Youtube, the Internet and the Future of Movies
YouTube, The Internet and the future of movies
The Internet has transformed the music industry. Sales of CDs in retail music stores have been declining while sales of songs downloaded through the Internet to iPods and other portable music players are skyrocketing.
And the music industry is still contending with millions of people illegally downloading songs for free.
Will the motion picture industry have a similar fate?
Increased levels of high-speed Internet access, powerful PCs with DVD readers and writers, portable video devices, and leading-edge file sharing services have made downloading of video content faster and easier than ever. Free and often illegal video downloads are currently outpacing paid video downloads by four to one. But the Internet is also providing new ways for movie and television studios to distribute and sell their content, and they are trying to take advantage of that opportunity.
In early 2006, major movie studios reached agreements with sites such as Cinema Now and Movielink, which has since been acquired by Blockbuster, to sell movies online via download. Until that time, those sites had offered movie downloads as rentals, which, like the video-on-demand model, the customer could watch for only 24 hours. Warner Brothers also expanded its presence by entering into relationships with video-downloading services Guba.com and BitTorrent. The studios moved to build on the momentum created by the success of the iTunes music store, which demonstrated that consumers were very willing to pay for legal digital downloads of copyrighted material. At the same time, they hoped that entering the download sales market would enable them to preemptively confront the piracy issue in their industry to avoid the fate of the music industry.
What remained a question was whether the studios could replicate the success of iTunes. The initial pricing schemes certainly did not offer the same appeal as Apple's $0.99 per song or $9.99 per CD. Movielink set the
The Internet has transformed the music industry. Sales of CDs in retail music stores have been declining while sales of songs downloaded through the Internet to iPods and other portable music players are skyrocketing.
And the music industry is still contending with millions of people illegally downloading songs for free.
Will the motion picture industry have a similar fate?
Increased levels of high-speed Internet access, powerful PCs with DVD readers and writers, portable video devices, and leading-edge file sharing services have made downloading of video content faster and easier than ever. Free and often illegal video downloads are currently outpacing paid video downloads by four to one. But the Internet is also providing new ways for movie and television studios to distribute and sell their content, and they are trying to take advantage of that opportunity.
In early 2006, major movie studios reached agreements with sites such as Cinema Now and Movielink, which has since been acquired by Blockbuster, to sell movies online via download. Until that time, those sites had offered movie downloads as rentals, which, like the video-on-demand model, the customer could watch for only 24 hours. Warner Brothers also expanded its presence by entering into relationships with video-downloading services Guba.com and BitTorrent. The studios moved to build on the momentum created by the success of the iTunes music store, which demonstrated that consumers were very willing to pay for legal digital downloads of copyrighted material. At the same time, they hoped that entering the download sales market would enable them to preemptively confront the piracy issue in their industry to avoid the fate of the music industry.
What remained a question was whether the studios could replicate the success of iTunes. The initial pricing schemes certainly did not offer the same appeal as Apple's $0.99 per song or $9.99 per CD. Movielink set the