NBC Universal Chairman and Chief Executive Bob Wright said on Tuesday that he was prepared to offer Universals movies online. Citing the music industry as an example of what can happen if illegal file sharing is the only source for the digital downloads, they think it is inevitable that they need to offer a legal means to obtain the content.
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Wright was speaking at the launch of an anti-piracy and counterfeiting initiative with senior executives from media, software, pharmaceutical and food industries known as "Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy" (BASCAP). Other participants included Microsoft's Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, Nestle's Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Vivendi Universal's Jean-Rene Fourtou and EMI Group's Eric Nicoli. "The problems are spreading and no one is immune," Wright said. "In my business we're just looking over the shoulder of the music industry, which has gone through a very difficult time." |
With the appearance of BitTorrent clients coupled with the spread of high speed Internet connections, this seems like a logical move. There are already some services on the Internet (for US customers) such as Movielink and CinemaNow that provide such content from various studios. For example, at CinemaNow, the film "Hitch" is offered for $3.99 and is in 700kbs form. By using Microsofts Media Player 9 those with the bandwidth can start to watch a stream in as little as 30 seconds according to the website. Another interesting example is "The Living Sea" which is in a 8000kbs form and can be downloaded for $19.99. This film requires a pretty nice system with at least a 2.6 GHZ processor and a 720p capable display to view the piece.
The service at CinemaNow is either pay for view, basically a rental for 24 to 48 hours or you can buy the film as well for unlimited views. There is also an option to join the "Platinum Club" for $29.99 a month. With this fee in addition to various discounts, you are able to receive Independent movies from Sundance Channel Home Video, Stream the latest business, world and entertainment news from ABC News, catch music concerts and finally - access adult content without fear of viruses, spyware or dealing with unknown adult websites. At the moment, it seems CinemaNow is offering a free 7 day trial of this service and if you cancel within the time limit, you will not be charged. Might be interesting to try this out if you have broadband and let us know if it is a viable service or not.
Source: ABC News
I concede that the studio is on the right track: if people are going to be downloading movies, the studio may as well do something to cash in on it rather than spend all their money fighting it.
It comes down to four things: Method of delivery, quality of content, DRM, and price.
For my part, I would need a movie I could download in a few hours, tops, so that if I knew what I wanted at 5PM, I'd be able to watch by at absolute latest, 9PM. The quality would have to be equal to current MPEG-4 rips of DVD's or better. Price needs to be competetive in one of two ways: Either I am allowed to make a copy to DVD-5 media for one price, or the content is time-limited like a rental, for a much lower price. The first method would be preferable, but if both options were offered to consumers it would likely boost sales.
If Universal offered a solution like this that did not require that I use some special software program hooked into my system (read: one that comes with evil EULA strings attached or that scans my files when I'm not looking), I'd certainly consider it, especially if it let me get fairly recent releases, and saved me money compared to theater pricing.
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