Kaleidescape now charging to scan unrecognized discs

[Transepoch]

(which was communicated via personal email to customers),

Really? So logically, if we haven't gotten the email yet, then we can still request no-fee appointments?

... be right back.

 

[brodricj]

Worth a try...if you find good luck how about I send all my discs to you to add to your fee-free appointment

 

[Transepoch]

No need, I'm sure they're all the same

Though we should've been spooked something like this was going to happen when they dropped the price on disks without a clearly impending replacement capacity.

[correction to earlier, would probably be a 6-month job, not 2-month]

 

[Mark H]

No e-mail and when I spoke to my dealer he was not aware of the policy change.

So will it be €10 or ?10 per disk (not per title) outside the US? With these charges most TV series will cost more to have book marked than the cost of buying the TV series!

We also know K has lost interest in disks as it will all be in the store in the US at least so perhaps it is just us foreigners who will really feel ripped off in the end as the store is dreadful and K have announced that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future for non US customers.

They may have reduced their margin on hard disks but they are not special apart from propitiatory formatting , don't contain magic pixie dust or any other secrets that justify their price.

K you are abusing your monopoly position now so dealers please pass on your customers displeasure when your rep calls asking for their next order as it is the customers that supply the disks that really enable the Kaleidescape experience for all.

Selfishly why should I pay for others to benefit?

 

[Transepoch]

Response from K was the new policy started Monday (when Peter posted.)
Response from customer to their inquiry on if I was still interested cannot be typed here, so I just said no... should've said only if they were willing to hire me to do it for ~$9/disc.

 

[brodricj]

They should have offered a "50 disc, free video book-marking" coupon to new system owners, and maybe 20 free for existing system owners, just to ease the financial pain of the surprise announcement.

I'll still send my discs for video book-marking because for me it's such an important aspect of the experience. I hate not having the "play movie/concert" option, and I use "scenes" feature all the time.

 

[Pio435]

assuming the key USP's of "K" are:
- Play Movie immediately (no Disc Menu ..)
- Create your movie database without having to think about ripping etc.
- Unique experience in "surfing through your movie database"
- Controlling Homecinema Equipement based on bookmarking movie positions

today i would say: "K" is dead because

• 
  why should anybody buy this system after 11.29?

• Somebody having already a movie collection (dvd based) will not be willing to buy the movies a second time to get actual and future movies together

• somebody having already a bluray collection has to be aware, that bookmarking the existing movies will nearly cost as much as buying 70 % of the movies once again

• why existing customer should stay with "K" after 11.29?

• they have a grandfathered system yes, but there are not gonna be enough new customers to finance the buisiness. Price will increase and I assume nobody is willing to pay that price

• non-US customers will change their systems, because they can't accept the fees for bookmarking - which was once a key USP - and there is no online-Shop where they could download bookmarked material

Even when "K" is promising all the best for existing customers, I think the sun is not realy shining bright for "K" and the step with the bookmarking fee is the first step to reduce costs facing the metioned problems and searching a knew way to exist.

If this all should be wrong and "K" realy has a future I would ask them to rethink the system of charging bookmark costs. I would suggest you establish a "MOVIE GUIDE CLUB" with a yearly fee of $ 200. Members of the club can access the full Movie Guide and 50 Movies per year for bookmarking are included in the fee. This way, nobody has the feeling of financing all the users and I supose you will have nearly all your existing clients on board!

The absolut minimum should be, that "K" opens the system in a way that we can maintain the positions of Start- End-Movie, Begin credit rolls and mask-information ourselves!

 

[Mr.Poindexter]

Is it possible that this is being done to prepare for new, lower cost systems that don't give Kaleidescape the margin to cover the bookmarking while at the same time increasing the number of titles that will need to be bookmarked?

 

[Transepoch]

If that was the case you would think existing customers should still be allowed.

I wonder if it is just a way of stemming the tide while they process the tsunami of titles that everyone-not-named-Disney brings to the table now that the litigation is settled. Hopefully, once they are caught-up, it will come back off (like airline fuel surcharges.) Or they may just come to like the additional revenue stream (like airline fuel surcharges.)

The worst part is for those of us with discs that refuse to be read. Not counting the ones that seem to have been blanked, but those with no ads, no BDlive, etc. and fire straight-up when tested in another player, but the vaults error-out during import (or cannot even identify when inserted.) Our only option for these is loaning, but I'm sure K want's to protect against abusing such an exception.

 

[Yetis]

I wonder how many people use this service. Is this like wireless internet, where the top 1% users consume 20% or more of the bandwidth? Is this k's version of throttling? I will be honest and say that up until now, I never realized K even did this. I am also left wondering how so many disks have issues? Is it foreign language disks or movies not produced in the US or other primary markets.

 

[Mark H]

I use it and we all enjoy it.
Why throttle those users that use the service most when one of the unique selling points is the bookmarking feature so our large disk collections are available to all other users who later buy a film or TV series.
Perhaps those that spend the most money buying disks and hence providing the most revenue and profit dollars, euros or pounds to the studios are the top users as we are more likely to have more disks therefore more chance they will need book marking regardless of source or language.
My personal belief is that this is about recovering margin and driving users to the download store therefore supporting their US customers at the expense of all their non US customers. I suspect they have looked at their customer base and taken a business decision to develop revenue flows where they get most 'bangs for their buck' so those outside the US will be neglected or forced to pay even more to realise one of the key selling points of a Kaleidescape system

 

[Yetis]

Sorry, wasn't trying to be blunt, just thinking out loud. Having looked at it now, it does seem like something where you should allow people to do it themselves if you are going to charge for it and then use the catalogue data for your own database. If people had their own personal databases, might actually help improve retention. Also, some of these function does seems all that difficult. Play function, high Rez clip art...

 

[Jerry D]

This has the feeling of a business plan that is changing more rapidly than planned as a result of this settlement.

It sounds like their focus now has to be on developing the US store - which will presumably grow rapidly now that they have reached a settlement - but which also means that anyone outside the US will not be as well supported.

Can K thrive focusing principally on the US? Presumably they have calculated that they can.
Sad.

 

[beckycat1]

Last week we posted changes to our policy on loaning discs to Kaleidescape for processing. The new process comes with a $10 per disc processing fee. This was a decision we had put off for many years as we know the program is highly valued by a number of customers and contributes to coverage for all Kaleidescape owners. This is simply a supply and demand problem our Movie Guide Team is no longer able to keep up with. The team is hard at work preparing the Kaleidescape Store as the best source of movie content anywhere. We are eager to make some big announcements soon.
Notes:
1.[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]The process for entering UPCs and getting metadata is still in place. Many movies can get metadata coverage within 48 hours by entering the UPC code via the OSD, iPad app or browser interface.
2.[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]This also doesn't impact single discs that require import investigation. Discs that are met with the import error, ?This disc cannot be imported, please contact loan@kaleidescape.com...? will be processed free of charge.

 

[Mark H]

Thanks Becky for the information but for us outside the US with a poor store or in most cases no store the charge just rubs salt in the wounds and undermines one of the key selling points of the Kaleidescape system.

For the rest of the world surely it would have been better to provide an alternative before introducing the charges so as to limit the alienation your wider customer base is feeling post settlement.

 

[Pio435]

Last week we posted changes to our policy on loaning discs to Kaleidescape for processing. The new process comes with a $10 per disc processing fee. This was a decision we had put off for many years as we know the program is highly valued by a number of customers and contributes to coverage for all Kaleidescape owners. This is simply a supply and demand problem our Movie Guide Team is no longer able to keep up with. The team is hard at work preparing the Kaleidescape Store as the best source of movie content anywhere. We are eager to make some big announcements soon.
Notes:
1.[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]The process for entering UPCs and getting metadata is still in place. Many movies can get metadata coverage within 48 hours by entering the UPC code via the OSD, iPad app or browser interface.
2.[FONT=&quot] [/FONT]This also doesn't impact single discs that require import investigation. Discs that are met with the import error, “This disc cannot be imported, please contact loan@kaleidescape.com...” will be processed free of charge.

@becky

Thanks for this information. But this doesn't make anything better for your non-US-Customers. No, in fact it's even worse now, assuming the store will not be open for non-us-customer. So this customers will have to pay for each title which has to be tagged, because there is no way to download it or to tag it by themselves ... with implementation of controlsystems in a homecinema, the UPC-Code-Solutions helps also nothing, because I don't get informations about end-credits, mask, etc. And this was one of the USP of K here in Europe ...

Poor decision of K!

 

[digitalvd]

Maybe they need money? Or force customers to buy all title in the store because the Kaleidescape experience is only available if you buy in the K store.

@Pio435: I agree. Maybe Kaleidescape in Europe, in Germany is history. There is no longer a Kaleidescape experience. The DVD or BR is very very expensive if I have to send it to Kaleidescape.

Patrick

 

[cinelife]

Not having had many discs that need to be sent in, I've not commented on this change until today. The frustration level of those that need the support is understandable. especially those outside the U.S.. I doubt there are any words that will make this change acceptable to those people, but a little additional perspective is needed here. First, this has always been a "service" that K provided in order to help folks get all of their content, including obscure titles, into the system, it was never an obligation to do so. Over the years, they exhausted countless man-hours manually bookmarking and loading titles that only a few owners (and often only one owner) would even need bookmarked. To this day, they continually get titles from around the world, many of which are multiple disc sets, and there have even been 10+ discs submitted for content like musical performances, and little known concerts that were recorded somewhere in the world. A lot of this content will likely only be used by that specific owner. The processing of even one disc isn't something that gets done in 5 or 10 minutes, it takes real time to get these titles properly bookmarked. There is clearly a cost associated with this process, and until now K has absorbed the cost (doubt the $10 even covers it). This additional fee was implemented to help defray that cost.

Can it be fairly argued that over the years K has created an expectation that this support would always be there, sure, and can one argue that part of the value judgment they used in buying a K system was that this service was available, absolutely, and I'm sure some did purchase with that as one factor. My only point is that the support has not been terminated, it is still there, no longer "free", but still available. Now if your argument is that you would not have bought into K if you had been told there was a fee to process some titles, okay, fine, then I understand your frustration.

Changes in business practices, for all companies, is inevitable, and K is no different.




Jim

 

[Mark H]

Obscure titles OK but is Life of Pi on BluRay obscure or much of the BBC's worldwide output? I think not but they are generally not bookmarked and now months after release Life of Pi is still un-bookmarked as is a lot of my BBC disks.

Hard drives at 5 times the market price - they may be classed as 'server grade' but as an employee of one of the larges hardware IT companies in the world I know there is no magic pixie dust in the K propitiatory format applied to Western Digital disks.

I always considered the cost of drives supported activities like bookmarking.

Of course business practices change but then so should Kaleidescapes home page video which still focuses heavily on the bookmarked features that their systems provide.

To add perspective an $80 complete TV series box set on amazon.com if not book marked then adds another $250 plus postage to have the series bookmarked into episodes it is no longer viable.

Why can't we bookmark our own disks in the same way we can add our own information, artwork etc?

 

[Drhemi]

I haven't used scenes enough to know if this is feasible or not. Could one set up a scene to start at the beginning of the "movie" and end at the end? In the case of television series, perhaps we could mark the beginning and end of each episode.

Just an inquiry at this point. I have been SO pleased with K's bookmarking service, it will be hard to go without. But owning well over a thousand TV series that will likely be watched once, maybe twice over time, it is difficult to justify the per disc expense. Per title, on the other hand, would be well worth considering.

Wayne