Zediva not forever: DVD rental site takes its last bow

ZEDIVA, the controversial online streaming-cum-DVD rental site has been forced to shut down its operations permanently.

A court case against the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ended badly in August, at which point Zediva was forced to suspend its operations.

Now that initial decision has been finalised: Zediva will pay 1.8 million dollars to the studios before disappearing altogether.

The studios took exception to the service because it tried to straddle two ways of paying distributors for rentals: streaming and physical blu ray and DVD rental.

Users paid two dollars to watch a film online but were, in effect, watching a physical DVD on an ordinary DVD player owned by Zediva.

"It seemed to us logical and evolutionary that if a customer was able to rent and play a DVD in his home, there should be no reason why he or she could not do that from the Internet cloud," a holding message on the Zediva site reads.

"After all, you can do that with a DVR, so why not with a DVD player?"

"It's not the having, it's the getting"

As that great diva Elizabeth Taylor has noted, though, it's not the having, it's the getting.

Video-on-demand services like Netflix in the US and the Lovefilm player here, must sign individual agreements with rights holders in order to stream films online.

It's why Lovefilm's selection has been building up slowly over the past few years, with occasional giant leaps as it signs a big deal with a huge studio like MGM.

Studios, naturally, prefer this way of operating because it means that they can be in full control of how their content is accessed online, at least by any legal means.

"Today there exist myriad ways for customers to watch movies legally over the Internet, from iTunes to Hulu to NetFlix to Vudu to Amazon to cable and satellite video-on-demand services, and many, many others," said MPAA Senior Vice President and Associate General Counsel Dan Robbins in a statement.

"Those services pay the studios licensing fees for the right to stream movies, and those fees allow the studios to invest in new movies and compensate the writers, directors, actors, set designers, caterers, electricians, and countless others whose work contributes to movies."

It's interesting to speculate that, having spent just a month of its life as a start-up, law-suit free there's no evidence that Zediva could actually have worked in practice.

Shortly after being featured in The New York Times' business section, the site had a definite wobble: suddenly popular, site users faced long waits for a free DVD player to watch their films.

It's not at all clear that upscaling even more, to a level of quality a streaming service could provide, would have been possible.

MPAA: also seen in...

If, at this point, you're reaching for the last place you heard about the MPAA let us help you out.

You may be thinking of their case against BT earlier this year, which forced the broadband provider to block the Newzbin2 filesharing site. They're a litigation-happy bunch.

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