There has been a lot of noise about movie downloading this year, but one of the consistent criticisms about these services has been the inability to burn a download to DVD. This has been important for the video download companies because they haven’t been able to figure out a solution to the ten foot problem and without offering consumers an easy way to view their content on their television sets, it limits the mass market appeal of their services. Apple has turned to their iTV dongle as a solution, TiVo is rumored to be in talks to help bring Amazon’s download service to the TV, but Cinema Now is actually doing something pretty rare in the movie industry, they are giving consumers what they’ve asked for and letting them burn their movies to DVDs on their home computers.
The program has been in place for the last few months and CinemaNow CEO Curt Marvis says that movie downloaders prefer burn on demand DVDS by a margin of 5 to 1 compared to the more restrictive DRM’d offerings on their site. To help bolster demand for the service, CinemaNow is currently testing releasing the The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift at the same time as they release the DVD into retail stores.
To consumers this move really isn’t all that significant, but to the studios it’s earth shattering and something that they will be watching very carefully. Why it would be a bad idea to sell a DVD to people who see a film in the theater is beyond me, but the studios like to play games with the release patterns on their films. First the theaters get the films, then DVD retailers and finally the movie downloaders and cable TV channels get their shot at distributing the film. With the film industry beginning to understand that the DVD boom market is now over, they are experimenting with all kinds of business models in order to enhance their shrinking DVD revenues.
While many in the blogosphere have commented that they want downloads to be able to burn to DVD, Cinema Now’s experiment may be best filed in the be careful what you wish for department because the technology is doomed to failure from the start. Burn on demand DVDs will certainly work as a solution for some people, but I question the mainstream appeal that this solution will have for consumers and suspect that it will end up as a nothing more then a footnote in the history of the DVD.
The problem with Cinema Now’s burn on demand technology is that in order to use it you have to first download a film from their site. This itself isn’t a major obstacle, but it immedietely limits the service to the tech saavy crowd who isn’t intimidated by these sorts of things. Once you’ve decided to actually purchase a film online, you then need to wait over five hours for your film to finish downloading. Finally, once your movie download completes, you then still need to own a DVD burner in order to actually get the film to your TV set. If you do happen to own a DVD burner, it’s up to you to spend your own money on blank DVDs in order to make legal copies of a film that you paid retail prices for.
While this process isn’t impossible and admitedly the same early adopters that find the service appealing to begin with will tend to have DVD burners, I think that it is way too many hoops for the average consumer to jump through in order to pay retail prices for a DVD that you burn with your own equipment. If the movie download speeds were more instantaneous then it could be advantagous to go this route, but with the bulky DRM attached the downloads make digital delivery painfully slow and with a 5 hour plus download wait time, consumers are better off going directly to a video store or waiting for Netflix to deliver their DVD in the mail, then they are going the do it yourself route.
I’m encouraged to see CinemaNow continue to push the envelope on film distribution, but the future of VOD needs to be hooked directly to a television set, needs to offer DVD quality or better and it needs to be instantaneous before we see the mass market adopt downloading as a real solution. Some consumers will experiment with CinemaNow’s technology, but I believe that the real opportunity for burn on demand will be at the video store level and not to the home PC. Video stores are open to everyone, not just people with DVD burners. It would be relatively easy for them to handle the orders and for the mainstream consumer, driving to the video store is an easier process then dealling with buffer overrun problems. With an online interface, the video stores could let consumers click a button and pick up their flim later in day. While it would still necessitate a trip to the video store, it would still be easier then making consumers do this on their own.