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HOME REVIEWS CONTACT ABOUT March 14, 2009
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Movie Distribution, Status Quo & Future
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In 1955, "The
Seven Year Itch"
starring Marilyn Monroe,
was the first "edited for
television" movie.
This
event was a milestone
in the history of movie
and video distribution.
No
longer did we have to
go to a theater to see a movie.
In the 1980s, movie rentals, made possible with the
widespread availability of videocassette recorders, became popular. Eventually, Blockbuster Video emerged as the
movie rental king. Now, however,
Blockbuster, hurt by the emergence of the home delivered rental and the
pay-per-view movie, is more than a billion dollars in debt.
NetFlix pioneered the home delivered movie rental,
an offshoot of the movie rental business, in 1999. NetFlix now offers more
than 100,000 TV show and movie titles from their library. Wal-Mart,
Pay-per-view
(PPV) service from a cable or satellite service provider is a form of movie
download, only the signal does not travel over the Internet. The primary limitation for these services is
the number of movies available. But PPV
in this format is very popular.
According to Kristie Fortner (Rentrak VP), 2007 orders of free on demand movies were up
66 percent, orders of subscription programs like Showtime or HBO were up 23
percent, and PPV movie rentals were up more than 40 percent.
Internet
downloaded movies appear to be the dominant delivery technique of the
future. Vudu, TiVo, Apple's iTunes, NetFlix, and Amazon.com currently offer video content via a
broadband Internet connection. However,
the number of movies in the download libraries is a bit less than the DVD
libraries, with about 10,000 movies now available for download on NetFlix.
Most
of the services are either offering movies in HDTV format, or planning to do so
soon. Video quality is difficult to
compare between the different services.
The video compression algorithm, called a Codec, plays a significant
role. The best objective method to compare
signal quality is bit-rate. A comparison
of bit-rate for some of the current video alternatives:
Service Bit-Rate
(Mbps)
Vudu HDX 9-20
Vudu HD 4
XBOX 7
iTunes
4
Cable
TV 10-15
Satellite 6-8
Blu-Ray 40
Prices
are coming down for the equipment needed for these services. Vudu slashed the
price of their set-top box to $99 for the 2008 Christmas season (from about
$300), but $50 of movie credits needed to be purchased with the hardware.
Kudos to Vudu for
their on-line service. The interface has been compared to IMDB.com
(a movie-buff website). You see an
actor, select the resume, and you can see what other movies they've been in,
and easily find your selection. It's makes the process absolutely pleasant.
A
significant downside of video downloads in the unavailability of recent
releases. Movies are generally
unavailable for at least a month after release, in order to protect the brick
and mortar movie theater market. This is
unlikely to change, at least in the near-term.
According
to Joshua Danovitz (TiVo),
the issue of download limits differs in each country. In the
It
is likely that the movie distribution business will follow the path blazed by
the audio distribution business. The
only reason for the time lag is that video files are much larger, and the
Internet capability was not yet ready.