a digital copy of something that is encrypted but you're not receiving the license that is required to watch it. They better carefully label that the PROMOTION part of the sale lest a consumer figures that they're paying 10% for the movies and 90% for the drive and then becomes upset when they get home and can't watch the movies without ponying up an additional 200%-300%.

    Both companies declined to say if they were taking a loss on the promotional price.

    Really? Oh yeah, sounds like Sony is bending over backwards to trap you into paying the retail price of owning the digital movie that sells for $15 right now on Amazon [amazon.com]. They're using Seagate and Seagate customers are rubes to get around paying for streaming bandwidth of these 50 gigs to potential customers.

    I choose to rate this tactic as USDA certified lame. Shame on Seagate. Shame on Sony. I feel sorry for those that might buy this without realizing what they're getting themselves into.

    • Re:$100 ... PLUS $10-$15 Charger PER Title (Score:5, Informative)

      by wjousts ( 1529427 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @11:55AM (#31833126)
      Also, the drive itself is about twice the price of the cheapest 500 GB drive you can find on Pricewatch. So even as a 500 GB drive (if you're not interested in paying to watch the movies) it's a rip-off.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by Captain Splendid ( 673276 )
        AND it's a post-Maxtor buyout Seagate drive. Avoid at all costs.

        How the mighty have fallen...

      • Newegg has various Seagate 500GB drives priced between $55 and $160. And I can buy the DVD from amazon.com for $17. Or less ($12) if I go with their individual sellers.

        What's the point, again? Oh, there's this:

        Both companies declined to say if they were taking a loss on the promotional price. Both could be using the offer as a way to lure buyers for other related products they're selling.

        Paramount, a unit of Viacom Inc., is selling its other movie titles, while Seagate Technology is selling a device that enables movies stored on hard drives to be played on television sets for $130.

        Oh, they're trying to promote the idea of playing movies off a hard drive. Brilliant! Count me in! [/sarcasm]

        • Oh, they're trying to promote the idea of playing movies off a hard drive. Brilliant! Count me in! [/sarcasm]

          Why the sarcasm? I've been doing it for years!

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by c++0xFF ( 1758032 )

            Sorry. The sarcasm wasn't pointed at the concept of playing movies on a hard drive, but at the promotion itself.

            Let's take the hard drive out of the picture. It's like selling rewritable DVDs with "free" movies on them and then requiring a code to be purchased as well. Oh, and there's nothing free or lower-priced about it.

            Yeah, that's a great way of promoting your products!

    • Re:$100 ... PLUS $10-$15 Charger PER Title (Score:4, Informative)

      by Uncle Rummy ( 943608 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @11:59AM (#31833202)
      And what's up with their $100 "promotioal" price, and the claim that "an empty 500 GB Seagate hard drive usually sells for $140"? It took me all of 20 seconds to find a 500 GB Seagate [newegg.com] on Newegg for $54.99 with free shipping.

      • Ehm, you are forgetting Hollywood economics (Score:5, Insightful)

        by SmallFurryCreature ( 593017 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @12:25PM (#31833672) Journal

        Remember in Hollywood a movie that earns millions in ticket sales, nonetheless fails to make a profit when the author has to be payed.

        In Hollywood a shared movie does damages to the tune of roughly the world economy * infinity.

        And in Hollywood a 500gb HD costs the price of a 2tb drive to anyone else.

        This ain't even the typical scam of naming the recommended retail price as a the value of a gift, since Seagate doesn't even recommend this price itself.

        Ah, hollywood and scamming. Remember, if you buy a movie, you are supporting these guys. Safe the free world, be a pirate!

      • That $140 figure was probably the price when someone thought up the promotion. By the time it got through all of their bureaucratic muckity-muck, they're putting an overpriced device on the market.

        That's almost as bad as our local Wal-Mart. They have a Battlefield 2142 gaming mouse in their clearance section. It has been on clearance there for over two years (and was likely on the shelves for two years prior to that point), and they still have the price at around $69. Retailers (and, apparantly, movie studies) have a mistaken notion that tech gear holds its value over time.

      • Although TFA didn't state this, a bit of investigation reveals that the drive is external [seagate.com]. Still, $140 for an external 500 GB drive is still a rip-off.

        Interestingly, Seagate's own site seems to not actually list what movies are included.

    • Re:$100 ... PLUS $10-$15 Charger PER Title (Score:5, Funny)

      by Reikk ( 534266 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @12:02PM (#31833272) Homepage
      In other words.. you could say this hard drive comes with Data?

    • Re:$100 ... PLUS $10-$15 Charger PER Title (Score:5, Informative)

      by Shakrai ( 717556 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @12:04PM (#31833306) Journal

      I noticed something similar when I picked up a copy of Gran Torino a few months ago. It came with a little insert that had a code I could allegedly use to download a digital copy of the movie. I thought, "That's cool, I can put it on my laptop and watch it on my next trip." Then I got to the website and was eventually prompted for a credit card number. They wanted more money for the privilege of obtaining a DRM'ed copy of the movie I already paid for.

      Yeah, that was going to happen.....

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by IICV ( 652597 )

      Also, for $100 you can buy a reasonable 1 TB hard drive. A 500 GB non-insane speed drive should cost ~$50.

      Since the movies won't come unlocked, you're paying ~$50 for 50 GB worth of data you could otherwise get for almost free, and which is almost free for them to provide. Is the movie industry just incapable of coming up with a business plan that doesn't involve ripping people off?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      Well It is probably an external drive but over all it is just dumb.
      I can get a 500GB external for less than $100. DRM is makes it a none starter for me. And I have NetFlix so I just put them on my list.
      Just seems like the king of bad idea. What I worry about now is are the Movie companies going to infect External drives with anti piracy crap?
      "I am sorry but it looks like you are ripping your DVDs I can not let you store these illegal files. Just pay for a digital copy to go along with that DVD like a good b

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by plover ( 150551 ) *

      People complain about DVD prices, about movie prices, about whatever the studios do that isn't "give away their stuff for free." And those same people (on slashdot and elsewhere) say "You need to find a new approach." So this looks like an effort by the studio to say "See, we're trying a new approach."

      However, as you've pointed out, we all recognize this is simply a different approach to packaging and marketing, rather than trying to change the economic model. And this particular attempt is almost sleazy

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

        The new approach is charging more than the DVD price? Then to add insult to injury charging an insane markup on a harddrive?

        Low budget films are 90% crap, which is the same ratio as high budget films.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by icebraining ( 1313345 )

        high quality movies still cost a truckload of money to make.

        That's the whole fucking problem.

        Good movies don't have to cost that. The problem is that nobody watches them, most people want to see the most expensive brain-dead CGI fest that can be made.

        The Ice Storm is a very good movie. It had a budget of $18 million. Critics at Rotten Tomatoes give it 75%+. Yet it failed, because people prefer to watch overpriced shit.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Alinabi ( 464689 )

        They'll simply stop investing money in big movies if there's no chance of payback.

        That is fine with me. Bring back the small movies. Where can I sign up to hasten that process?

    • Re:$100 ... PLUS $10-$15 Charger PER Title (Score:5, Interesting)

      by markov_chain ( 202465 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @12:25PM (#31833670)

      This diagram [imagechan.com] sums it up well.

    • It's not an entirely bad idea. The major drawback of the plan is that the films are infected with DRM, making them useless on any platform but Windows, and dependant upon the reliability of DRM activation servers. From past experience with several major vendors, these are not very reliable at all. They'll be shut down in a few years, causing customers to lose access to their films, forcing them to buy again.

      I would consider buying the drive if it met the following conditions:

      1. DRM free. I refuse to buy an

    • This is similar to a glad garbage bag promotion, where there is a code inside the box which allows you to download the movie.

      So I took a chance, and went to the site. You have to enter your name and email as well as the code. (Huh? I thought it was a free promotion?).

      So I took a chance, and entered my email etc. You can download for windows or Mac. Tried downloading with Linux, but the file was corrupted or something...

      So I took a chance and got out the old computer. Redownloaded it, and tried to copy it to

      • Not unlike what happened to me with a free download of an Amazon video on demand. After numerous attempts that I could never get to work, I gave up and torrented the movie.

  • Fixed that for ya. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TooMuchToDo ( 882796 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @11:51AM (#31833014)
    " It's the latest way for Hollywood to combat falling DVD sales due to netflix and other cheaper content avenues."

    • Re:Fixed that for ya. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by FriendlyLurker ( 50431 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @11:53AM (#31833056)
      " It's the latest way for Hollywood to combat falling DVD sales due to piracy" citation needed

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jedidiah ( 1196 )

      ...that's exactly what I was thinking.

      I have a copy of GI Joe right here sitting on the printer that I haven't bothered with yet because I have been too busy streaming stuff on the Wii.

    • Re:Fixed that for ya. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @12:00PM (#31833228) Journal
      Sounds closer to the truth. I have a hundred or so DVDs, but I've hardly bought any since I subscribed to a DVD rental service. I get 2-4 DVDs in the post every week to watch for about the same price as buying one DVD a month. There are very few DVDs that I've watched more than a couple of times, and I'd almost always watch something new than re-watch an old DVD, so buying doesn't make economic sense. Per viewing, it costs more than renting for all except the most exceptional films.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shakrai ( 717556 )

      " It's the latest way for Hollywood to combat falling DVD sales due to netflix and other cheaper content avenues."

      I'm pretty annoyed with Netflix for cutting deals with a few studios to delay new releases. They got some sort of concession on pricing and in exchange agreed not to put up new releases right away. Rather than pay full price for the DVDs and make them available right away they opted to go along with Hollywood's protectionism of a dying business model.

      Seems rather stupid to me. How many people actually buy a movie because they can't find it for rental? Somebody who liked the movie is going to buy it reg

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by jmauro ( 32523 )

        It's actually the movie studios forcing this and not Netflix. Netflix and RedBox signed the "deal" because they were pretty much forced to or have no access to movies sold on the bulk market.

      • I agree Netflix should've had more of a backbone, but in return they get the right to move more content to their streaming service (always a nice thing). My thoughts are, "So what if I can't watch it in the first 30 days? It's in my saved queue and will get dumped into my normal queue at some point." I'd argue things will be business as usual instead of folks running out to buy DVDs during the embargo window (or they'll just pirate them).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by h4rr4r ( 612664 )

        Is your netflix queue so short that you notice a 28 day lag?
        I have over 200 films in the queue at any given time, and I use a vm XP to play streaming. If it keeps prices low I am fine with a 1 month delay. Even if I cared the redbox is not far away.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Also, for Star Trek, lack of sales due to pricing content for the rental rather than consumer market. Voyager, a not popular title by most measure, is $250-300. Alias, a much more popular series by the person who did the new star trek, can occasionally be had for around $100. Now that is 5 season instead of 7, but it is still a difference between $20 a season and $35 a season. For old shows, and shows that want to be sold, $1 or so an episode is the price. For older show like the original Star Trek, th

    • "It's the latest way for Hollywood to combat falling DVD sales due to Hollywood making crap."

    • Jepp I agree here, it is less that DVD sales fall due to piracy but due to not having any interest anymore.
      At least this is my personal experience, I dont pirate movies, but I do not really want to shell out the money, it is either rental or watch it on TV (via recording)
      But I guess that comes with age, there is less and less material worth watching for me, and my private life is more and more interesting due to having a family and a son to raise!
      I used to buy 2-3 DVDs a month when I was around 30, not it i

    • Re:Fixed that for ya. (Score:5, Informative)

      by noc007 ( 633443 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @01:04PM (#31834392)

      Not to mention the state of the economy.

      I'm not making as much as I use to, so money is tighter and I'm thankful to just have a damn job. We've budgeted to have a NetFlix subscription and go out to a movie once every three months. That budget is considered luxurious by some people I know.

      Quoting piracy as a reason for dwindling sales is a cop-out IMHO. Anti-Piracy groups need to focus on the people selling pirated DVDs as legitimate ones; they're really taking traceable sales away. Is it possible to download a pirated copy of a movie for free? Yes. Will it always be in high quality, not require you to go find some new or obscure codec,and can be had in a matter of minutes? Hell no. My time is worth something and all that dicking around just isn't worth it for me and I may not even end up with what I was downloading not to mention the legal ramifications and possibilities of a fun lawsuit.

      NetFlix is a good deal for me. I have the patience to wait for the disc in the mail and Watch Now (on demand) is great. It's a little annoying that they're cutting deals with the studios to hold off for 28 days, more so for the wife than me, but it means more content that can be streamed to the TV and not take up a slot in the mail queue.

      MOVIE STUDIOS, I have some advice for you:
      1. Stop making a lot of crappy movies just to see if they'll stick to the wall.
      2. Make better movies and it doesn't always require $100+ million budget.
      3. Understand that your low sales isn't a 100% result of piracy.
      4. Understand that spending a lot of money on a movie doesn't mean it's going to net a lot of profit.
      5. Appreciate that piracy in the US isn't as bad as it is in other countries.
      6. Invest most of your anti-piracy efforts in the groups that are mass producing pirated DVDs for profit. They're taking significant profit away from you.
      7. It's fine to educate people within reason that pirating is illegal.
      8. Stop with all the DRM and DMCA. All it does is hurt your legitimately purchasing consumer and can potentially cost you money in the long run with refunds when shit doesn't work right or the authorizing servers go offline (e.g. Yahoo music).
      9. Understand that fair use isn't costing you much money. I have the right to make a copy for my personal use and I'm going to do that so the original doesn't get damaged. If it did get damaged and I didn't have a copy of it, that doesn't mean I'm going to go and buy a new one. I'm not going to dick around with re-encoding it so it fits on a single-layer (dual-layer is too much and you might as well go legit for the cost) that I'm going to give to my friend, plus he can go out and pirate it himself or go down the street and rent it from RedBox for $1.
      10. Understand that if people don't have a lot of disposable income, they aren't going to spend money on your product that they don't need to live. If you have a problem with that, either do something positive to get the economy rolling so people have disposable income to trade with you or change your business to something that involves basic needs like food, clothing, and/or shelter.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Shakrai ( 717556 )

        11. Smack J. J. Abrams upside the head one time for each lens flare in the new Star Trek film.

      • Re:Fixed that for ya. (Score:5, Informative)

        by Toze ( 1668155 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @03:01PM (#31836858)

        2 and 4: studios constantly post net losses from films. They do this by spreading the profit to other companies, owned by the same people. They do this in order to screw people whose contracts guarantee a perfect of net profits; the creators of the IP they're exploiting and then aggressively defending. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting [wikipedia.org]

        from the link;
        The guy who wrote Forrest Gump got $0.
        The guy who wrote The Last Unicorn $0.
        B5, despite the series pulling in >$1B, is supposed to be $80M in debt, screwing Stracynski out of a lot of money.

        Studios are not losing money. They are swimming in it. Their hilarious accounting allows them to claim that they're losing money, and being able to blame pirates (and so turn the Government of Canada into their bag man [wikipedia.org]) is just gravy.

  • Added bonus (Score:4, Funny)

    by elrous0 ( 869638 ) * on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @11:51AM (#31833028)

    They also come loaded with a DRM system that will probably function like a virus or some form of malware to not only make it impossible to watch these movies without calling into the server, but also possibly scanning your system for other Paramount movies and either deleting them or reporting you to the MPAA. They could include 100 movies and it still wouldn't be worth it to have something like that lurking around on my system.

    Frankly, I would have more trust in a hard drive I bought from a sleazy-looking dude with a Russian accent hanging on my local street corner. And Sergey is not very trustworthy.

  • Buying a license for the movies? (Score:3, Funny)

    by siwelwerd ( 869956 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @11:54AM (#31833076)
    So, can I buy one of these drives, reformat it, and then torrent these movies legally?

  • Ummm (Score:4, Informative)

    by Kylere ( 846597 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @11:55AM (#31833122)
    "An empty 500 GB Seagate hard drive usually sells for $140" This is factually inaccurate, the only way I can see you spending that much on a 500 gig drive, especially the typically bad Seagate drives is to buy them at Best Buy. For that much cash Newegg was selling a 2TB drive yesterday.

    • Well, you don't expect some Paramount idiot board member to shop anywhere other than a big box chain store, do you?

      Remember, the Internet is the enemy of these people, so why would they ever think to shop at someplace like Newegg.

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by idontgno ( 624372 )

        Minor correction:

        Well, you don't expect some Paramount idiot board member to send his personal assistant to shop anywhere other than a big box chain store, do you?

  • Meh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ak_hepcat ( 468765 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMakhepcat.com> on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @11:58AM (#31833180) Homepage Journal

    I can get a 1TB hard-drive for under a $100 at many locations (costco, google-shopping) so this seems like a big waste of money to me.

  • President of Seagate talked about this years ago (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Beryllium Sphere(tm) ( 193358 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @12:01PM (#31833246) Journal

    He was suggesting preloading content as a way to struggle against commoditization and to do something with today's enormous capacities. I don't think he mentioned saving bandwidth as a reason, but never underestimate the bandwidth of a 2TB drive on a UPS truck.

    I don't have a citation for you, but I think it was a Forbes article.

    • This isn't it, but it could be done well and complete with Netflix. If the hard drives were the *same* price loaded with movies as empty, and you can "rent" movies by downloading a key. You end up with a similar user experience as with Netflix or cable "on-demand" movies. Sure, you have a small selection *but* you can "rent" movies almost instantly, even with dialup or cell-phone based internet.

  • Due to piracy? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Scrameustache ( 459504 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @12:02PM (#31833258) Homepage Journal

    Well stop shipping your cargo through the waters off the coast of Somalia!

    • Forcing Somali pirates to watch Nacho Libre or GI Joe will finally make the seas safe for everyone, unless that is already against international conventions against torture.

  • I mean now, to steal a movie, you have to go to a torrent tracker or other share site or drive to a rental place and rent the DVD you are going to rip. unless you use Netflix of course. But, thanks to Paramount, your new hard drive already comes with a digital copy of the movie, ripe for sharing!

    Yes, I know that DRM is involved but we've all seen how well that has worked out in the past. Why don't they just cut to the chase and load the drive with 20 different trojans instead? Just make the icons nudey pict

    • If by 30% off, you mean 100% more, then yes, you can.

    • Just make the icons nudey pictures and most guys won't have a problem shelling out cash to "see more".

      That's it! Forget the mainstream Hollywood movies. The only problem with their business model is that they preloaded the wrong content! What happens to most hard drives anyway? Sooner or later they get jam packed with porn. So ...

      1) Preload HDD with pornos
      2) There is no ???
      3) Profit!!!

  • Not really surprising... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Svartalf ( 2997 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @12:06PM (#31833338) Homepage

    Nothing new. They've been at selling Star Trek branded USB Thumb drives with the movie on it in a DRMed format for a bit now. Showed up about 1-2 months ago at Fry's. I suspected that the HD's with that same story would show up shortly in the consumer boxed drives. (And people wonder why I would rather have the OEM bulk-pack stuff...)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by geekoid ( 135745 )

      This is funny because I actually looked for an HD with Star Trek on it last weekend.
      I needed to buy a new HD anyways, so I was curious to see if it had breached that market.

      ANd at 100 bucks for 500G, I wouldn't have bought it. I got mine for 69 bucks.n

  • DRM makes this useless crap. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RyanFenton ( 230700 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @12:06PM (#31833340)

    ...Even watching "Star Trek" requires registration...

    The pre-loaded movies come with a Windows-based digital rights management system that prevents file sharing. They take up about 50 GB of the drive itself.

    This means the drive is filled with extra useless crap wasting space before a format. It'd be a sad thing to discover you paid extra for this, only to not be able to actually use the movies as you would any other file, or even DVD. Hardly a "promotion", more like a way to gamble and write off a loss on old stock.

    Ryan Fenton

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by argent ( 18001 )

      Luckily you're paying $40 less for this.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wizkid ( 13692 )

      And it looks like they're putting something on the drive to screw with your system. I'll bet it will block p2p programs, and there's a good possibility it will look for movies and corrupt em if it doesn't think you own the rights.

      Don't trust the MPAA and it's affiliate companies. They've been watching the RIAA, and are now starting to employ the same tactics.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Gramie2 ( 411713 )

      Plus, of course, that you have 21 movies taking up 50GB, or less than 2.5GB per movie. Either the movies are short, or they are being compressed to hell. So you are also getting low quality! Way to go Paramount, show the industry how to think outside the box and make it attractive!

      So:

      $140 for a 500GB drive (about twice the cost of buying one retail)
      1 movie viewable, with the other 20 unlockable if you pay over the market price for second-rate movies that are several years old -- and all have DRM
      All movies h

  • Store Clerk: "I'm sorry, sir, but all of our hard drives come fullly loaded with tons of crap that nobody wants and nobody needs. In other words, you buy a 500G drive, with zero free space. But the content producers pay us a cut to push the shit, and we like that."

    "If you want to buy an empty hard drive, that will cost you a bit extra . . ."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Animats ( 122034 )

      Yeah. When I buy a hard drive, I do not want it prefilled with crapware. In fact, there should be a prominent security warning on the package for any media that comes with executable content. Microsoft OSs still tend to execute any executable content that comes within range of the machine.

      Did they put an autorun file on the hard drive? I'd regard that as "exceeds authorized access".

      • Step 1: Get drive loaded with crap Step 2: Add as a second drive to Linux machine Step 3: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb Step 4: Profit!
    • Boot to linux CD.
      wipe -qf /dev/sda
      Format with your favorite file system & enjoy the 500GB HDD you paid double for.
  • Why would I pay $15 to take up drive space for a DVD quality film when the Blu Ray runs $16?

  • More information (Score:2, Informative)

    by MaddMatt ( 107146 )

    Seagate has a press release [seagate.com] with more information about this.

    The drive is an external drive, which Newegg is selling for $100.

  • I don't care if they put it on my hard drive, I still refuse to watch that damn movie. I'm sick to death of reboots, time travel, alternate universes, or alien smurfs in 3D.

    • What if they rip your eyelids off and strap you into a chair in the middle of an IMAX Dome theater? Will you watch it then?

  • It's the latest way for Hollywood to combat falling DVD sales due to piracy.

    Maybe some of us just tire of re-buying the same movies on the newest format, or maybe they've been putting out so much crap that it's all we can do just to sit through the movie once. I don't buy or download movies, and I barely rent them. Methinks piracy is just the patsy for their own inabilities to cough up something watchable.

  • ten percent of this hard drive is taken up by the studio's drm system. i would think they could do better than that.

    hey paramount, make it 20% and you've got a deal!

    - js.

  • I've returned 2 new Seagate drives 14 times so far. No "Live long and prosper for YOU!"

    It's called Hardware DRM.

  • Way to not be objective.. "falling DVD sales due to piracy".

    Really - is that alleged link reported as a fact now? Even on Slashdot?

    I thought DVD sales were plummeting because everyone was using Netflix, or buying (or waiting for) the Blu-Ray edition of things... or waiting for the second printing of the Blu-Ray (because the first one ships without "extras" or a bad transfer, just so they can sell you the same BR movie twice).

    Or maybe DVD sales are plummeting because we're in the midst of a recession that is

  • For $100 dollars I can buy half the hard drive space I would buy for $80 at Frys, with the additional benefit of buying 20 movies each, for the same price as a DVD I could buy and copy onto my hard drive effortlessly!

    If only I could be guaranteed a ridculously short lifetime - oh, wait, it's a SEAGATE - I've had two or three of those over the years and they *all* died!

    I'm just dizzy with the anticipation!

    Pug

  • "requires a code ... purchased for $10 to $15" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @12:50PM (#31834136) Homepage

    Um, can't you buy real DVDs for a similar sort of price?

    }"An empty 500 GB Seagate hard drive usually sells for $140."

    Sure it does...in the year 2007.

  • "due to piracy" (Score:4, Informative)

    by Touvan ( 868256 ) on Tuesday April 13, 2010 @01:22PM (#31834716)

    OMFG!! Why is hollywood so fixated on this ridiculous lie. Piracy isn't the reason no one buys DVDs. They don't buy DVDs because the movies suck.

    They were saying the same stupid nonsense about why no one goes to the movies anymore, then what happened? Good movies came out, and look! People went to the movies in record numbers (and it wasn't the god damn 3D that was just icing - the movies were good!!).

    Hollywood is run by morons.

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