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Cringely on Blockbuster-iPod Video Distro Plan
MrPerfekt writes "In this week's Cringely column, another one of his hypothesizing sessions actually seems plausible. Blockbuster's retail outlets make good sense for Apple to partner with them for video iPod content distribution. From the article: 'Take your Video-out iPod to Blockbuster, drop it in a kiosk dock then download from the local xServe your choice of 50,000 movies. You can rent the movie or buy it and you can even choose the resolution, which may or may not affect the final price. Take the iPod home, drop it in the dock attached to your TV and watch the movie. H.264 decoding takes place in the iPod in hardware.'"
This is the key point to take from the article. I'm not defending whether or not Burst's patents are valid or not valid...just that nothing will happen until Apple makes Burst.com go away. This will require:
1. Invalidating their key patents via the courts - long and costly
2. Buying a license to use their patents (the solution Microsoft pursued) - short and costly
3. Buying Burst.com - short and costly and not a chance in hell because I can't see Jobs giving up when he is convinced that the patents that Burst.com hold are invalid.
However, I do think that the rumors of Sony launching some sort of movie service that y'all can plug your PS3s into is lighting a fire under the Cupertino booty. Somebody is going to launch this party . . . and if iTunes is any indication, to the first goes the $$$$.
We definitely live in interesting times.
Cringley has a knack for stealing ideas and passing them off as his own genius (such as baxter .. tsunami warning system etc).
.. once CableCard 2+ comes out it will be mad easy to buy videos. It's more a cultural/habit shift to no go o the music store. I mean why do people contnue to buy CD's when tehy can get the songs cheaper online on napster.com or yahoo music? Heck maybe HDTV's will have touchscreens or he remote itself will be a touchscreen face ipod-style and voice controlled making it super easy to buy music, select tv shows and movies wirelessly. Right now the interface for doing it is ugly and navigating with the remote is a pain.
As usual, this stuff has been talked about before on forums and websites/blogs. Like, some discuss the video membership card itself being an NTSC transmitter with a HDD in it containing a full movie and the best part is you'd use the membership card as a remote to fast fwd etc. It would discourage copying etc. I mean, copying is a problem any which way. Furthermore they can sell a USB dock to the device so you dont have to take it into he video store to download the movie.
Anyway this is all moot cause the cable companies already have movies on demand
Greetings.
.com stores with their real stores. Apple probably wouldn't make the movies available through Blockbuster/Hollywood Video/etc. that would be just the channel to make them available for the computer-phobes or non-broadband customers.
My first reaction was the same as many here when I read the article: why bother, if you have broadband?
Cringely gives a good answer toward the end: because not everyone we know is using computers or cares about broadband. Outside our techie world, some people find the computer either intimidating or perfectly acceptable running on a 56 kbps modem. Thus, the ability to dock and iPod and refresh its contents at a local store isn't that far-fetched.
If you look at some of the big box retailers' strategies, they're all leveraging their on-line stores against their bricks-n-mortar stores, creating a continuum rather than a separate experience. They are integrating their
Now... coming back to reality... where on earth does Cringely get this stuff? Very entertaining, good speculation... but just that, in the end. Is anyone keeping track of which of his write ups wind up being accurate?
Cheers,
Eugene
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
Seriously, who needs a coupla thousand square feet of overlit retail space and some glassy-eyed clerks when a vending machine can do the exact same thing, 24/7, in 12 square feet, installable in any mini-mall, public transit station, school or grocery store? If Apple were really interested in direct loads to iPods one of these and a network connection is all they need.
Figure a box the size of your typical soda machine (mostly for security & visibility), fill the bottom foot with concrete for stability and theft-discouragement, then a rack with an Xserve & some reasonably high-speed communications gear. Have it download material on a regular basis, video & audio, in whatever formats and quality required. Put some smarts into the system so local demographics are respected and demand is anticipated (Espaniol in Spanish neighborhoods, kiddie material when installed in schools, etc.) On the front stick a few TV screens showing previews and specials.
For security double encrypt all of the media content, partially decrypt as it's being iPod-loaded, then have it played back using a public key system. Then step back and see what sells. Sure music, videos, ringtones and movies can be the first products but what about software, indeed any sort of large or valuable file. Leave room in the top of the box for wireless distribution - walk nearby and your electronics can auto-discover streaming audio and video advertising in WiFi & Bluetooth, access to websites that pay Apple for the privilege, etc.
But a whole Blockbuster? Naw, a mini Lockerbuster!
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
There are quite a few areas (like, say, anywhere >2 miles outside of a suburb) where you can't get cable or DSL. These people still like to watch movies (which is one of the reasons why satellite TV is so big).
But that's just the advantage over internet distribution. No one's talking about the advantages over retail.
How many movies are in an average blockbuster. How many of you have gone there (ok, say five years ago back when you didn't just download it over your university connection) and they didn't have the movie you wanted to watch, or had already rented it?
If you have all of your collection on a hard drive, you can rent it out to everyone at once, no problem. And you can keep WAY more movies available at any one location.
The whole convenience of blockbuster is a good selection (or sometimes just large selection - how much luck do you have finding exactly the awful horror flick your friend recommended to you on p2p in any reasonable amount of time) and short time to get it - yes, it isn't as convenient as netflix or a download if you're planning ahead, but if you just want something to watch TONIGHT, it's a lot easier to stop at a store on your way home than scour p2p or call netflix and wait a day.
I could definitely see my parents (who don't have broadband) using this, and if it were tied into a fully stocked online store/rental (and therefore, I already had a video ipod) I could myself using it, too, when I don't have time to wait for a download.
It's not as good as a full download store for those of us on fat pipes, but a large portion of the country can't or won't get those, and for those people I could see this being quite useful (assuming you made the whole thing so easy to use that they wouldn't be intimidated by it - that'd be the hard part).
How much is a DVD? 5 GB? Let's say we have an iPod that size.
What BB could do is to stock iPods preloaded with movies? You go and pick up a movie. When a movie is in demand, they load many iPods with the movie. When it goes out of demand, they replace the movie by a newer one.
They get to re-use the hardware. They could also do just-in-time inventory - if a movie is left with 2 copies, they just start loading another 2.
BB could charge customers a deposit to rent the device.
But I still think a better solution is downloadable movies.
I know more ipod owners without computers than with computers. I live in a 7 person house share, and there are 6 ipods that use my computer. The one girl loved the look of them so much she just bought a 30gig pod and put (get this) 7 cd's onto it. Thats all she wanted. I sneakily put the ricky gervais podcasts onto their as well, but sheesh, you'd be amazed at the none-techi people out there using ipods. Their biggest gripe about it is getting content onto it, as they're not allowed to install itunes on their only regularly available computer (their work computers). I reckon instead of Blockbusters, they should be doing this in virgin / hmv / [your own brand of music store] so that if you buy a cd from them, you can pop your ipod into a dock at the cash register and it'll upload the tracks while you're busy typing in your pin number etc etc. I mean people usually only buy one or two cd's, and it doesn't take long at all to upload that much content. I reckon there'd be huge demand for something like that.
I live in the Blueridge mountains of Virginia an hour west of DC. All I can get is dial-up. We don't have DSL, cable modem, and my 100 ft poplars and the mountain to my west prevent me from doing satellite. We are far enough out that I can't even get network TV. However, I have a 60 inch plasma HDTV and a Bose surround system and a library of 1,000 DVDs, a lot of which are documentaries, etc so my kids have something besides crap to watch (they read a lot). I visit a Blockbuster store once a week and it is 15 miles away, so I am likely to be a great candidate for this type of service, but I can tell you right now that I'm unlikely to ever use it as described.
Why? Because I'm all about owning my video and having the ability to sell them when the media they are on becomes obsolete (like VHS). After all, at $20 a pop x 1,000 DVDs, I have a real inventment. When I go to sell all those DVDs and trade up to Blu-ray (or whatever), I want something tangible that I can take a picture of and sell on eBay, and I just can't see that a terabyte video iPod loaded with movies would bring me more money than the actual physical DVD and case. Real hard to take a picture of bits.
What someone SHOULD do is kill off DVDs and the upcoming Blu-ray stuff and concentrate on building a read-only 30GB movie flash card that can somehow be loaded up *very* quickly (a GB/second) using special write hardware (perhaps located at Blockbuster and other stores). Now you have my attention. Not only would the media take up less space in my living room (allowing me to have a larger library), but it wouldn't be prone to scratching by my kids, and I still have a physical embodiment of the video that I can sell in the future. Since we already have 1GB flash cards, I don't see this as a tremendously difficult leap. The players would be a lot cheaper and more reliable too, since they would involve no moving parts.
Hmmm....forget I said anything. Think I'll start a new business....