SportsLizard Entrepreneur Blog - Comments
Adam,
I agree that movie downloads won't blow up on a widescale basis, at least not the same way that the iTunes music service did. However, as you mentioned, it is a niche, and I do believe it will be an extremely successful niche.
You make the point that downloading a movie isn't the same because it's a second class experience. It's already compressed, it can't be burned properly, and those that aren't computer savvy just can't understand how to get around that. This is all very true. But the one thing I think worth mentioning is that the opposite also HELPS the idea of movie downloading. Those people who are not computer savvy have no idea how to rip a movie, convert it to iTunes, etc, and even if they did, they don't want to be bothered. Most people - adults with some cash to burn, business travellers, etc, just don't care about the limitations. All they know is - "It's 8 AM on Friday and I'm leaving for China tonight at 6 PM. Gotta finish a ton of work, but I want to relax on the flight. Let me just download a couple movies on iTunes. They might take a couple hours to finish but it only takes me a couple MINUTES to buy them, and by 6 PM, they're on my iPod and laptop with no effort on my part."
Ok, that was a long monologue, but I think you get the idea.
Your original point still stands. Movie downloads the way they exist today will never be be a big hit with the mass market. But for a few small niches, it will, and those niches are still worth serving - if you can get the same price for a movie and you don't even need to pay for packaging, distribution, etc etc, then you're making a lot more off every sale. I'm sure that's the goal in the beginning. Once they're confident that those niches get the point, then they will start to make it more appealing to everybody else.
I agree completely Anthony - that niche market is still HUGE (I'd love to have a piece of it lol), but, as you mentioned, it's more of a mainstream thing that I was talking about. Apple has convinced me (and most people I think) that the best way to download music is with iTunes. They still haven't even come close to doing that with movies.
I came here via stumbleupon and had to leave a comment.
I wholeheartedly agree with you. I don't think this downloading movie thing will work out at all - also, we cant even use the iTunes store here which is ridiculous.
I'm one of the ones who buys dvds... and having a collection of around 300 original dvds ona shelf seems alot more fulfulling to me than having a file on my computer. At the end of the day, I have 300 dvds in full view as opposed to a few low quality movies on my computer that I could have downloaded for free on a p2p network.
Also I agree with the renting thing as well. Here a new release costs around $30 to buy or $8 to hire... it takes less than 20 minutes to copy a dvd and burn it to another disk.
Paying for and downloading movies just seems like a waste of time.
Personally, I think you are all missing the bigger picture here. We are at the burgeoning edge of a new technology. At this point in time, your stance is valid, but can only continue to be so if it were safe to assume that technology is simply going to stand still, and that assumption is beyond merely foolish.
About 15 years ago, a famous techie was quoted as saying "No one will ever need more than 2mb of RAM." Essentially, Adam, you and your contemporaries seem to share in an updated version of this woefully short-sighted view.
Give it 5 years, tops, and you'll be eating your words.
Cheers
I can see your pt Will, but bandwith isn't going to change in the forseeable future, so downloading times will still be long...and the other biggest problem, restricted file access, isn't likely to change soon either.
15 years from now much of tech will certainly be extremely advanced, but no one can say for sure that bandwith will increase that much...and no one definitely can forsee that studios will lift restricted file access, so I stick by my main point.
No one has mentioned the unbox connection with TIVO. If you don't have on demand (which I don't), there's nothing simpler than downloading an unbox movie to tivo. Granted it takes a little planning for the 5 hour download time, but for a rental, it's a deal. No special trip out to blockbuster to pick up and then return the movie. I'm not a movie purchaser, just a renter, so this is for me.
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