The Wall Street Journal Online has a story (subscription required) that does a good job of explaining why movie downloads have a ways to go before they take off.
One of the first hurdles is getting the computer hooked up to the television:
What a sad state the modern technology world is in. We can send a digital signal over thousands of miles, through a hopeless tangle of fiber, copper, switches and routers. Yet we can't easily send that same signal 10 more yards, from a PC in the den to a TV in the living room.
There are many ways to do this, but it's going to take a while before my mom's computer is connected to her television.
Another issue is picture and sound quality. I'm spoiled by how great the picture is on a DVD, which takes up gigabytes of space on a disc. The current movie download services compress them even further, so the customer expectations of DVD-quality are not met:
Movielink is on the right track here, offering some movies at two compression levels, with the higher one giving crisper video quality but a longer download time and a bigger file. In these days of increasing broadband speeds and gargantuan disk drives, time and size are no longer major problems. Let's hope download services soon begin competing on the basis of which one has the least compressed movies.
He also discusses piracy prevention, or what I like to refer to as "adding annoying barriers to the ease of use for 99% of consumers in order to prevent a few hackers from pirating a movie to impress their friends." Apple's iTunes has sold more than 100 million songs because it gives the consumer a lot of freedom in how they can use their songs, yet makes the music labels happy. This has to happen with movies before this is a runaway success. I like Lee's comments on the current, 24 hour limit on each rental from MovieLink:
How about, for instance, having a full weekend to watch a movie? Or being able to start watching a movie on your desktop but finish it on your laptop? (Another service, Starz!Ticket, has a monthly fee for all the movies you want, for folks who don't mind these sorts of automatic recurring charges.)
We know Netflix is going to enable us to download movies next year. I just hope they think of us, their customers, when they create the service, and give us the freedom to watch a movie on our terms.
Thanks to Joe for sending this over.
Don't forget us old modem users aren't about to dl any movies either! I bet Netflix and USPS is still faster and with "real" DVD quality.
Posted by: Fred | September 01, 2004 at 01:34 PM