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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."
Its not the services that are illegal, its what everyone's doing on them.
A blog about stuff.
Also of note, 80% of users are male What about the 20% left, does it include dolphin and whales ?
Movielink is not catering to Europeans.
MovieFlix doesn't seem to have any decent movies anywhere.
Back to mlDonkey and Bittorrent...
X.
They're probably trying to install Gator onto my machine anyways...
In general, I find that online renting of movies still lacking. They charge you more per download than if you were to go to a store to rent it. Second the view period is usually only 24 hours. And if these two factors are not enough to turn you away from a pay to rent service, the video quality is severly lacking compared to the DVD version (I have a 3mbps internet connection, a 2GB version of a movie shouldn't be a problem).
There are also the questions of compatibility. Do you need special software for Windows? Will it play on a Mac, Linux? Probably not. I think this sums of the situation quite nicely:
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.
They are probably using some weird activeX components to launch a movie playing applicaiton.
...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.
On MovieLink's site, they say "Watch now or up to 30 days later" while describing the benifits of their service. How do they accomplish this time limit? Does anyone know?
They almost just had a new customer, until i saw this at the top of my screen.
"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."
Oddly enough, I dont anticipate them getting any of my money in the near future.
Pay anywhere between $1.99 and $4.99 so that you can use your own bandwidth to download a movie. You have ONE 24 hour window to watch the movie. You can't burn it to DVD. You have to pay to watch it again after the window is over.
Netflix is a better deal.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Wow, with movie greats like "Zontar Thing From Venus" and "Matango Fungus of Terror" I just don't see why MovieFlix isn't #1.
Of course, NPD released this information to drive industry interest in its services, so there's no hard data really given. This isn't a "study" by any means. Notice how there's no mention of methodology, like whether the survey was multiple choice only or whether participants could write in other names for companies offering VOD, like Greencine. It also doesn't state whether this survey was done independently or whether it was sponsored by one of the two listed companies, as many NPD surveys seem to be.
Get off my launchpad!
Also of note, 80% of users are male and the top films purchased are sci-fi and fantasy.
Anybody else supprised that pr0n aint toppin the list?
This service is great for someone who is in college and if their college has a really good connection and they also have access to that connection "privately" as most sysadmins will not allow anything as huge as the 800mb+ files to cross their system. I have a pretty fast, stable, cable modem, and it would take me several hours to download one movie, so it's not really a "gimme" yet. Once bandwidth gets cheaper and more readily available, you will see these services offered directly from your cable company. Most of the movies offerred you can just get off of PPV anyway.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
Mantango's suppose to be a classic. It's actually a Toho monster movie(one of the few non-Kaiju flicks). I imagine the dub leaves something to be desired though. They probably tried too hard to Americanize the thing...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I've watched 3 movies so far and even though the regular prices are too high [but if you go through real.movielink.com they have a small number of movies $1 every week, which is how I watched mine], the limitations (24h after first view, IE, windows, etc...) are painful,... It does work suprisingly well.
I have a 100inches front projection home theater and it looks almost as good as a good DVD, and the files are only ~540Mb(*)... They must be using some pretty powerful codecs (better than dvd's mpeg2)
*: Or twice that for the "EQ" (higher quality) but again, standard quality was actually pretty good
Just my experience
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.
Apple had to serve hundreds of millions of songs before economies of scale started kicking in, before they could even make a small profit.
Now replace 4 MB songs with 600 MB movies. Even if MPAA fees were less outrageously high than RIAA fees, how can they expect to turn a profit?
If they want to be a serious competition to Blockbuster, they'll have to have a pretty large product range. This means storing and serving petabytes of movies: huge costs - even when storage and bandwidth costs going down - which I'm pretty sure they can't cover charging $5 a movie.
The RIAA wanted to replace p2p flows through unidirectional flows (e.g. iTMS to customer only) in order to keep tight control of what is being downloaded on the net. However, this is materially impossible for movies. The only cost-effective way of distributing large files is over p2p.
I want to rent games online. I also want to rent movies online. Until a service exists wherein I can do both these things with the same subscription, nobody gets my business.
You go girl.
I could be wrong though. There might someday be a movie download service that offers
Mine went like this:
You just lost my business.
Also of note, 80% of users are male
The other 20% signed up using their mother's credit card...
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
(E) TVs typically have better resolution then computer screens, and movie watching is often a "family" event. Thus it makes more sense for most people to download movies on to your TV then on to your computer.
Incorrect, the exact opposite is true. Standard NTSC is only 720x480 and that is what is stored on dvd's. While there is HDTV which gets up into higher resolutions that's far rarer than people with 1600x1200 on their monitor. So I'd heavily disagree on TV's typically having better resolution. Now if you really meant screen SIZE that'd be rather different, most TV's have a much larger physical screen size.
(C) though is a perfectly good point. Most of the movies I saw on the site were going for about $4-5 and was a 500mb file size. So definately these video's will be lower quality then the dvd's you could rent, but possibly similar quality to vhs. Of course an action flick will look a lot worse crammed to this size. I'd rather just spend the extra effort to go rent a dvd or just buy it outright.