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Why Movies Are Not Exactly Like Music

Posted by kdawson on from the not-going-gently dept.

Ars digs into the proposition that movies will go the way of the music business, and finds some reasons not to be totally gloomy about Hollywood's immediate future. For one thing, the movie biz managed to introduce a next-generation format to follow the DVD, a trick that eluded the music crowd (anyone remember DVD-Audio? SACD?). Blu-ray isn't making up the gap as DVD sales fall, but it is slowing the revenue decline. Perhaps the most important difference from the music business is that movies aren't amenable to "disaggregation" — unlike CDs, which people stopped buying once they could get the individual songs they really wanted. Ars concludes: "The movie business is facing many of the same challenges that are bedeviling music, but it's not about to go quietly into that good night — and it may not have to."

2 of 378 comments (clear)

  1. PSN's video store by Rik+Sweeney · · Score: 3, Informative

    I was horrified when I saw some of the prices on the PSN video store. £2.50 to rent Zoolander. In the UK, that film is on TV every other weekend and then DVD is probably onto £3.99. There's no way I'd rent that, much less fork out the £6.99 for the SD version.

    That said, with proper 3D movies coming into play, I'm quite willing to still go to the cinema, sure I find the price quite high but if you haven't seen a 3D film yet I urge you to go and see one, it's very rare that I'm impressed with technology but this is something else.

    Movies are definitely not like music, except it would be nice if you could download your favourite single episode of Family Guy, The Simpsons or The Big Bang Theory instead of having to fork for the box set (or can you already do this).

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    Summation 2
  2. Re:DVD Sales Gap by slim · · Score: 3, Informative

    I believe that for some formats, the player needs to peek at the start and end of the file, before chewing through from the start.

    Hence, many Bittorrent implementations prioritise the start and end of the file.

    For as-good-as-streaming, of course you can fetch the beginning, fetch the end, then fetch the rest beginning at the front.

    If everyone does that it kills torrent swarm performance as a whole, but hey, we're not advocating P2P here, right ;)