The insanity in the movie business continues. Today a group of movie studios announced that they would sell you a downloadable version of some movies, with heavy DRM applied, for twenty to thirty bucks a pop. What are these guys smoking!?
The movies will be available through Movielink and CinemaNow, both owned or controlled by groups of movie studios, who are offering their idea of generous usage terms:
• no transferring to portable devices
• no burning to standard DVDs
• no Mac support
• no extra features
• lower quality*
• no nothing except watching it on your Windows computer
*The movies are encoded in Windows Media format, and are about one gigabyte in size. For those who don’t know, movies on DVD are typically about 4-6 GBs. So not only are the movies more expensive and less flexible, they are lower quality too.
How yummy.
I don’t know why I am even surprised by this stuff anymore. It simply continues the efforts of the movie studios and record companies to deliver less and charge more.
Here’s a bit more info at The Motley Fool
UPDATE – Bitrates, resolution, and prices
I did a little investigating and came up with this data about the compression used on these downloadable movies. Using ‘Corpse Bride’ for comparision, since I happen to own the DVD, I found that the version sold by Movielink is 740 MB. If I extract just the main feature from the DVD (which is all you get with the download) its size is 4.15 GB. This works out to bitrates of 1.28 mbps for Movielink and 7.19 mbps for the DVD. Even granting that Windows Media encoding is more efficient than the MPEG-2 used on DVDs, the download will definitely be lower quality.
Unfortunately I can’t find any mention of the resolution used for the Movielink files, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they are standard 720 x 480. (I’m not about to give them twenty five bucks to find out.)
Of course, some people won’t care that the movie is of lower quality, but many will care that the DVD sells for $16.96 at Amazon, while the download from Movielink is $24.99.
We already pay $9.99 for low-quality movies in iTunes and $0.99 for low quality songs in iTunes. Why would consumers not pay for low quality movies for their HD TVs as well. It’s ridiculous that we’re getting better quality tvs and speakers and monitors but lower quality content than VHS!
This is ridiculous.
You can bet your life that on top of all of the idiotry already mentioned here that it will take them at least 18 months to bring a service like this to the UK. Not that I would use a service like this in this state
but…
When will the movie and music producers learn that we will not put up with DRM that is this restrictive!