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MovieLink 2004's Top Film Download Service, So Far
An anonymous reader writes "The NPD Group has released some research on the fledgling pay digital movie download services. Numbers for the first half of this year show MovieLink as number one with a third of total users followed by MovieFlix with 13% of the market. It's a very small market though, with purchases equalling only 0.3% of the total movie market (and nowhere near the numbers of those trading on the free P2P services). Also of note, 80% of users are male and the top films purchased are sci-fi and fantasy."
It is also apparently not catering to Linux or MacOS users, which is a shame, because I'd be willing to pay what they seem to be charging, at least on occasion.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. --Dan Kaminsky
...hence the following message upon visiting their site with Firefox 1.0PR:
"Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must use Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, which supports certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies. Click here to get the latest version of Internet Explorer.
We do not anticipate supporting Mozilla or Netscape in the near future."
No thanks, I'll take my movies non-DRM'd to death, thank you.
*follows X back to Shareaza and Bittorrent*
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"Thanks for your interest in Movielink, the leading source for movies delivered directly over the internet. We want you to enjoy our powerful movie download experience, but it is presently unavailable to users outside of the United States."
Why don't they just say "Sorry, but we only support Internet Explorer on Windows in the United States. We don't plan on supporting anything or anyone else".
I wouldn't. Even at around US $2.00 I'm not willing to pay for something that I only have a "24hr Viewing period" for. Sure, whatever their protection mechanism is could be defeated and I could get a copy of the movie to watch indefinately (think wargames playing 24hrs a day), but I could have just as easily gone to alt.binaries.movies.* or a bittorrent tracker site and just downloaded the same movie.
stuff
The South-Koreans have a nice service as well vod.naver.com. The service is very cheap compared to those mentioned above, only about 2000 won for new movies (which is about $1,50). The quality is near DVD and is distributed by a p2p like network, on which i usually get speeds above 150KB. Besides lots of Korean movies (sometimes with English subtitles) they also have a gazillion American movies.