Why iVoD Is Important
Over at Big Brain Boy, a fine blog about the future of entertainment technology, the cerebrum comments that:
In your future we don’t see much Pay-Per-View on your desktop.
I agree. Computers make for crappy movie viewing, and televisions continue their natural evolution towards home theater.
So why should the creative guilds be so concerned about residuals for movies downloaded over the internet?
The internet is a delivery system. Right now, you view the web via the internet on a computer. There may come a day when internet is used to deliver everything: phone, web, video, audio, smell-o-vision, you name it…to a variety of appliances (television, phone, fridge, cyborg house boy). For our economic purposes, it’s not the “what you watch it on” as much as it’s the “how you get what you watch”.
I think the potential for internet-based video on demand (or an iTunes-like service) is the ability for small films to have real profit potentials without studio backing. Blog-based word of mouth would allow for movies with small but profitable niche markets (where advertising is near impossible through traditional methods) to actually see the light of day and generate revenue.
There was an interesting article recently on the slide of b-movies and other direct to video features due to the Netflix service. The logic being that when people browse in Blockbuster, they see Piranha 3 or whatever and pick it up. But in Netflix, the system works that only highly-rated movies in similar genres or with similar actors/directors/writers (in that order, of course) are featured next to the major film.
The upshot of the Netflix system and other internet-based review systems (like Amazon) is indies and niche market studio pics have much greater potential. The victims are, of course, the b-movies that now have nearly no eye ball real estate. Oh well.
Here’s to hoping the guilds lock this down and, likewise, let the potential exist. iTunes’ Digital Rights Management (for all I know) works flawlessly in protecting the music and could be used for h.264 (the upcoming super-compressor codec) in distributing films. Any thoughts on this?
J:
DRM is clearly a major obsession of the studios. I downloaded MovieLink (one of two fledgling legitimate film download services) on my PC, and their service seems to work on an authorization-feedback model with time constraints. You essentially rent the rights to view the movie for three days following your download, but you never actually have a permanently-viewable copy of the film.
I’m not sure if their service streams the film, or gives you a file that requires steady authorization signals in order to decode (and perhaps self-destruct commands written into the code?).
It sure does send my firewall into spasms, so it’s clear that MovieLink is talking to the mothership quite frequently.
I primarily use a Mac, and the service isn’t yet available for it, so I can’t comment on that yet.
“iTunes’ Digital Rights Management (for all I know) works flawlessly in protecting the music and could be used for h.264 (the upcoming super-compressor codec) in distributing films”
It’s pretty easy to beat the security - you just…(The instructions were deleted because, hey, we don’t want to spread evil…Ed.)
You may find this column by Robert X. Cringely interesting, because of his conjecture on Apple’s potential for just such an internet delivery system for movies.
Indeed, I thought the column was fascinating. In particular, I hadn’t really connected the dots between iTunes and Jobs’ Hollywood clout.
The scenario is certainly plausible.