Five
Movielink…a site co-owned by Sony, Warner Brothers,
Recent releases will be sold for $20-$30 and older movies will be available for download for $10-$20. (These prices seem a bit high given discounts available for DVDs at places like Amazon.com but perhaps a lot of people will be willing to pay those prices in order to have immediate access to movies. We shall see.)
Customers will not be able to burn the movies onto discs to be played on DVDs but they will be able to be stored on computers indefinitely. The movies will also be able to be transferred to two other computers. (Transfers of movies to handheld devices are not available yet but that capability is in the offing.)
Sony and Lionsgate will also be selling movie downloads through another site, CinemaNow (which appears to accessible to Firefox and Netscape as well as Internet Explorer.)
Of the major studios only Disney is shying away from digital downloads of their films for the time being. This is likely to change though.
Personally I’m not that excited about watching movies on my computer but I have to give the major studios credit for, however reluctantly, acknowledging that the ways movies are being viewed, rented, and purchased are indeed changing.
2 comments:
Aww, wow, very interesting, thanks for sharing ;). Gotta try it!
So... I pay more and get less? (As in, I have to watch it on a computer. No disc. No cover art. No art on the disk. Can't burn it.)
Also, it's going to take a large chunk of my hard drive space? There's only one kind of film that takes a large chunk of my hard drive space.
David Bowie tried this same business plan once. (Same price as a cd, but you downloaded it yourself, doing all the work, and supplying all the materials yourself.)
Never tried it again.
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