According to reports, today marks a “watershed event for Hollywood in the digital age”. Starting this week, Movielink and CinemaNow are going to offer digital movies to download the same day as DVDs hit retail outlets. From the article: “Both sites will allow consumers to copy digital movies for backup use. Those copies will be software protected so they can not be burned onto DVD discs and replayed on DVD players.” The prices range from $10 to $30.

Let us first, for a minute, assume that not being able to burn DVDs is acceptable policy. $10 to $30 for a digital download? They better be serving immaculate quality files with an enormous amount of extras to even justify $15. Considering the uproar following iTunes pricing of Highschool Musical at $9.99, you’d have thought they would know better. You have to remember, they are competing with rental and purchase of DVDs.

That brings me to the can not be burned onto DVD discs bit. What? So we watch these $30 movies on our computers? Or is this all geared towards that fantastic future of fully connected households?

In any case, MovieLink tells me the following:

Not only that, Linux and Mac users are not even allowed to browse their web site. Tough luck, they lost a potential customer and a potential good review.

So none of what I’ve written means anything to them. My puny little Gentoo box and my scrawny Powerbook do not have the technology for downloading movies. CinemaNow is no better- XP + IE6 required.

CinemaNow reports an average of 1.4GB file size encoded at 1200k to 1500k. Not bad- but (broken record) $30? Movielink will not provide me with the information as I use a computer that does not have the right technology.

Of course, the idea is- to quote the article- Moreover, the second half of 2006 is expected to bring a number of TV devices, such as Intel Corp.’s new, compact Viiv PC, that allow consumers to connect their TV directly to the Web and download and store movies at home.

Very perceptive, but strange. The issue with this Viiv future that people seem believe to is that it conflicts with the Cisco future and the Apple future. All of these could be beneficial to Movielink like outfits, but for two behemoths on the horizon that probably have a head start in terms of mindshare and market capital.

Google and Apple. Anyone want to compete with both?

This entry was posted on Monday, April 3rd, 2006 at 12:06 am by Devanshu and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.