Perhaps you missed Leonardo DiCaprio’s swashbuckling performance in “The Man in the Iron Mask” when the movie came to theaters. Or to video. Or to HBO. Now, four years after the film’s cinematic release, you can pay $5.99 to download it from the Internet.
Less than an enticing proposition, you say?
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. chose admittedly less-than-blockbuster fare to launch its experiment with Internet pay-per-view movies. But its venture with digital distribution partner CinemaNow Inc. last month marks the latest in a series of tentative steps toward digital film distribution.
Consider it a preview of things to come.
Since Miramax offered the first mainstream movie for download via the Internet a year ago, a growing number of studios are dabbling with digital film delivery. Three major studios–DreamWorks SKG, Warner Bros. and MGM–allow online distribution partner Intertainer to stream movies–including such fare as “Shrek”–to computer users with high-speed Internet connections.
The difference with MGM’s deal with CinemaNow is it allows users to download a film to their hard drive to watch later. Once it is opened, users have 24 to 48 hours to watch it before it expires.
All eight Hollywood studios have invested millions of dollars in joint ventures poised to deliver movies to PCs–possibly by the end of the year.
The hurdles to Internet video-on-demand services are as numerous as they are obvious. Most people prefer to watch movies on a television screen, not a computer monitor. And few households have the home-networking infrastructure needed to transport the film from the computer’s hard drive to the living room TV.
A coming generation of Internet-connected devices, like the ReplayTV 4000, the Moxi box or Microsoft’s Xbox game console, hold the promise of bringing Web-delivered content to the home’s entertainment center. But for now, DVD players seem adequate to satisfy the home-movie needs of the average consumer.
“How many people are going to say, on a Friday night, `Hey, kids, let’s sit around the PC and watch a movie?”‘ asked P.J. McNealy, a senior analyst with the GartnerG2 research firm. “They’re going to watch a DVD in the living room. On the couch. On their big-screen TV–not their computer monitor.”
Proponents say Internet movie distribution is a no-brainer. Consumers have shown a surprising appetite for movies delivered at the click of a mouse. File-swapping sites like Morpheus and Kazaa are more packed than the suburban megaplex on a Saturday night, distributing nearly 1 million bootlegged films a day, piracy experts say.
“It’s difficult to quantify, but I can say by almost any metric, from almost any source, it has grown phenomenally over the last 12 months–and probably even doubled in that time period,” said Mark Weaver, executive vice president of MediaForce, a firm specializing in Internet film piracy.
Improvements in peer-to-peer technologies, better compression schemes and the sustained growth of high-speed Internet connections serve to stoke interest in the Internet bootlegs, Weaver said.
To avoid being Napsterized, the studios began working on Internet video-on-demand ventures last summer. MGM, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Universal Studios and Warner partnered to create Movielink; Walt Disney and News Corp. jointly formed Movies.com. Neither service has launched, though Movielink has pledged to go live before the end of the year.
Movielink’s new chief executive, Jim Ramo, says digital film distribution is more than a defense against piracy. It represents a new way for studios to cash in on their films–in industry parlance, it’s a new “window” of release, to be added to theatrical debuts, home video and DVDs, HBO and Showtime screenings, and free cable networks like TNT.
“Video on demand over the Internet could some day give consumers access to almost any kind of recorded material that they wanted at their convenience,” Ramo said. “Generally, the more consumers are given the benefits of convenience and choice, the more they tend to buy. Therefore, the more content is sold. And the pie gets bigger.”
As Movielink and Movies.com prepare to unveil new services, the studios are moving forward with tentative experiments with independents.
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