If you’re not in the know enough to find torrents of first run movies, you’ve probably been wondering what people do with Portable Media Payers. Wonder no longer - Microsoft has launched their video download service. MSN Video download generically claims to offer the latest news, sports, and entertainment for $19.95, all you […]

This has great potential. MSN has teamed up with three movie industry players, one of which, CinemaNow, will offer movie downloads (with DRM of course). From the press release:

“You come in to one place, then you go off to a co-branded site with CinemaNow, where the [Microsoft] butterfly is at the top part […]

We keep hearing that piracy is killing the music and movie industries…well, get this:
“The North American box office took $1.03bn (£562m) during June, Hollywood Reporter found - a 14% increase on June 2003’s previous monthly record.”
Record breaking box office takes has to make you wonder how over-publicized pirating movies is.
Read all about it here.

Though we do not know how this is something that can help sales, Disney announced today that its DVD of Haunted Mansion will include Mac-compatible bonus content developed by InterActual.
Read all about ithere.

If you’re new to the downloaded movie scene, or even if you’re a seasoned veteran, you may occasionally have some trouble playing what you download. Hearing audio, but don’t see the movie? You may have the wrong codec. That’s where Gspot can help. GSpot can analyze any OGG or AVI […]

It’s no surprise when Michael Moore stirs up controversy, and this time he is proving many of his opponents wrong, setting a precedent which will be followed by few of his stature. Moore’s biggest critics have argued that Michael Moore himself is only out to profit from the events of 9/11. Perhaps responding to criticism:

“The activist, author and director told the Sunday Herald that, as long as pirated copies of his film were not being sold, he had no problem with it being downloaded.”

“I don’t agree with the copyright laws and I don’t have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they’re not trying to make a profit off my labour. I would oppose that,” he said.

We never thought we’d see the day where a director openly embraces technology that potentially takes money out of their pockets, but hey, we approve - so fire up your Bittorrent clients (if you haven’t done so already).

Moore: pirate my film, no problem - [Sunday Herald]
Moore: pirate my film, no problem.

Expanding upon the success of Netflix comes a company with an interesting new idea: Peerflix. Peerflix, for $5 a month (cost includes bubble mailers), is basically a Peer-to-Peer DVD trading network via the mail.

It’s great to see ideas like this given a chance, though this one will have a hard time making it mainstream. Hopefully, as more and more start-ups take risks and innovate, some form of online DVD swapping (aside from Bittorrent) will ensue.