Movielink Ready To Roll
from the ready-to-fail dept
Anyone want to take bets on how long it takes for Movielink, the new online, Hollywood studio-backed, movie viewing company to fail? They're launching today, and soon you'll be able to spend just as much as you do at your local video store to watch a movie with fewer features than the DVD you could rent. You have to watch it on your PC instead of your TV. You only have a 24 hour window to watch it from the moment you hit play, also. Oh yeah, you also have to give up 2 gigs of space on your hard drive and wait while it sucks up all your bandwidth during the tedious download. Who is this going to appeal to again? That's right, no one. Of course, after it's declared a dismal failure, expect Jack Valenti to stand up and eloquently tell Congress, how they made such a valiant effort to offer legal movies online, but those crazy pirates made it impossible for them to succeed... all the while the "Boston strangler" of home video will continue to line his pockets.
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Too expensive
For what they are charging, I could select a Pay-per-View movie from my satellite service and use the DV recorder built into my satellite receiver to watch it over and over again until I'm sick of it.
Now, instead of taking advantage of local businesses or work with my current satellite provider, I should pay more ($4.99, I checked) to watch a crummy streaming video on my PC? I can't wait to invite my girlfriend over so we can snuggle in our roll-around desk chairs in front of my computer desk straining to see the crappy video with crappier sound on my 19" monitor. Wow, isn't that romantic.
For lonely shut-ins I can see where this could be of some use, but if all 187 lonely shut-ins in this country that have high speed internet access should happen to sign up, my guess it that they will have to rent an average of 56 movies each per day in order for this to show any profit (all numbers completely made up for purposes of humor and sarcasm).
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How can they make it better?
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Service works VERY well, but
Although the software works well and the downloads are speedy, is just too damn expensive and it has a crappy selection.
I can see them fixing the seleciton over time. But at that price... there's no point. My vieo store rents DVD's for $2.
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Re: Too expensive
Although the software works well and the downloads are speedy, is just too damn expensive and it has a crappy selection.
I can see them fixing the seleciton over time. But at that price... there's no point. My video store rents DVD's for $2.
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On-line movies
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