I have an elderly relative who lives here in the UK, but spends a fair amount of time in her holiday home in Turkey. She’s thinking about buying a tablet of some sort to take with her when she travels, and part of her thinking is that she can load it up with movies and TV shows to watch while she’s over there.
She doesn’t have WiFi (or any internet access) in her holiday home over there, so the idea would be to load it up in advance at home where she has plentiful bandwidth and WiFi.
Do the usual streaming services allow storage of the media on the device itself? I know that BBC iPlayer does, but only for the duration which it would be available to stream - which is usually only the period of broadcast plus a week or so. How about Netflix / Amazon Prime, etc? She’s typically away for a month or two at a time, so ideally stuff would need to remain playable for that long at least.
She doesn’t mind paying a monthly charge as long as there are no long-term commitments (I suppose Amazon’s one-off £79 charge would be OK if it was the best solution). Once she’s in Turkey, there’s no guarantee that she’ll have any access to the internet at all, so anything that requires contact with a server to play back would be a no-go.
iTunes Store allows you to purchase (or rent) and download programming to iPhones, iPads, and computers (through Itunes software). I believe that Amazon Prime and Google Play allow it too. But so far as I know, in order to download a movie, you have to purchase or rent that particular movie.
Thanks Acsenray - that’s a good shout. I’m not sure why I forgot about the Google Play Store (I think it’s more likely to be an Android device than an iPad). I suspect that she’d need to buy the films and shows, because from memory the rental periods are only a few days.
Does anyone know if the Play Store requires authentication or anything before it will play back downloaded media from the device? The tablet will be completely offline while she’s overseas.
Another option; buy used copies of the movies on DVD or Bluray while in the UK. Either she can bring the DVDs with her to the UK or she can use a program like Handbrake to convert the DVDs to digital files. For example, a movie called Howard’s End is available for under a pound if you’re willing to buy a used DVD. This might be cheaper than buying the streaming version directly.
Google Play rental periods vary so you’d have to check each movie to see, but there are two time constraints that apply: the period in which you can start watching the movie, and the period in which you have to finish watching the movie once it’s started. Some allow 30 days to start watching, and once you’ve started it, you have 48 hours in which to finish it.
I don’t believe you need an active internet connection to watch a Google Play movie that you’ve downloaded to your device. The other half loads movies on the (WiFi only) tablet when traveling and watches them when offline.
There is free content that’s lapsed into the public domain, was never protected by copyright (like Night of the Living Dead where the studio forgot to include the copyright notice they intended on the release…ooops) or is protected by less limiting licenses, like Creative Commons, that may allow legal download for personal use. The hard part is finding and sorting through it. There’s typically some lack of clarity as to status though.
Opensource is one place I’ve looked to help find it. Some are still copyright protected but released for free viewing. A fair number of their links are to YouTube which presents an issue. Something like Beat The Devil (Bogart film combining camp and noir that I enjoyed) hosted there is legal in the sense that it’s public domain so there’s no copyright violation if you use one of the tools to download it for offline viewing. ISTR it violates youTube’s TOS though. It will take some poking to find content that avoids the TOS issue.
The Internet Archive video page also provides a place to dig through for unprotected content. They have direct download links too skipping the YouTube TOS issue.
As has been mentioned ripping from DVD for personal use is generally considered fair use here in the US (and being in the UK she may avoid our DMCA legal issue with decrypting DVD content, even for fair use, in the process). Used complete seasons of TV shows she hasn’t seen can provide a lot of content at reasonable cost.
One other option is getting a PVR that records unencrypted video then dumping it onto a memory stick or cheap hdd and taking that with you. There may well be some that will record it directly to the hdd. Note, most will not allow you to copy or move hd content.
SD content runs to about 1.5 GB an hour and transfer from the boxes can be slow but this is a solution that we do all the time.
We spend several weeks away over summer and we record various series and a load of films on our freesat PVR and then dump it on to memory sticks and take it with us.
You are more likely to find a box that allows this function if you steer clear of any of the serviced boxed (i.e. freeview, Sky, BT-TV, virgin etc) and go for cheap and generic pvr’s.
Also, we have an amazon prime account and iplayer that we use as well but as has been said above you have time limits for those that vary from title to title but typically are about a month.
