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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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?<br /><br />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. ;-)