Zediva taps loophole, offers new movies online

On Wednesday morning, it had Danny Boyle's "127 Hours" available to stream — a movie that Netflix users won't be able to rent even physical copies of until March 29. Other new movies, such as "The Fighter" and "The American," were also listed, though these two were rented out.

via news.yahoo.com

Comments

[Ben Langhinrichs]

It's clever, but doesn't sound like it would scale very well. Rapid increases in viewership would be hard to accommodate. Also, the courts are unlikely to let it be that they just have to own the DVD and player, but are really streaming from a single copy. That would be like buying a physical copy of a book and then lending the eBook repeatedly and serially. It won't stand in court. If they were physically playing each copy, they might get away with it (although the article suggests otherwise), but that wouldn't scale at all, and would never be cost effective at $1.99 a copy.