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Honey, Let’s Download a Movie

As Real Networks joins Movielink (owned by five movie studios, site inaccessable to non-Americans) and CinemaNow (partly owned by Microsoft) in the legit movie download business, the actual number of subscribers is pretty paltry. The two existing services distribute a mere 135,000 movies per month. Why aren’t they selling better? Let’s see: Could 10 to 30 minute downloads, lousy image quality, DRM and file-sharing networks have anything to do with it?

I’d be curious to hear from anybody who had used these or other legitimate movie download services (I don’t think there are any such companies in Canada). I can see legal music downloads being viable (though I’m not paying for DRM-equipped music), but people consume movies differently, and the technical and social barriers to downloading them may be too high.

This entry was posted in:Movies
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Published by dbarefoot

Darren Barefoot is an author, speaker and digital strategist. He’s the co-founder of Capulet Communications, and co-author of “Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook”.

6 comments

  1. It’s really all about quality of viewing experience, and the lack of bandwidth available to deliver it. Even though we have a propagation of DSL/Cable modem, there still isn’t enough bandwidth to deliver these in a timely fashion, at a high resolution. Take a look at the consumer voracity for widescreen, HD-capable televisions, and the explosion of DVD titles in the last 30 months. The average consumer wants a larger, higher-quality movie at home. I know for our household, I really had stopped watching television almost altogether on our 19″ box, until we shelled out for a flatscreen 32″ model. That inspired me to actually invest in 5.1 surround and a DVD changer (rather than using the lowly XBox).I would surmise that, if pricing for these is similar to home rental, few consumers would worry about the DRM aspect of view-on-demand. But if it takes me 10-30 minutes to download, why on God’s green earth would I settle for a crappier viewing experience than if I wandered down to Videos-R-Us, in the same time period for delivery? BTW Darren, can you enable HTML formatting in comments?

  3. Download times and quality are directly related. I have a movie store less than a block away, so I’ll pick that for *movies*.

    I don’t have a TV. But I do watch “The West Wing” and others. In the time it takes me to watch an episode, another episode can be downloaded.

    I think it comes down to a convenience factor, especially for people in more rural areas where there *isn’t* a movie store around the corner.

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