There is a new player in the never-ending grab for your dollar. Hoping to stem the perceived tide of free movie trading on the Internet, five movie studios (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal and Warner Bros.) have banded together to offer movies for rent on the Internet. The idea, I assume, is to make legal downloading of movies on the Internet easy enough and cheap enough so that people will not do the illegal thing and trade them for free. The website for their joint venture is www.movielink.com.
What they have done so far is to make a few dozen mediocre movies available. When you sign up (there is no signup fee), you are then entitled to download your choice of movies and play them on your PC. The cost of the movies is from $2 to $4. Once you download them, you can play them for 24 hours. You have 30 days to start playing, but once you start a particular movie, you can only view it for a day.
OK so far. But in order for a service like this to work, there need to be a number of important criteria met. The cost and rental time is in line with movie rental stores or buying the movies on pay-per-view systems like Time-Warner Cable offers - so far so good.
The biggest problem is that the downloads take the better part of an hour, at cable or DSL speeds. Forget it if you have just a modem connection - it's far too slow. Once you download the movie, you find that the quality is, quite frankly, terrible. First of all, the movies are not in widescreen format. This may not seem important, but to any movie aficionado this is the only way to go. There is no high quality sound - I am not even sure the movie was in basic stereo. But the biggest problem is that the images are heavily compressed, resulting in what are called compression artifacts - false colors, false boundaries between colors, blotchy colors, smearing, etc. I couldn't even finish viewing the one I did download - the quality was just too bad.
Now, compare that with other offerings. First of all, there is still the local rental store. Sure, you have to go there and then take the tape or DVD back when you are finished, but at least the quality is good to excellent. But now there are a number of offerings on cable. Time-Warner has a movie-on-demand system with which you can select and purchase movies, and then view and control them just as if you had the DVD or tape - i.e. you can stop/pause/go forward/rewind, etc. The quality of these movies is much better than the Movielink downloads, both video and sound. (But I do have to add that the MOD movies are not widescreen - I intend to make my feelings about that known to Time-Warner.) The more traditional pay-per-view movie format (starting at a specific time, and no controls) is also still available.
You can also subscribe to Netflix (www.netflix.com) the DVD rental service via US Mail. This service just keeps getting better and better, and is becoming very popular.
From a product standpoint, I think the five movie studios have really missed the mark with Movielink. One wonders what their rationale was - surely it will not generate any significant revenue for them. Perhaps it is only positioning and posturing in the ongoing battle against Internet copying. As it has been said before, the recording and motion picture industries have to learn to embrace the Internet and to do a paradigm shift to a quality product from which they can derive significant revenue. Movielink isn't it.
Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).