Online movies
Slate reviews the new Starz/Real Networks online movie service and finds it seriously lacking:
By the time I finished perusing the entire Starz catalogue for this week, I realized I wasn't getting all that much for $12.95. The 100-plus title list beats watching an edited airline flick or paying hotel-movie rates for even fewer choices. But for less time and effort, BitTorrent users willing to flout copyright laws can get newly released movies for free... Add it up, and Starz offers fewer movies than BitTorrent, at lower quality, for a higher price.
It also makes a good argument that the movie makers need to see piracy as something to beat, rather than to just complain about:
Sure, it's impossible to beat the pirates on price, but the movie moguls could learn from the mistakes, and the recent successes, of the music guys. For all its strengths, BitTorrent is just a file-sharing protocol. You still have to hunt down URLs for movies on the Net yourself. Once you do, they can take all day to load, and sometimes the download doesn't finish. If it does, you sometimes find you've spent hours downloading a grainy video with bad sound. An iTunes for movies?a well-designed, super user-friendly video store with fast, reliable downloads (there's no reason it couldn't use BitTorrent on the back end, linked to fast corporate servers)?would lure consumers into paying. Not by making piracy feel criminal, but by making it feel inconvenient.
To me, the biggest downfall to the new Starz/Real Networks service is simply that it's associated with Real Networks, makers of the first spyware software (a.k.a. RealAudio). It's hard to think of any other program that has done more to offend and irritate its users than RA.
Beyond that, though, I think this author's approach to online piracy is correct. Yes, theft is wrong. But the media companies also need to work to provide genuinely helpful services to customers, rather than just expecting the world to revolve around their own (sorely outdated) business and technology models.
June 18, 2004 08:40 AM