Sony to Make an "iTunes for Movies"

dAzED1 writes "After years of complaining that the RIAA and MPAA were missing the boat, and should have embraced things like Napster instead of supressing them, we got iTunes and the like. Now, Sony has announced it will 'make its top 500 films available digitally in the next year' according to a report on the BBC, with Sony's iPod replacement being the PSP."

Comments

Re:Great Idea if they "Get It"

[bechthros]

"Apple's AACs don't *need* an iPod to work"

That's because AAC is a product of Dolby, Apple just licensed it.

Re:This could rock, except...

[Calroth]

Who wants to watch a movie on a 3" screen?

Actually, I bet that a lot of people do (or will).

It's like audio. Back in the day, we had huge hi-fi systems, speakers, amps, the whole lot for the ultimate enjoyment of music. But then the industry brought out a whole bunch of miniature radios and players, culminating in the Sony Walkman (and OK, the iPod) and people found a whole new way to enjoy music: on the move, outside, inside, wherever they felt like it.

Now substitute "huge hi-fi systems" with "home theatre systems" and "Sony Walkman" with "Sony PSP"...

One of my friends has a Dell Axim (that's a Pocket PC) with a 640x480 screen, and DivX playing software. It's awesome, you can watch ripped TV shows literally where you like, on the bus, in the park outside, etc. etc., and the quality is brilliant. I could get used to that. (Not that I advocate ripping TV shows.)

Re:The thing is....

[jalefkowit]

You hit the nail on the head there. Sony's decision to offer the top 500 shows that they really don't understand what makes ITMS so successful at all.

If there are any Sony folks reading, you should click through and read the following articles immediately:

• The Long Tail
• Millions of Markets of Dozens

Here's the key grafs from the 2nd piece (by Joe Kraus, founder of Excite and now chief of JotSpot):

Let's look at the Amazon example. This graph shows that Amazon sells roughly 2.3M books and that the average Barnes and Noble retail store stocks 139,000 books. So, Amazon stocks roughly 2.2M more books that Barnes and Noble.

No surprise here. That's the benefit of an online storefront. Massive inventories housed in ultra-low-rent areas that are fronted electronically.

The astonishing figure is the percent of sales that comes from the "long tail" of books (books that Amazon carries but that Barnes and Noble doesn't).

57%.

57% of Amazon's sales come from books you can't even buy at a Barnes and Noble...

Yep, just like I would imagine a good chunk of ITMS sales come from singles you can't find at your local Sam Goody -- and Kraus cites in the same article that "every iTunes song has been purchased at least once", which would seem to bear that out when you figure that ITMS has an inventory of over a million songs. That's a heck of a long tail business.

If Sony had a brain they'd be figuring out how to use the PSP as a platform to revitalize their back catalog -- all those movies they've got sitting around that aren't Top 500 material, but which have a few fans here and there. If they can get the distribution system efficient enough the profits would probably be considerable.

a comparison

[CySurflex]

I have been trying out different movie download services - so here are some impressions:

• It's definitely the future. It's so much easier to click and download a movie you want to watch instead of going to the store and renting it. And it has a significant advantage over Netflix in that you don't have to plan in advance, you get instant gratification. I decide I want to watch Troy - I log in to my computer, pay the fee and can be watching it 2 minutes later as it starts downloading
  
  
• Movielink is the venture put forth by a bunch of big movie studios. As such it has the latest movies which is good. However, it is expensive ($4.99 for 24 hour watching period!). It is also very restrictive DRM wise - you only have 24 hours, and you can only watch it on the computer you downloaded. The plus side is that they have all the latest movies
  
  
• Starz Ticket on Real Movies - this one is cool because for a flat fee ($12.95/month I think) you can watch all the movies you want. A drawback is that they have a very limited set of movies (300 movies I think), most of them you never heard of, or heard of and never wanted to watch, and a lot of very, very old movies. BUT, besides that, the service is pretty cool - you can activate up to 3 computers, so you can download to one computer and view it on another. And you can view and download as many movies as you want. They rotate through different movies and always have about 300 or so in the library, so if they rotate "out" a movie you were watching, you can't finish watching it. But I do like this service, because unlike Movie Link you're not limited to 24 hours
  
  
• Digital Cable / VOD / On Demand - I have Adelphia Digital Cable, and they seem to have a large library of movies "on demand". The convenience factor is great - it's already on your TV, you don't have to plug your computer into your TV to use this. Drawback is steep price - like MovieLink its $4.95 for 24 hours of viewing time. They do let you view the movie from any digital cable box in your home, so thats a little flexibility right there. And you can obviously record it to your TiVo and watch it beyond the 24 hour period. They have a lot of new movies, I'm watching Shrek 2 using this right now.
  
  If someone managed to combine the Starz Ticket pricing and DRM model with the movie collection of the others, that would be close to a winner.
  
  After having been a Netflix subscriber for 5 years, I realized that this is really the future, once people start getting it. (The vendors AND the consumers need to get it)