14 DAY TRIAL // The web has made huge changes to the way people consume media, but it could have made even bigger ones had the old entertainment businesses not done their absolute best to undermine that. This is why it's still a lot harder and confusing to try to watch a movie you want to check out legally than it is to pirate it.
Streamnation, a new video streaming service, aims to bring back some common sense to online video, albeit in a rather convoluted way.
The new service is basically a cloud locker for videos and photos. In the latest expansion, users can now upload entire TV shows and movies they own to their cloud locker so they can watch them whenever they want, wherever they want.
That sounds like a great idea and a very basic one, but it's already something that Hollywood won't like. The entertainment business doesn't want you watching a movie you bought the way you want to. It wants you to buy the DVD to watch in on your TV, but also buy the digital copy from iTunes to watch it on your iPad.
But Streamnation goes beyond simply hosting your videos; you can also lend any item in your library to friends. That is, you can let any of your friends watch any of the movies you uploaded, with the restriction that only one of you can watch it at any given time.
That's the equivalent of lending a DVD you own to a friend, which is perfectly reasonable and legal. But the movie studios and TV networks are not going to like it.
Streamnation added the restriction specifically so that it could argue that it's not encouraging infringement since, technically, there's only one copy of a movie being used at any given time. That's not going to stop anyone from suing. Streamnation will make money from offering you cloud storage; you get 2GB for free.