Growth In Legal Downloads of Movies?
We know that many readers were shocked by our last post that there are companies out there offering legal streams of new studio release features. With impeccable timing CinemaNow announced that they have now signed deals with 6 out of the 7 major studios:
Online movie provider CinemaNow on Tuesday said NBC Universal has agreed to offer its films to CinemaNow subscribers giving the Internet service content from one more major studio as it continues to expand.
CinemaNow allows clients to legally download films and television shows for a fee, and it now has six of Hollywood’s seven major film and TV studios as content providers. It lacks only Paramount Pictures, a unit of Viacom Inc .
The CEO goes on to claim that he expects 100% growth by the end of 2005. Someone should explain to him that two times any small number is still a pretty small number. These precentages sound great because its impossible to find out about any hard numbers in their actual revenue.
Now we could go on about why CinemaNow and their main competitor Movielink haven’t gotten anywhere very fast but Damian over at Media Thinking has said it far more succinctly than we ever could:
Why Movielink and CinemaNow don’t matter
I’m really not clear on why so much press is given to the internet-based video-on-demand (VOD) services - it’s pretty clear that they are going nowhere fast.
1. Broadband pentration, while increasing, is still a small portion of the internet population.
2. Given that the music services have had trouble signing up people, I can’t see why Movielink is going to do that much better.
3. Who wants to watch movies on their computer? I consider myself a computer person, but I’ve never wanted to watch a movie on my computer. If it’s supposed to appeal to the traveling executive, then they’ll likely just rent a DVD and play that in their laptop - who’s going to wait 2 hours to download the movie?
Unlike Damian we here at BBB watch movies on our computers all the time. But then again our motto is “we live in the future so that you don’t have to.” In your future we don’t see much Pay-Per-View on your desktop.
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Over at Big Brain Boy, a fine blog about the future of entertainment technology, the cerebrum comments that: In your future we don’t see much Pay-Per-View on your desktop. I agree. Computers make for crappy movie viewing, and televisions continue...Tracked on: The Artful Writer (216.193.215.153) at 2005 02 07 02:29:13
Comments:
The major difference between signing up for a music site over a movie site is file size. Right now, people are completely satisfied with compromising their morals by taking a few minutes to steal a song. However, it takes days to download a movie off the likes of KaZaa and other file sharing networks.
Hundreds of megabyte files are far too tedious to wait for because they take longer than most people are willing to spend on a file sharing network only to get a couple of hours of enjoyment out of the download (As opposed to software of the same size where people may get a year or more of enjoyment out of it). Also, it is far too frustrating to spend two days waiting to get a copy of the movie you want only to find out that the file is corrupted and you can’t watch the movie. If the song sucks, you only wasted a minute or two of your life. As far as watching a movie on your computer… I find it disconcerting that BBB lives in the future so I don’t have to, but the future doesn’t hold today’s technology with computer/home theater integration.
To say that the majority of internet users with broadband is small is probably true. However, the digerati of most of the major west coast cities alone make it a viable business model in the United States. Take, for example, San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. Literally hundreds of thousands of these cities’ residents are on broadband. And they are technocrats that like to watch movies.
Posted by Don on 02/03 at 10:47 PMDon,
As you are clearly a member of the technocratic elite please forgive us for our “we live in the future so that you don’t have to.” That statement clearly does not apply to you.
However, since you are obviously a member of the digerati we should warn you against the hubris that is so common among the technologically inclined. Namely that everyone is as enamored with technology as you are. There are perhaps hundreds of thousands with broadband in the cities you named but these are people who are wowed just by getting email faster. Downloading movies is a whole other mess o’ beans.
You’d be surprised how often we get asked (even while wearing our geek pride “No, I will not fix your computer” t-shirts) “Hey you technology smartpants, what’s the best way to download movies?” Then they wink and nudge to indicate that they don’t mean legally.
The fact that computers are not integrated with entertainment centers is the heart of the matter. We gazed into our crystal ball over here and remembered something that a wise Japanese Sony executive once yelled at us during the original playstation launch: “People do NOT want computers in their livingroom!”
Of course just a couple years later Tivo proved him wrong but what he meant to say was that people don’t want the COMPLEXITY of computers in their livingrooms. If you make it as easy as a VCR to operate then people forget that there is a warm and fuzzy intel processor in there.
Perhaps Don knows something that we don’t but we stand by our prediction that one day our children will laugh at how naive the studios were with their first forays into paid downloads. One day they will change but that will only come once their backs are against the wall.
Posted by BigBrainBoy on 02/04 at 10:40 AM
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