AT&T could soon be sinking to new lows — tracking and reporting its “frequent offenders” er, AT&T customers, of suspected piracy — according to an article in the LA Times:

The San Antonio-based company started working last week with studios and record companies to develop anti-piracy technology that would target the most frequent offenders, said James W. Cicconi, an AT&T senior vice president.

On a case by case basis with court order this behavior from a company one does business with wouldn’t be so bad. You have to follow the law and it isn’t right to steal music. While those who download movies and music they haven’t purchased will try to argue that downloading music or movies isn’t stealing, it is, but that doesn’t make what AT&T is doing right — and they are the first major company to admit they will be doing this type of surveillance according to the LA Times article.

I still believe that DRM is more appealing than piracy. Why isn’t AT&T working on a better DRM system as opposed to an advanced tattle tale model? The problems with tracking all your customers activity and ratting them out to the RIAA and MPAA without any sort of legal mandate are staggering: AT&T is playing judge, jury and executioner. Why pit your company and customers against each other?

Only a company with bad DNA could do something like this to their entire customer base. Don’t do this, AT&T. Again, I fully support AT&T and any other company by court order tracking select customers suspicious of breaking the law, but I will never support any company doing this to all their customers.

Go get ‘em Dave:

They should do things to reward customers for being smart enough to have chosen AT&T as their Internet service provider. Instead, they would make their customers the stupidest people on the planet, choosing the only ISP that will send you to jail to create a new business model for them. Instead of competing to provide great service at the lowest possible price, they want to drive their customers to financial ruin, for having made the mistake of choosing AT&T.

There is a reason AT&T is on my Do Not Do Business With list and it’s anti-customer behavior like this that remind me to keep them there. I’ve told the story before, so you’ll be spared reading it again unless you click through, but coming from this completely rehabbed former AT&T customer they’re a company I’ll run not walk to get away away from. It’s actually a bit of a challenge not accidentally doing business with them because they are in a lot of places doing a lot of different things.

In fact on Tuesday when we were looking at the different prepaid wireless plans a plan from Cingular was in the running at one point — until we realized that Cingular was now owned by AT&T.

Just remove the ampersand and the name is correct: ATNT. Self-destruction began a long time ago.

My favorite non-tech magazine growing up was Mad Magazine. The spoofs on tv shows and movies are legendary. It’s good to see their humor is still as zany as ever. With Pirates of the Constitution, your desktop may never be the same. Mad also offers a Fanatic Four download. It’s still too bad Mad isn’t available digitally, but maybe they are recycling.

This morning one of the first things that jumped out at me on Google News was that this summer Sony is going to start offering a Blu-Ray player that costs a little less than the Playstation 3. Are they giving up on the PS3 being the most cost effective option for Blu-Ray playback?

The Sony BDP-S300, according to Trusted Reviews, will now cost $499. I checked Amazon and found the price still at $599 and didn’t see a direct link on Trusted Reviews to preorder the player. The official Sony Style website pictured right still shows the price at $599.

On the PC side on Saturday Engadget confirmed an earlier news piece they linked that Pioneer will be offering (next month) a combo PC read/write Blu-Ray drive for $300: Pioneer BDC-2202. Amazon? No link yet.

If readers find any working buy links to either of these two products at the lower prices along with actual release dates please share in the comments below. The standalone Sony BDP-S300 player for $499 (or less) price or the Pioneer BDC-2202 Blu-Ray drive for the PC. I didn’t do any extensive searching, but some cursory searches revealed no links for either at those prices.

The only stand-alone Blu-Ray player I’ve seen in local retail stores cost $999 which made buying versus a PS3 which can play Blu Ray movies a completely unwise buy. The Sony Style lists that model at $799 with a $200 price drop, so hopefully the local retailers have adjusted the price by now.

Personally, I think at $499 or even $300 it’s still too much. An add-on HD-DVD drive — the competing format — for the Xbox 360 costs $199, which still hasn’t made people go out and buy HD-DVD players in large numbers.

Until and/or if Blu-Ray players go for under $250, I don’t see any significant adoption rate. Though I don’t know for certain, that’s when I remember DVD players start to take off. The problem with HD-DVD and Blu-Ray remains that people still need to buy an HDTV to truly experience the next generation video so it’s not only the player to be concerned about. More and more people are getting HDTVs but I still believe neither HD-DVD or Blu-Ray will replace DVD.

My money is on something with no moving parts like holographic storage or perhaps protein-based storage. What about you? Do you think Blu-Ray or HD-DVD will have any legs? I can see hardcore home movie enthusiasts buying them and sure, those who get the PS3 will probably buy a few Blu-Ray movies, but will people not in these niche groups buy in large numbers?

Yesterday morning we got up and caught the 10:30 showing of Spider-man 3.

The theater was about 60% full and the mood of the audience was lukewarm. Some laughter, no crying, no applause or cheering. For this review I’m assuming you’ve seen the first two Spider-man movies.

In the first a vital part of the suspense was how Peter Parker became Spider-Man and how he wished he could get his girl of dreams, Mary Jane Watson. She didn’t know he was Spidey which added to the suspense. It had a great villain in The Green Goblin. In the sequel, Spider-Man reveals his identity to Mary Jane at the end and the whole “go get him, Tiger” took away the mystery of him not revealing who he is to her and whether they would ever work as a couple or not.

In Spider-Man 3 that mystery is gone and it hurts the script. Instead we get a lame Mary Jane failed broadway actress story and even a jealousy subplot that doesn’t work. Spider-man isn’t a musical drama. Spider-Man 3 focuses too much on redemption and forgiveness and comes off almost insultingly sappy.

Venom and the Sandman are decent villains but don’t get enough screen time to become much more than cardboard characters. The New Goblin (or is it just “Goblin”?) sidestory is interesting, albeit cliched. Sam Raimi would have been better leaving some of the Mary Jane and “The New” Goblin scenes on the cutting room floor (sorry Kirsten Dunst and James Franco) and given that screen time to Venom and Sandman being more, well, bad.

Spider-man 3 didn’t connect with me like the first two and sorry Howard but I don’t see how it will make more than the other two movies except that it was showing on half the 12 screens at our local theater. Let’s see, what is there to see today? Spider-man 3, Spider-man 3, Spider-man 3 … The opening weekend sales will be good, but this won’t perform as well as the first two. Probably good enough to generate another trilogy. Grade: C+

Update 5/7/07 3:27am PST: Indystar is reporting that Spider-man 3 set a couple opening records: most number of screens (4,252) and ticket sales $148 million (besting Pirates Dead Man’s Chest). The Spider-man 3 budget (yo Forser) is an estimated $258 million.

Hmmcast #109 mp4

Did somebody say Spider-man 3 Collector’s Edition game complete with exclusive play as Goblin and $10 concession cash? Oh yeah!

Maybe I’m out of the loop since we only watch something like 6-10 movies in the theater a year, but how long have movies started in the nine o’clock hour on Fridays? I didn’t realize most/all new screenings started before 11am here locally. As the screenshot from the newly designed Fandango above indicates feature films like Spider-man 3 which opened at midnight have five screenings before noon and a few other movies start before 11am too. I can see screening feature films first thing in the morning, but all new films? Are they expecting the Monday-Friday crowd to skip work or school to see the film early?

Or trying to jack up gross receipts, perhaps? I’m sure they’d love to break the opening week record receipts with Spider-man, especially since the budget flirted with $300 million. That’s a lot of bones to rack up before getting into the black.

Prior to publishing this post I did some checking in the archives, remembering catching the earliest showing of Star Wars III in May 2005. My son and I watched that one at 9am, even earlier than Spidey’s newest tangled web of action, and I pointed out being surprised by the theater being 70% full that early in the morning. I don’t remember any other movies playing that early, nor ever seeing any other movies that early, so I’m curious if this nine o’clock hour Friday thing for all new movies is commonplace these days?

I’m sure in some places like Nevada where cities never sleep earlier showtimes like these are regular occurences. In Puyallup, Washington USA I wouldn’t expect to see a movie like The Invisible for breakfast, would you in your city?

As for our family seeing Spider-man 3? We’re still planning on catching that either Saturday or Sunday afternoon morning. While I’m looking forward to the film, I’m not as anxious about it as I was Spider-man 2. While I normally stay away from movie critics reviews for feature films before watching them I couldn’t resist checking Rotten Tomatoes for Spider-man 3. It’s not exactly burning up the vines with a 64% fresh rating and 45% by the cream of the crop reviewers.

Did you know this is Spider-man week in New York City?

Yesterday, Howard Stern got an early preview of possibly the most anticipated superhero sequel of all time: Spider-man 3 and on this morning’s show Stern and crew talked about the movie. Stern is a Spider-manaholic so it’s expected he’d overly praise the film. It’s not going to gross more than Titanic. I’ve already gone on record saying that The Simpsons Movie could. The Simpsons already have owned TV, so why not the big screen?

That’s not saying I don’t think Spider-man 3 will do well. I think it will do as well as Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith.

Stern’s sidekick Robin Quivers gives it 3.5 starts out of 5. John Hein who formerly owned the site jumptheshark.com didn’t like it as much as the other ones.

I was kind of disappointed in X-men 3. Adding more bad guys doesn’t make a superhero movie more exciting. While Spider-man 3 previews have spiked my interest I can point to hundreds of trailers for bad movies that have done the same.

Spider-man 3 will be in theaters everywhere this Friday, May 4. Advance sale tickets have been available for some time now. We’re hoping to take the family to see it Saturday or Sunday matinee but if it’s too crowded we can wait it out. Last movie our family of five went to see was Ghost Rider. Won’t be difficult for Spider-man 3 to top that.

You planning on seeing Spider-man 3 in the theater or waiting for the DVD?

Using blue food coloring, Pringles is using their potato chip space for Spider-man 3 trivia. I couldn’t help thinking how long before more advertisers and Pringles team up? It’s a curious place to advertise.

Spider-man 3 [official website] will be in theaters May 4.

Disclaimer: I’m being paid to write this review.

I hadn’t heard of the legal EZTakes online movie service, but was intrigued by their business which doesn’t try to get you to watch movies on your computer but encourages you to burn them to DVD that can be played on “most any” DVD player. Sweet, no DRM.

EZTakes self describes their service as:

EZTakes is different from almost any other legal movie download service in that we DO NOT use Digital Rights Management (DRM) and we make it easy for consumers to burn our downloads to DVDs that will play in just about any DVD player. Almost all of our DVDs include the same special features found in the physical retail DVDs. In addition to burning, our customers can also print their own label and cover art by using our free EZTakes Download Manager software. Although we just came out of beta testing in late 2007, we already have over 2,000 feature-length films on-line, including many dozens that won awards at Sundance, Cannes and other prestigious festivals, plus a few Oscar winners.

Once I clicked over and saw they had Troma films, I was hooked! I’m a huge Troma fan seeing The Toxic Avenger and Class of Nuke’em High several times when younger. Haven’t really stayed up with what they’ve been up to in the independent horror film market, but I had my eye on a couple films to check out right away. The fact that they could be burned to DVD and played in our DVD player was a bonus. I was ready for some Troma action.

But first the account registration and software download process.

EZtakes Download Manager Software and account registration
It isn’t required — or even available from what I could see — to register for an account through the EZTakes website, you can do that right inside their software. A bit unusual, albeit a nice touch. The download footprint is 25 MB and the EULA didn’t have any language that crossed my eyes, so I proceeded. The registration information required is pretty minimal: email address which becomes your username, password, first and last name.

I like that “yes” for the weekly email radio button wasn’t selected. Neither “yes” or “no” is selected. I chose “yes.” Fairly quickly I was sent an email confirmation with a validation link to click. Smooth registration and installation process.

Time to go DVD shopping
There are a couple free test videos you can go with but I decided to skip those in favor of checking out some Troma films. I choose the oddly titled Surf Nazi’s Must Die because well, I think all Nazi’s should die and the title struck me as classic Troma. I was also intrigued by another Troma title The Killer Condom, but planned to try the Surf title first. After clicking the download I was prompted to enter credit card information.

It accepted the form with no problem and the downloading began.

Time to download the selected Troma film Surf Nazi’s Must Die with default settings using the EZTakes Download Manager software on my cable connection: 1 hour 40 minutes. Comparable time to downloading movies on Xbox 360 but without the ability to start watching it midstream.

Wait, there’s a better way.

Download TIP: For those with the bandwidth and CPU, you can cut more than half that time by going into TOOLS->PREFERENCES ->NOW DOWNLOADING and moving the slider all the way to the left “Fast” and increasing the threads to a maximum of 5. I didn’t figure this out until about halfway through the first download.

Unlocking
After downloading the DVD, it goes through an “unlocking DVD” phase which took an additional 10 minutes. I’m not sure why it didn’t download unlocked to begin with? Is this some kind anti-piracy measure? The process isn’t explained in the interface anyway, perhaps that’s in the help docs somewhere.

And unlike the download process the unlocking doesn’t give a time that it will take, but does show a progress bar. Suggestion: add some sort of estimated time for end users. We want to know how long it will take, at least an estimation.

Moving the first download broke it somehow
After downloading I realized the default directory wasn’t the one I wanted to use long term. I wanted to use one of our beefier external hard drives. Changing the default drive was easy but when I went to move the file it locked up after about 15% of the progress and I had to close. This somehow hosed the movie and it wouldn’t play once burned or play from the computer.

I downloaded a second time (at no additional charge) and burned a new DVD. This time it froze at the Warning screen in our DVD player three different times. The only way I could eject the DVD was to power off the DVD player, turn back on, and immediately eject. I tried loading the DVD on our newest computer powered by Windows Vista and it froze on the Warning screen there too. The second time, however, it loaded the full menu.

Ejecting the DVD, I looked at the other side. It was clear with no scratches or other blemishes. I tried putting in our DVD player again and, to my surprise, it made it past the Warning screen. I didn’t clean or otherwise do anything to the play side of the DVD, odd.

Let me go back to the DVD burning process for a minute.

First time DVD burning experience
Would you believe this was the first DVD I’ve ever burned? Despite owning over 500 store bought DVDs and several DVD burner drives, I’ve never taken the DVD plunge before. Sure I’ve burned ISOs, lots of MP3 CDs and plenty of backup CDs but never a DVD movie burn — until now. The EZTakes DVD burning process?

Pretty smooth. Just pop a blank DVD into the drive and press the “burn DVD” button and then [sigh] wait. It’s another 10-15 minutes at 4X speed (the max speed my DVD writer would produce).

By now, I was a good three hours into “the process” and somewhat exhausted. I’d have thrown the flag and driven to the store to buy the DVD by now. Easier, less hassle.

EZTakes Satisfaction Guarantee
I like the EZTakes Satisfaction Guarantee from CEO Jim Flynn that states if you aren’t completely satisfied with the service within the first 48 hours of download you can email tech support and they will refund the charge.

No, I wasn’t “completely” satisfied, but not sure if that was because I screwed up the first download by trying to move it to a different drive or if that was a bug in the software, but I’m not going to request a refund. After all, I was able to redownload the movie again without additional charge. I suspect most won’t take advantage of this offer, they will simply try a second time as I had or quit using the service, but I’m glad to see the guarantee being offered.

Note: I was also offered to have the cost of buying the movie reimbursed as part of writing this review but am declining that polite offer. I wanted to see this movie and have no problems paying for it, but I did find it pretty cool that in the review request notes EZTakes indicated that they would still pay the studio for the film even if I requested a refund. These guys are clearly serious about running a legit operation. Respect.

Comparing to DVD purchases
A couple omissions when comparing to buying the DVD in the store:

1. No transfer of ownership rights. You own these movies forever, yes, literally forever. Because the Terms of Use state you cannot resell the material. This makes building a collection for future sale, which we are doing with our store bought DVDs impossible with EZTakes current licensing. They should provide a transfer of ownership clause. Why can’t I permanently transfer ownership to another EZTakes user? Even for a small fee that they could pay the studios again and keep some for themselves.
2. Unprofessional packaging. Printing out packaging unless you are a professional printer with expensive equipment is cheesy. I’m sorry, but even with the coolness of my Lightscribe DVD writer — which I didn’t actually use the Lightscribe function — it’s nowhere close to the DVD you buy in the store.

Summary and grade
Of the many online video download services, EZTakes scores points for wanting to eliminate DRM. They told me in the review comments that their strategy is working and they’re receiving reports they are outselling some billion dollar competitors. For those who like independent films, I believe that.

It would be much better if the major studios would sign onto this service, however the main weakness which I can’t really get past is there being no collector’s value to the deal and the whole “process” to downloading and burning is still a bit clumsy and time consuming. I don’t want to spend hours getting to the movie I want to see. Even on Xbox Live when we rent a movie we can start watching it after it streams for a little while.

Also I can go pick out and buy the DVD from the store (admittedly not many of these independent titles) and be home within 30-45 minutes watching it. While I could pick out, buy and download a movie from EZTakes in that time, there is still the burn and will it play phase and the lingering realization that there’s no resale/collector value. I would like to see EZTakes do more about explaining what DVD players are not compatible with their service and why. Maybe they have that explained clearly in the help documentation but the only thing I saw clearly advertised was that the burned DVDs would play in “most” DVD players. Our DVD player is a newer JVC progressive scan player and as mentioned it did work after some fiddling. The point is that there hasn’t been any store bought DVD that doesn’t play. Perhaps a list of known incompatible players would be a good addition to the site.

For those who enjoy independent films and would like to support a DRM-free online movie service — and I think their mission is a good one — EZTakes, despite the shortcomings mentioned in this review is still worth checking out. Grade: B-

Sunday night we resubscribed to the Hollywood Video MVP pass. $19.99 for 3 movies out at a time, unlimited rentals and, get this, the manager actually asked us if we wanted to cancel right away so we wouldn’t be charged automatically at renewal. How many times has that ever happened to you? Us? Never.

The first three movies we rented included Stranger than Fiction with Will Ferrel. Didn’t work for my wife, but I thought it was an alright Ferrel vehicle. No laugh out loud funny moments like Talladega Nights. We also rented Sentinel starring Michael Douglas and Jack Bauer, er, I mean Kiefer Sutherland. I can’t help it with Sutherland, he’ll be forever typed as Bauer.

And finally the blatant Snakes on a Plane ripoff with Snakes on a Train. We watched this one last night and I’ve never heard of snakes that eat their way into people. Yes, I know about the Boa Constrictor and some other snakes that will devour rodents and smaller creatures, perhaps even small children in rare cases. I thought snakes primarily just bit people when startled? Maybe there are some snakes that are more aggressive and actually hunt people for food but I couldn’t get past that part of this movie with the premise that this woman has received a curse of “the snake” which means she has snakes inside her, trying to eat their way out … and back in.

There is some but not enough nakedness for a horror flick so somebody please call Mr. Skin. The acting is mostly bad. The ending of the movie, which I won’t ruin, is completely implausible. If you like snake movies, it’s barely worth a rental, but not recommended as a purchase. Like most movie knockoffs, it’s not in the same league. Grade: D+