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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."
...something that:
* Will last much less time than a standard DVD before failing
* Not play in all of my DVD players
* Mean I have to wait around for it to finish burning
* Probably cost as much, or more than, a regular DVD
I won't, that's the answer to that. Get with it Hollywood, you need to offer movies to download at a significantly discounted price, or with no DRM. Offering me less for more, which is what you try to do at every step, doesn't make me want to give you my hard-earned cash.
Hollywood found out they can sell you a product that self destructs.
FTFA: Retailers are concerned that digital downloads might spell an end to the sale of DVDs, and see the download-to-burn kiosks as a way to keep them in the DVD business.
If only could they realize they gotta adapt instead of run hacks to keep the good ol' days.
There weren't plenty of typing machine manifacturers that started making keybaords and mice as well I think. They just tried to keep the old ways and ceased to exist.
For a second, I thought this had something to do with the proper disposal of movies like Battlefield Earth...
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Now that Skype offers free calls to US numbers until the end of the year, why not drop the MPAA a line and let them know what's on your mind? Maybe we can all check in on them daily and thank them for their efforts!
Oh, and if you'd be so kind, could you also let them know that The Pirate Bay is back up? They seem to still be under the impression that it's down... (PDF link)
Oh. You might need their numbers:
Washington: (202) 293-1966
LA: (818) 995-6600
New York (listed as their "anti-piracy office"): (914) 378-0800
I already have a movie-burning kiosk in my home.
:)
It's called BitTorrent.
AE
...They should make better movies.
...when are we gonna start seeing book burning kiosks?
There nothing new here but the quality is shite.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Industry insiders describe the kiosk prototypes they have seen as a DVD burning iMac with the browser's homepage set to "http://thepiratebay.org/". This strikes me as an mindblowingly ill-fated idea -- I mean, if I had to drive somewhere to get to the iTunes Music Store, I can't imagine I'd use it. It's all about the American I wannit now impulse.
~jeff
I guess it never occurred to the movie industry that perhaps sales/attendance are slumping because all of the movies they're coming out with these days are (a) expensive and (b) exactly the same as all the other movies for the last N years? "This story line worked before, it'll work again!"
:-P
Thanks, guys.
- DVD-quality downloads. 1GB of H.264-encoded movie should give 'good enough' quality.
- 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.
- Any film or TV series that's been released on DVD.
- 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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Can I shout "fire!" in a movie burning kiosk?
But "burned" DVDs have a limited life. They may only last a few years depending on the quality of the DVDs etc. Properly pressed DVDs last nearly forever. How happy will the consumers be when a few years down the track the DVDs stop working?
DVD is certainly having a negative impact on cinemagoing. There are certainly times when you want to go out and see a movie, but in many (most?) cases the difference between watching the movie at home or at a cinema is decreasing. Therefore more people are buying DVDs, and fewer people are going to cinemas.
Whenever I go to a cinema (unfortunately rarely these days), I am subjected to trailers which often show me really cool movies that I then want to go to see. So if I go to one movie, chances are I'll go to a few more in the next few weeks. I'm sure that i'm not alone here (and the advertising industry hopes i'm not too!)
But there aren't compulsory trailers on DVDs (and if there were i would get very pissed off and boycott the DVDs concerned), and so audiences aren't exposed to future movies that they might like. So they are then less likely to continue seeing as many more movies.
How can the movie industry fix this? More, better advertising on TV perhaps. More trailers on DVDs (though if you make these unskippable you WILL piss people off and they'll rent less DVDs because of the annoyance). But the best strategy, if it is possible, is to entice the public back to watching movies at the cinema, probably by lowering prices. Then they'll want to keep seeing more movies at the cinema if the movie's good enough, or otherwise on DVD.
The motion picture industry's line of thinking (if it can be called that) probably ran something like this:
I'll agree, the idea is an interesting one. And if circumstances were different, I could see it taking off. There are already bands which record the concert live and then sell CDs after the concert. That seems to work fairly well. So yes, there could have been a chance for this model. (I did say that this would be a brief, feeble defense, yes?)
Now, where does this idea really fall flat? Well, the problem as stated is pretty much accurate. (It's solely their problem, but technically, to them, it is a problem.) Although, parsed through the lens of objectivity their problem actually reads, "People aren't paying enough for our movies." Meaning that making money hand-over-fist isn't enough for them, they want to make more money, both hands over three fists, damnit.
The observation is also correct: if the need is great enough and the item is unique enough, there will be someone honest enough to pay nearly any price. (As a corollary, there will also be someone crooked enough to never pay for the thing if there's any chance at all of getting it cheaper or for free elsewhere.) The sales rate to product going out may approach, but will never reach, either 0% or 100%.
I see the biggest problem in the solution, because they're providing a convenient sales mechanism for people who are already using this other sales mechanism, both of which are tanking in the marketplace! If the problem is people not buying DVDs or going to see movies, tying the two of them together is silly! It's like trying to build a flying machine by tying two bricks together.
I could also launch into a diatribe on the cost/benefit analysis of piracy vs. purchasing, but this isn't the place.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
this is just my subjective impression, but it appears that the sheer numbers of new movies seems to have gone up radically over the past decade or so. There are just so many movies that people want to watch I think, I know I dont care to see so many, certainly not all of them or even close to that. Seems like a long time ago, when a new "big" movie came out it was a relatively big deal, now its like every weekend there are a dozen (whatever) new movies. Same with bands and music for that matter.
Like I said, subjective, I have no actual hard numbers to point at.
As to the kiosks, I think it could be a fine way to do it if the movie plays in anything called a DVD player and if the discs are significantly cheaper than what you get now off the shelf. The main problem is disks need to be around three bucks, not 20 dollars.
*snort* We bought some movies yesterday out weekend yard saling, I got VHS tapes three for a dollar. Thats about the only way I buy movies or music now, used and at a cheap reasonable price. At 20 bucks, I buy zero movies. Under ten dollars I start to think about it, bargain bin new 5 or under I grab a few if I feel like it.
If they want to increase their market share, the movie companies should take that share away from other media, for example, the print media. To that end, I propose that they set up book burning kiosks in video stores world wide.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
All the points above are valid and each will nulify any business plan that Hollywood had planned for this service.
This plan can only work if the films being distributed are:
- Not available from Hollywood. This is great for the thousands of films made in Europe and India that don't get any distribution or review in the USA. The disadvantage of distributing films (or anything in the 'long tail') in this manner is that noone knows which few titles are good, and which of the remaining ones are mediocre.
- Significantly cheaper than the current pre-pressed DVD distribution of blockbusters mode of business. Perhaps an 'eBay'-type of auction for little known titles whereby the highest bid after a day would get the opportunity to pickup the DVD-ROM with the downloaded and formatted film from the video store distribution point. The local video store would get half the auction price for the burning service against a minimum guaranteed price that would be made by the film distributor. Many details need to be worked out, but this major change in business model could work.
Ah, but there's the rub.... It requires a major change in the mentality of the entertainment industry for a major change in the business model to occur. However, we all know that can never happen until they are either all bankrupt (unlikely with receipts at record levels) or some big company like Apple tricks or talks them into it.
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks