Why movie downloads suck
p2pnet.net News:- Forget corporate online flics. Why? Gizmodo’s Charlie White puts it in a nutshell:
Movie downloads suck.
You know it. I know it. And so do Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal and Disney, the Big Six Hollywood movie studios.
But in exactly the same way Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG, the members of the Big 4 Organized Music cartel, and the lamescream mainstream media talk about the corporate online music download biz just like it’s real, the studios keep coming up with scams to sell movies online just like you and I’d be dumb enough to fall for them.
They seem to think they can handle movie sales like they pump out propaganda. But there’s a big difference between repeating lies over and over until they’re perceived as truth, and trying to make people buy grossly over-priced ‘product’ by constantly shoving dodgy sales ’services’ in their faces.
White lists Top Ten reasons on why it’s a waste of time, but the five we like best discuss:
Pricing. Downloads cost a, “whole lot more than you’d pay to rent a movie at Blockbuster or have one delivered to your mailbox from Netflix”. And in the same way the labels are trying to flog paltry selections from their bulging catalogues, movie downloads won’t be able to match the “vast collection of an ordinary video store” for a while, at least, says the story.
Speed. Who’s going to pay $20 bucks or so for a movie download which’ll take hours, and maybe even days? And, “Let’s don’t even think about downloading HDTV movies, which will take four times longer to download,” says White.
ISPs. Some (most?) ISPs throttle the amount of data customers can download. “Sure, might think you have ‘unlimited’ Internet service, but it’s only unlimited as long as you don’t use it much.”
DRM. “Even if you are able to solve all the problems with downloading movies, there’s still gobs of digital rights management slathered onto that data, restricting how and when you can play it back. Nobody but the greedmeisters at the Hollywood studios likes this.”
Too complicated. Finally, the average person is, ” just not willing to go through the learning curve to get the digital data from the PC to the TV screen when they can effortlessly pop in a DVD”.
And the Gizmodo post doesn’t even bother to mention most Hollywood’s releases are so bad they’re not worth 20 cents, let alone $20.
But none of the above will stop the cartels.
Also See:
Gizmodo – Top 10 Reasons Why Movie Downloads Suck, February 8, 2007
whole lot more – Wal-Mart movie download farce, February 6, 2007
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February 8th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
heh
February 8th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
I must be one of the rare few on this site that think a lot of the ‘major’ movies are actually pretty good. But NEVER good enough for that price, or anything close to it. I don’t think I’m ever going to pay to download a movie or some music. If I’ve paid for it I need to be able to hold it. But yeah, ‘Hollywood’ stuff is actually alright with me, and I’ll continue to download the latest releases every week.
February 8th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
Some movies are entertaining, but there’s very few that have been developed “completed” works the whole way through. One of the important aspects that has started to fall through in the past decade is the endings. Any storyteller will tell you the ending is the most significant detail, even if every other aspect is average, if you nail the ending right, WHAM, the audience takes that feeling with them. The decline has accumulated and the largest negative WHAM effects had to be Star Wars 1/2 and Matrix Revolutions, and we’ve lowered our expections ever since.
They don’t give us a good story, we don’t value it as much. We don’t value it as much, we aren’t going to buy it regardless of the price. That’s the other point the industry doesn’t get, competing with piracy isn’t competing with “free”, it’s competing with demand and free-dom, no DRM, no restrictions, WE determine what we want, in what format, and how we’ll get it. Their biggest loss leader is their own ignorance, file-sharing (read: not actually “piracy”) has nothing to do with it.
February 8th, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Over and over everywhere I go, I hear the same thing. DRM isn’t cutting it. I don’t want it, Joe 6 Pack doesn’t want it; only the copyright holders demand it. Ok, You keep the DRM, I’ll keep my money. It’s not piracy that is doing that. It’s lack of value for the buck that is driving that opinion.
I expect when I fork out money that I get something for it and it ain’t the DRM watch dog. If I want to rent a movie on limited time basis, the price is right at $3 bucks. I don’t expect to be able to keep it because I expect rental rights to demand it.
When I pay for a movie to keep it, I expect it to be mine. That means I expect to be able to back up the movie so the kids don’t play fizby with it and then can’t get it to work again. Once it’s gone, I am not buying it again. If I want to take that movie with me to play on the plane, in the van, or at my neighbors house, I expect after buying it to be able to do so.
Simply Hollydud isn’t meeting my expections for the product and I’m not buying because it isn’t value for the buck.
Now they want me to pay the price of a new movie for crap content, use my own bandwidth, expect me to take hours to do so, prevent me from using it how I want, and then have the balls to charge more? Not from me they aren’t going to get a customer that way.
The cartels are directly responsible for Vista protections. I like many more, won’t have it for the same reasons I don’t like DRM in the first place. Likewise, I won’t spend the money to get new. I’m not alone in this one either. Tons of folks are saying why buy it? No value for the money, only more pain in the butt.
Congratulations, the cartels are alienating their customers. Punishing the very ones they should be rewarding for doing as they wish. So when it doesn’t sell the convenient answer is piracy? No one guarantees a profit for a business. If you fail to provide what the customer demands, they fail to buy the product. Do it long enough and your market disappears.
February 9th, 2007 at 6:00 am
Like all the other ‘mainstream’ (ie unpopular) download services, it’s the price that guarantees their failure. They are not only competing with free, but with superior formats/outlets of their own.
Why download an album on iTunes when you can buy a perfect digital copy, unencumbered with DRM, for the same or less? With movies, DRM is less of an issue – having watched it once, I probably don’t care if I can’t watch it again – but still, why go through the stress of downloading only to pay as much or more as renting it?
A cynical person might think they want these experiments to fail so they can fall back, with a shrug and a sigh, on their old routes to market.