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View Full Version : MSN Video Downloads: You'd Better Have a Spare Few Gigs!

Jason Dunn
03-31-2005, 11:45 PM
I'm a sucker for trying out new technology, so of course as soon as I heard about the <a href="http://www.msnvideodownloads.com/">MSN Video Downloads site</a> I jumped over and signed up for their basic service. It seemed like a cool service - it provides video content optimized for PMC/Pocket PCs (320 x 240, 500kbps) and Smartphones.I installed the MSN Music Client (which was odd because I already had it installed), and waited. And waited. I was expecting to see some sort of screen after the sign-in process that actually showed me what the hell I was supposed to do. Nope. I noticed that the client was running in my system tray, so I moused over and and saw that it was downloading some video content and would take....three hours? WHAT? 8O There's an option to see the download status, which takes you to a Web page that lists all the files that are downloading. That's a cool integration, but why was it cramming all this content down the pipe at me? I'm not into sports, so why was I getting hundreds of Fox Sports videos? I decided to leave it to see what it would do. For the next three hours, my Internet connection was sluggish as the MSN Videos came hurling down at my cable modem.When it was all said and done, inside the My Documents folder, I had 408 video files, totalling 4.15 GB in size. And because I use data mirroring software, my other laptop and server now had the same video files, so MSN Video was now taking up over 12 GB of space on my network! Gee, with all that content there must be something good, right? I'll never know - I tried playing six random files, and all six files <a href="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/msnvideo-godzillarampage.gif">gave me the same authentication error</a>. I tried logging in with my Passport information, since that's the authentication that MSN Video Downloads uses, but no dice. You can see in the error window that it was trying to authenticate from admin.theplatform.com. It seems thePlatform <a href="http://www.theplatform.com/mps.aspx">is a DRM service</a>, and <a href="http://www.theplatform.com/pressrelease_msnvideo.aspx">MSN is using them for the DRM</a> on these files. Keeping in mind that these files are all free once you log in, why would they have such hostile DRM? And what username and password was I supposed to use?I've since deleted all the files and cancelled my free subscription - it feels like a beta service that no one bothered to test with real people. If you've tried it out, what did you think? I hope you had a better experience than I did. ;-)
SnozBerries
04-01-2005, 05:43 AM
I haven't read much about the new MSN Video Downlaod service, but in reading your post, I could help but think back to the 90's and all the talk about "push technology" being the next big thing. As we all know, "push technology" was a bunch of marketing hype, and not something that people really wanted.
edupin
04-01-2005, 10:56 AM
Jason, at least you're lucky you downloaded something !
I tried the same than you yesterday night (free basic subscription...), and when it came to the download process, I waited, waited... and nothing never came. The download status displayed "calculating download time..." or something similar and stayed like this infinitely.
I finally closed all and I'll try again tonight. If it does not work better, I'll do like you did : uninstall and unsubscription.
Good job Microsoft, thank you !
Jason Dunn
04-01-2005, 06:18 PM
I haven't read much about the new MSN Video Downlaod service, but in reading your post, I could help but think back to the 90's and all the talk about "push technology" being the next big thing. As we all know, "push technology" was a bunch of marketing hype, and not something that people really wanted.

Yeah, there was a lot of hype around push, but I think today there are some compelling reasons for push. For instance, I'd love to have high resolution movie trailers pushed down to my computer overnight, or throughout the day. I think of it more as "automated pull" rather than push.
HailStorm
04-02-2005, 04:12 AM
This was actually beta testing publicly for the last few months...I tested it back in January. I ran into the same difficulty as you...sans the DRM issue.

I was able to play the video files, but didn't find any of the content interesting enough to keep. I was not able to play the files within MCE without a delay as to make watching any of these files via MCE frustrating.

I had so much content blasted down to me with no real means to specify what I didn't want.

I did not like the integration with the MSN Music client...all the downloaded video files mixed in with my music download history. Not pleasant. If I could filter by video/music...it would be improved.

Based on this experience, I'm a bit nervous about the forthcoming MSN Music subscription service...we'll see.