Movie Burning Kiosks Coming To Retailers

Vitaly Friedman writes "The motion picture industry is in talks with some major retailers about installing DVD burning kiosks in stores. It's an interesting idea, but one that almost entirely misses the point. Hollywood's movie distribution system is in dire need of a fix - very few will dispute that. Movie attendance has been suffering, DVD sales are slumping, and all the industry has managed to do is come up with a half-baked, unpopular download service and a scant handful of simultaneous releases. In another attempt to sort of give consumers what they want, the motion picture industry is thinking about allowing retailers to set up in-store kiosks for distribution."

Comments

Here's what I would buy

[TheRaven64]

I currently have a movie rental subscription. It costs £13/month, and gives me as many DVDs as I can watch, up to three at a time. This works out to about one a day. I would pay a similar amount, maybe a little more (say, £15) for the convenience of a service that offered:

1. DVD-quality downloads. 1GB of H.264-encoded movie should give 'good enough' quality.
2. No DRM; I often watch films on my laptop, and I occasionally watch them on a handheld device. Don't tie me to any particular platform.
3. Any film or TV series that's been released on DVD.
4. Up to 30 downloads a month.

Sure, some people would archive everything they've downloaded, but would the industry lose much from that? I rarely watch a film more than two or three times, and so it wouldn't make much sense; particularly when you can just re-download any film you want.

Of course, these films would also end up on peer to peer networks, but at that price it just wouldn't be worth my time and effort to get them illegally.

I don't want any more DVDs. I own fifty or so movies on DVD, but I stopped buying new ones over a year ago. They are simply not worth the money; when I can rent close to thirty for the price of buying one it's only a good investment to buy if I plan on watching it more than thirty times[1].

Sadly, I don't think the movie industry is likely to adopt such a model for quite some time.

[1] The opposite is true for music. Looking through my iTunes library, the vast majority of tracks have a play count of 50-80, making music rental services a very bad financial choice for me.

Re:Why would I buy...

[Kasis]

I agree, I dislike having to wait five minutes for my passport photos to be developed, I wonder how long this would take exactly?? In my personal home kiosk, it takes anywhere from half an hour to several hours to download a movie, then another quarter of an hour to decompress and burn it. And it's free...

If I'm standing in a retailers and I feel that a movie is worth paying for, I'll pick up a ready-pressed DVD from the shelf in a glossy box, pay for it and leave.

What exactly is the benefit of this service? Yes I did rtfa but I still can't see any advantage.

Distribution Economics from an early attempt

[billstewart]

About 10 years ago I had a customer who wanted to set up movie stores like this - they'd always have the current movies in stock, and they'd always have every movie that had ever been made. (They'd done a similar model with record stores, and had some fast digital-to-VHS burning technology.) The main catch was that you needed an OC3 network connection (155 Mbps) to be able to do 5-minute downloads, which was laughably unrealistic at the time, as opposed to today when it's only fairly unrealistic. Since this was before DVDs, they also had issues with the costs of data storage for movies they had cached - 500GB was still pretty big, though there were some digital tape technologies that might work if you had a robot, or you could copy videotapes if you didn't mind the quality hit.

On-Demand downloads weren't very practical - but pre-loading movies as they're released works quite well, especially since that's what you're most likely to sell. A 1 Mbps network connection lets you download 75 GB a week, which is about 15 movies, depending on resolution, 2-disk-sets, etc. Hollywood seldom produces more than 10 movies a week, and Bollywood's pretty similar. (The pr0n industry produces a lot more.) So if you've got a cable modem or decent DSL connection, you can keep ahead of the mainstream movies and have some bandwidth available for CD-quality ad-hoc downloads. Network availability can be a problem - the obvious place to put DVD burner kiosks is in malls, but they often don't have cable, and they're usually far away from telco offices so DSL bandwidth is lower. On the other hand, grocery stores are usually in/near residential neighborhoods, so they've usually got cable nearby and often have decent DSL.