Film Studios Remain Pigheaded on Digital Films
By Jason Ihle
A few weeks ago Warner Bros. became the first major film company to strike a deal to make its films available to purchase and download on the Internet. Movies would be available online when they are released on DVD. Their deal was with MovieLink. Just last Wednesday Disney announced it had struck a deal with CinemaNow to do the same thing. It was followed one day later by Warners’ announcement of another deal, also with CinemaNow. Clearly the major studios will follow suit in the coming weeks and months.
Of course this is a smart move and I hail it as a step in the right direction. The music industry acted far too late in their attempts to curb piracy. The movie industry took a long time to learn from their counterparts’ mistakes, but they’ve caught on at least. Or so it seems on the surface.
The downloaded movies can not be burned to DVD or uploaded to your iPod. This makes reasonable sense to me. Why would the studios give you a clear outlet to make multiple copies of the thing they don’t want you to copy? The colossal mistake both Disney and Warners have made is in what they will charge for these films. The prices for most films will fall in the $10 - $20 range. What? You serious, Clark? That’s what you can expect to pay for a new DVD that is devoid of special features. Essentially what you get with a downloaded film is a DVD without special features, but you can only watch it on your computer (or your television if your laptop has an S-Video output like mine does). But the majority of people would most likely be watching these films on their computers. Even if you do watch them on your television, the high quality sound mix that exists on DVD will be absent.
Who is going to pay premium prices for material that is quite obviously not premium, especially when you can buy the DVD for the same price (or a few dollars more plus cool features)? If the movie industry wants to try to curb illegal downloads by making their films available for online purchase then they need to price them accordingly. I would be more than willing, especially given my current living situation in Spain with no TV or DVD player, to pay for movies online. I would not pay more than $5, however. I think I’m a fairly average person and there must be many more people out there like me who also would not pay more than $5 for such a service. So the movie industry is putting itself back into the position of encouraging people to find alternative (and illegal) means to see the movies they want to see.
Overhead can not be an issue. The cost of putting a film online for downloading is so much cheaper than mass producing millions of copies of a DVD complete with packaging, photos, features, notes, etc. Okay, they have to pay for the server space and they have to pay some techies to keep the sites working and actually post the products, but this is close to no overhead as a company can get with a new product.
It amazes me that the studios can be so bull-headed in this arena. They have made a smart move by allowing an easy, legal alternative for downloading films, but have priced themselves right out of the market. I hope their plan backfires miserably. I hope nobody buys movies online and they continue to download illegally and make bootleg copies of DVDs.
