MovieLink To Offer Burn On Demand DVDs To Home Users

July 17th, 2006 Davis Posted in VOD |

Movielink has pretty much been a flop from the get go, but we are finally starting to see signs that the company might be innovating. A lot of people have suggested that Movielink was designed to fail from the beginning. That the site was nothing but a shell that Hollywood could point at to show that they were embracing digital downloads and that Congress should put their foot down on Bit Torrent and other file sharing sites. Earlier this year, there were rumors that Hollywood was trying to unload the service and that Blockbuster Video might actually buy the service, but those talks suppossedly broke down after Blockbuster insisted on the rights to burn on demand technology and Hollywood balked at the deal.

This morning, Hacking Netflix points to a report by Video Business that the studios might be ready to change their tune when it comes to burning DVDs on demand. While this will help to solve the problem of getting digital downloads to the TV set, I don’t think that this will be the eventually winner when it comes to VOD. The problem with even a burn on demand solution is that only a small population of potential customers even have DVD burning capabilities to begin with and then they have to go through a number of steps in order to get a copy of that disc.

Given some of the preliminary pricing that iTunes has talked about, I just don’t see consumers paying $10 - $20 dollars to download a film, then burn it using their own equipment and then watching it on the big screen. By the time that you go through all of this hassel you are better off waiting for Netflix or driving to Blockbuster to pick it up. I may end up being wrong about the success of this service, but until I can easily and inexpensively order VOD directly from my set top box, I don’t see myself adopting VOD.