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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?
Frankly, I can't see a major online content vendor not delivering video in the future. Napster and iTunes and all better be prepared to enter the movie market once the technology is ready (bandwith).
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Hey this sucks, it started out like The Matrix but 3 minutes in, it just loops continously.
If you think
Does this mean that they're going to be selling Tron, Cloak and Dagger, and The Wiz?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Hey this sucks, it started out like The Matrix but 3 minutes in, it just loops continously.
Then it must have been "Matrix Revolutions" that you saw..
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...
I didn't see television mentioned in the article. $2.99 for a movie...how much for a TV show? Maybe they could charge by season. If we're going for video on demand, I'd like to see some of the older shows. They can keep the reality TV for themselves.
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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.
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 am not saying this will never be a valid medium for movie distribution, but right now I just don't see the market being that large.
It's a chicken and egg thing. There are portable media players that will play the movies, but they won't be popular until there are plenty of easy and cheap ways to get the content legally.
portable music devices are a huge market, and CD burners are nearly ubiquitous in computers these days, plus you talking about the difference between a couple minutes and a few hours worth of downloading
1) the mp3 player market didn't spring up over night out of nothing.
2) DVD burners are becoming a lot more common, and will probably displace CD burners. Besides, other than capacity, are they all that different? Both utilize Shiny Disc technology.
3) It can take many many hours to DL an unauthorized copy of a movie on the file sharing networks, but people do it (often to find that what they downloaded is not what they wanted). Some people will happily pay a few bucks to guarantee that their getting the movie they want, that they can find it easily, and that it will download in a reasonable amount of time.
Anyway, these things just don't happen by themselves. A company has to actually try and deliver a product or service, or there is no market.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
One application of this I'd be interested in is perhaps the opportunity to buy music videos in addition to songs. I almost never buy songs; I believe $1 is overpriced when I can get the whole CD used for $7 if I drive a couple miles to my local independent record shop in Pacific Beach. Since there really isn't a place to buy music videos unless the band released a DVD (in which case there's likely multiple videos -- the majority of which I likely don't want), this would be a product which I couldn't buy anywhere else and I can somewhat justify a dollar or two.
Sadly, PS/2 was yet another victim of USB, which doesn't care what you plug into it, the electrical slut.
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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I just don't see the demand right now.
The demand is there, otherwise we wouldn't see such a huge black market dealing in unauthorized copies.
Until downloading movies saves you both time and money, and is easy to use, I don't see the service becoming too popular.
I mostly agree with you, but it needn't save both time and money. Change your statement to "time or money", and I totally agree with you. Consider this: I want to watch some very obscure movie or TV show, and my local Blockbuster doesn't have it. Now, I can buy it on Amazon for retail + shipping + wait time, or I can purchase a single viewing download for $2.99, with the option of burning to DVD for another $10.
Whoever can execute this scheme the most successfully will make a good deal of money, and will be hailed as the movie equivalent of iTMS. Unless it's Apple, in which case we'll criticize the proprietary nature of their product/service combo, the DRM, and the pricing. =)
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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.