Warner Brothers has entered a deal with YouTube-type site GUBA to offer users VOD, video-on-demand, as well as DTO, download-to-own, content. I think this is the first step towards a movie download site as Apple is rumored to be incorporating in a future iTunes release. There are currently only around 200 of Warner Bros.’s video titles but that is soon to expand if the sales look promising. Full length movies can be downloaded from anywhere between $9.99 and $19.99 where as select movies maybe rented (streamed) for one day around $2-3.
However, this is not without some obvious downsides. The content is in a highly proprietary DRM’d Windows Media Player format at a subpar VGA (640×480) resolution. I believe the price point for DTO films is too high for the restrictions posed to users. This type of campaign is an obvious nod to the direction of piracy but who will pay for a VGA-resolution movie with DRM at the price of a high-resolution DVD? Even the types of movies commonly pirated are at higher resolutions than VGA. Instead, I think GUBA might be more successful with VOD purchases. Paying $2 is rather trivial for most, so people can justify it for a 2 hour movie they didn’t get to catch in theaters.
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Man, what a waste of time an effort. Aside from the crippling points you’ve mentioned above (windows media DRM, 640×480 vga resolution), you’re only able to watch these movies on a Windows machine – no support for DVD players since there isn’t a single one on the market that has windows DRM support.
How does this get past the initial brainstorming sessions? I’d love to be sitting in one of those meetings when someone decides that providing a downloadable movie service that only supports one OS (not counting alternate versions of Windows, obviously), one media player and can only be played on a PC in a shitty low-resolution for around the same price as a retail DVD is a good idea. Seriously. Blows my mind!
The amount of money these stupid old white men that run the music and movie industry have wasted is staggering.
I’m not at all surprised. Companies intentionally commit poor implementations of services like these so that users will reject them and continue to pirate content. Then the companies can point at the results and say, “see? we offered this and no one took it. they are breaking the law, now we should arrest them and fine them millions.” They are just out to make money, not necessarily to please users. They also do not want to crush the DVD market.