Pirates, put down your Neros and your burners! As of this week major movie studios are allowing you to legally download blockbuster movies to your computer for you to keep forever. What a breakthrough!
Of course, they cost at least as much — probably more — than the same movies on DVD, even though you don’t get the bonus extras, inserts, or box. And there are only about 300 titles available so far. And each one will take around two hours to download. And they can’t be burned to a DVD. Or put on an iPod. And you can’t watch them on a television set without buying more electronic gear or running cables from your PC. And you have to use Windows Media Player to watch them. Oh, and you can’t even get to the download site on a Mac. Or a Linux system. Or with Firefox. Or Netscape. Or outside of the U.S.
But apart from that, it’s the hottest thing ever!
This week MovieLink.com, an online company owned by Warner Bros, Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and MGM, expanded their downloadable movie rental service to allow users to purchase and keep movies they download. Another company, CinemaNow.com, offers flicks from Sony and Lions Gate. And all the marketing power they could bring upon the current status of media distribution has revealed to them the secret of success in movie downloads.
People are clearly desperate to pay almost twice as much for crippled movies in inconvenient formats. Can’t you hear the money rolling in?
Across the land, video pirates who have spent the last few years ripping movies by the armful and putting them online, unencrypted and entire, are surely shutting their bit torrents down to a trickle and signing up for this killer deal. It’ll give them something to do with all that money they’ve been saving.
This is the studios’ first attempt at capturing those lost dollars and curtailing the amazing amount of movie piracy that’s presumably been keeping them from making billions from some truly crappy movies of late, and we can hope that some of the problems will be addressed. Also, to be fair, the studios really can’t undercut the retail stores too badly or they’ll annoy that market, which is a lot bigger than the downloading market (so far). But just once, couldn’t an innovation be cheaper?
I was already peeved at the studios for their recent sneaky move in DVD marketing; the unannounced no-frills edition. I bought the latest Harry Potter DVD (making sure it was widescreen) and got home to find it had no extras at all. I even shook the box a few times to make sure they weren’t tucked under the ad sheet for official authentic life-size licensed “Hogwarts” reproduction shoelaces that cost more than a summer home. The DVD with the extras — you know, the featurettes and the deleted scenes and the bloopers and the things that make the DVD worth buying — was now a separate Collectors Edition Two-Disc Set that was clearly worth twice as much as I paid for each of the previous three Harry Potter DVDs. Same with “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” a few months ago and “King Kong” last week, although this time I had my lawyer read the box label to make sure what I was getting.
Now I can see a market for people who just want the movie; no frills, no bragging by the director, no collections of flubbed lines or page after page of production art. Fair enough. Sometimes you just want something to throw on the TV to rescue you from “Unanimous.”
But shouldn’t they be cheaper?
Every new entertainment innovation jumps up another $5 or so, even as production costs go down, and most of the innovations are sad attempts to stop piracy that usually cause more grief for the legitimate buyers. If someone came along and said, “Want to watch movies in a different way? Here, try ’em for 10 bucks a pop and see what you think,” they’d clean up.
We love movies. We want to buy them for ourselves, with money and everything. We might even want to download them. But we want them affordable, worth watching, and in a convenient format.
After all, we already know how to do that ourselves.
Arrh.