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.