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Napster to Offer Movie Downloads
sebFlyte writes "silicon.com is reporting that Napster is going to move into legal movie downloads. They are aiming particularly to tap the younger video-game generation."
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It is simply good business sense to move into this largely untapped market, especially if you already have a platform for charging for and delivering digital content. Though they aren't the first; MovieLink and CinemaNow are already offering movies for legal download.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Considering how much I dislike watching movies on a monitor, I doubt there are many people out there interested in downloading movies instead of renting or buying.
You don't like it so no one else will? Um, okay. Considering how many people download movies off of bittorrent, I think there IS a market out there.
Since when do movies have something to do with young video gamers? I mean, what are they going to be offering, Mario Bros, Street Fighter and Resident Evil movies for example?
I don't know about you guys but Mario Bros movie was a hell of a movie.
After people watch the movie, they want to talk about it with their friends. How much fun is watching a movie by yourself?
The only exception is pornography. Unless Napster intends that its service will be predominantly for pornography downloads, Napster will not achieve much market penetration (pun intended).
Perhaps, Napster should offer a special deal: After 10 downloads, you receive a free jar of vaseline. <chuckle>
"Original music download heavyweight Napster is considering remaking itself as a movie download site too."
So let's see... no business plan, no decisions on DRM or encoding format or anything remotely technical, just the statement that it's being "considered..."
Should this really be considered news? I mean, a lot of groups are looking at doing movie downloads...
The article makes no mention of the quality of the downloads - DVD rip or VCD or something a little more compact, nor do they mention any DRM scheme to be attached. This isn't news yet, aside from a company saying they have a vague idea to take an idea already being done through BitTorrent effectively and charge for it.
With the size of the movie files, I wouldn't be surprised if they actually implemented a distribution model like bit torrent to ease the server load. At 10$ per album, which could be anywhere from 50-100 Mb, for movies, cinemanow.com says its DVD quality. The amount of bits to required to generate half the money is astronomically larger than for the music equivalent. That, plus at least in Canada a number of cable/dsl packages aren't unlimited. 10 Gb down a month goes pretty fast, that'll generate alot of animosity from the unknowing public when they pay $3 to download but $30 to the ISP.
Plus if its not a p2p system similar to bit torrent, then it will probably slow down as it gets popular, and have a reputation for being slow.
I see this implementation of a good idea tanking.
Perhaps I am wrong on this, but I would say tha statistic given in the article (not really backed by the link) that one in four people online have downloaded a film sounds rather high.
I know it is spreading in popularilty, but even so I know very few people at work (for example) that even know what Bittorrent is, much less have downloaded a film!
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i would buy this if:
1. i can burn it to disk
2. play it on my home theater set-up
3. the quality is as good as buying a factory pressed disk.
add in lightscribe, not too shabby
Since iTunes came out, I started paying for my music. I don't mind doing so, but it's easier to obtain from iTunes rather than hunting down files on news or torrent. But, downloading movies is a completely different realm.
* Are there any decent portable movie players?
* Can we burn our movies to DVD like we can burn our music to CD?
* I have a Mac & PC, but for everyone here who lives on *nix, will there be cross-platform software?
* Are we going to be downloading 4.6GB DVD's or compressed divx-like files? Also, how are you going to pay for all that bandwidth without killing your customers with additional charges?
* Finally, what will be the selling point to downloading movies to your computer. Why not just go out and rent, or even yet, rent online through NetFlix or Blockbuster?
These are all very valid points that need to be addressed before anyone tackles this. Napster has yet to do this and I see them headed for a bust.
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Some people like watching movies on their laptops, yes, but I would hardly call it a vast market. However, earlier commenters are correct: internet delivery of movies will eventually become mainstream.
So what's the catch? I don't want to sit around for a few hours while my laptop downloads a movie, only to have to burn it to a DVD to watch it on my TV (or plug my laptop in to the TV, making it useless for anything else). What *I* want is the ability to browse, order, download and view movies from my TV.
I think this is where TiVo, or perhaps and Apple/TiVo partership, would kick ass. Being able to buy and download a movie through my TiVo, and when it's ready, I can watch it all I want on the TV... or burn a DVD right there on the device. Or copy it to my laptop if I really want to watch it there.
THAT'S the way to go.
They are aiming particularly to tap the younger video-game generation.
Is this some marketing term for the young kidz who like totally radical xtreme eye popping special fx at the touch of a button?!?!?!
Are "video games" the mark of the young generation? Are these a target group for downloading movies? Right now, the generation that "grew up" with video games would be anyone 35 and under. So is the main feature of everyone under 35 that they like video games?
What does any of this mean?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Ultimately the cable companies will be the winners here. They have a high speed digital cable running into a box which is attached to your TV.
What more can you possibly say?
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I think you're giving "torrent users" too much credit. All it takes is clicking the mouse and a download starts. I've heard a lot of people talking about napster, morpheus, kazaa, etc... that couldn't tell you what a zipped file was. Heck, I know people that use bittorrent and still refer to their monitor as their computer. People that downloaded music in Napster's golden days were made up of a pretty broad spectrum too.
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They get ONE chance to win our trust and our praise on this, and one chance only. They screw it up, and they will have paved the road for Apple to do it right, which they inevitably will.
Napster needs to offer no DRM, fast downloads, no annoying and invasive advertising in the middle of the movies or anything, and a wide selection. If they can't do it, someone else will. Frankly though, I don't have much hope for them doing the right thing.
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The only thing that I see as a requirement would be instant viewing of the movie. People download music from iTMS b/c they get instant gratification. Less than two minutes and you have whatever song you want. In order for an online movie buying business to work, they are goign to have to be able to play the movie well before it finishes downloading, and with decent quality on their TV. Otherwise, people will just rather spend the 3 hrs goign out to a rental place and purchasing a movie, or just get Netflix.
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If the mac mini is designed as the machine that we hook up to our HDTVs (I currently have a modded G4 cube doing that for now.)
And assuming (this might be a stretch) that the "Asteroid" box is really a HD video box (Jobs said it's the year of HD) and that my iPod Photo has the hardware already to play movies then Apple will have a perfect set of distribution/watch on HDTV/carry on iPod. A formidable concept.
Apple is putting into place the exact pieces to create the iTunes store for movies. With Steves experience in the film business (Pixar) he already has more connections than he did with the record companies and now he has a track record, no, he has written the book on legal downloading.
Napster is talking abut dilly-dallying around with the concepts that Apple is preparing the major groundwork for.