Hollywood's Latest Flop

from the not-usable,-appealing,-or-compelling dept

Wed, Dec 4th 2002 9:53am — Mike Masnick

Stewart Alsop's latest column for Fortune absolutely trashes Hollywood's attempted offering of downloadable movies. We've made similar complaints about MovieLink when it first launched, but Alsop does a good job of explaining why the movie studios should stick to making movies, and should partner with a company that actually understands the internet to do downloadable movies. He points out that he could have made 20 trips to Blockbuster in the time it took him to download the movie, but that it still cost him just as much to have less flexibility in watching the movie. He admits that it's good that they're at least trying to offer legitimate movies online, but says that "they forgot to make the service usable, appealing, or compelling." He also predicts that after this fails, Hollywood will shut it down saying that it's impossible to offer legitimate movies online, blaming all of their customers as criminals again.

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Mark Fox, 4 Dec 2002 @ 10:02am

What does he expect?
The reviewer complains about the size of the files, what does he expect. Braveheart is 2(3?) hours long - 952 MB of data seems reasonable if you want to approach DVD quality with current codecs. The download time is also dependent on his DSL provider - maybe he should get a better service.

The reviewer also compares the 1 day viewing period to the 3 or 4 days from Blockbuster. He does not mention the 30 day period you have the film during which you decide when to start watching it, you cannot do that with rentals.
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- Mike (profile), 4 Dec 2002 @ 10:12am
  
  Re: What does he expect?
  Clearly, at this time, you can't do much about the size of the file. However, I think his points are valid. From a customer experience standpoint, MovieLink is much more annoying, less useful... and costs just as much. Not very compelling.
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