Zediva Go Basic With Movie Streaming Service: Stacks Of DVD Players

Winning today's "Credit For Trying" award is Zediva, a company which has taken a somewhat off-the-wall approach to streaming rentals. Rather than sign deals with studios and try to find as many customers to watch content at once as possible, Zediva is working on a more one-to-one basis: you rent not only a DVD but a DVD player that lives at their data center, and tune in via an internet stream.

Thanks to that limitation – only one computer can access the DVD player at any one time, something Zediva likens to "a really long cable and a really long remote control" – the company thinks they've bypassed negotiating streaming rights. No rights means cheaper prices, with the limited catalog (of only 40 or so films) going for $1.99 for a 14 day access period.

You can even have them mail you the DVD, though you'll have to pay more for that. The legal ramifications are currently being argued, with questions over what copy protection – if any – is being bypassed in order to stream the DVD player's output over the internet, so it'll be interesting to see how long the studios take to respond.

[via TechCrunch]