Zediva Forced to Discontinue Service Permanently

Remember Zediva, same with most people in the world. Zediva is a video-streaming startup company that found an alternative way to stream movies to its customers. Instead of being required to pay separate payments for streaming rights, Zedia used a system that rented out movies to its customers for $1.99 per movie through a way of streaming the actual DVD disc from their data centers in Silicon Valley. Though companies are allowed to sell rented DVDs physically without permission, streaming any movie over the internet requires separate licensing and payments to the publishers. Well the Motion Picture Association of America got to them.

The Motion Picture Association of America (representing studios including Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Colombia Pictures, and Disney Enterprises Inc.) sued Zedica’s WTV Systems and founder and CEO Venkatesh Srinivasan in April and recently, Zedia lost the battle. The U.S. District Judge John Walter in Los Angeles has issued a permanent injunction on Friday forcing Zediva to close its doors for good and pay $1.8 million in damages.

As of right now, Zedia has changed their site with a statement:

You may have heard by now that we’re having to lay off our DVD-changing monkeys… :-)

A couple of years ago we came up with an idea for the next generation of DVD rentals. It seemed to us logical and evolutionary that if a customer was able to rent and play a DVD in his home, there should be no reason why he or she could not do that from the Internet cloud. After all, you can do that with a DVR, so why not with a DVD player? Well, it turns out to have been a little more complicated than that …

We are suspending Zediva’s operations to comply with an order by the United States District Court for the Central District of California.

While we hope to be back online soon, we don’t know when (or whether) that will happen. We are disappointed by this turn of events, and that we are not permitted to serve you.

Though it was a great idea in writing, it was not a good way in actual operation.