Preloading Hard Drives with Movies - Sneakernet

The financial times has an article yesterday about Seagate preloading USB hard drives with movies.  Apparently the drives will come with around 20 popular movies already present, but reading between the lines they are encrypted.  If you want to watch them, you can do so by buying the decryption key online.  I'm sure there is more DRM to it so that you can't easily share the movies, but the basic idea is kinda neat.  Essentially, you are bypassing the biggest issue of digital delivery of movies (bandwidth and the latency of waiting for the download) by having the access to the movie controlled by a download of only a few kb encryption key.

I think this approach has potential beyond what Seagate is doing.  Imagine if your Netflix subscription, instead of shipping you DVDs one at a time, just shipped you a hard drive with your entire movie queue on it in encrypted form.  When you are ready to view the next movie in the queue, you just log into your netflix account and download the encryption key in a few seconds.  Instead of having X DVD's out at a time, you could have X encryption keys per month or something.  The advantage is that there's much less shipping involved and you can rearrange your queue however you want and start watching any of the movies immediately with no wait for the mail or slow internet download.  Even a HD movie is probably only around 10GB, so a cheap 500GB hard drive should be able to hold around 50 movies, and moore's law will only improve on this.

Going a step further, using the MPAA's own statistics, there are roughly 600 big movies released to theaters a year, not all that many.  At 10GB per movie, that's only 6TB of space required, or 500GB per month.  Lets say all of these movies were "finished" at least 1 month before release.  You could buy a 500GB drive for way less than the cost of a month of a cable subscription and by sending this back and forth to netflix, you'd have continuous on-demand access to any of the blockbusters the day that they are released and for roughly a month to follow.  The producers could simply not sell the decryption keys until the chosen release date.

This is just the latency/bandwidth tradeoff of using the sneakernet.