Print

Mail

wiki links

Six studios now offering movie downloads

Six major studios planned to begin selling movies over the Internet yesterday that buyers can download and keep for watching at any time.

Until now, the only downloads the studios have offered have been online rentals, which can be watched only for a 24-hour period -- an idea that has not caught on with consumers. But the high prices and technological limits of the new permanent downloads suggest that they may not be an instant hit.

New movies will cost about US$20 to US$30 to download; older titles will cost as little as US$10. The downloads will be available on the same day that the DVD is released -- quicker than rentals, which are put online about 45 days later and cost US$2 to US$5.

The studios hope more people will want to own digital copies of movies, just as more people pay to download songs than sign up for online music subscription services with a monthly fee.

Download sales have been discussed for several years in Hollywood, but the studios have been spurred to action by the success of TV programs sold through Apple Computer's iTunes Music Store.

Starting yesterday, nearly 300 films went on sale through Movie-link (owned by Warner Brothers, a unit of Time Warner; Sony Pictures; Universal; MGM and Paramount, a unit of Viacom), which has been largely an online rental site. It offers films from its owners and from Twentieth Century Fox, owned by the News Corp.

Another movie site, CinemaNow, started selling downloadable versions of about 75 movies from Sony, MGM and Lions Gate, which owns a large stake in CinemaNow.

Curt Marvis, the chief executive of CinemaNow, said that he was talking to other studios about selling downloads.

Apple, Amazon.com and other online retailers are also busily trying to cut deals with Hollywood to sell downloads, according to several studio executives. In general, the studios want to make downloads available on largely the same terms, in as many places as possible.

For now, a movie will need about 1 gigabyte of hard-drive space and will take an hour or two to download using a high-speed Internet connection.

The studios have limited the way they can be watched. CinemaNow will allow them to be played only on a single computer. Movielink will allow a movie to be copied onto a DVD and downloaded to two other computers, but it can't be played on a conventional DVD player.

Nor can the movies be copied to Apple's video iPod or handheld video players that use software from Microsoft.

For now, it is difficult but not impossible to watch the downloaded movies on a TV.

Industry executives say these limitations will dampen the appeal of downloads.
This story has been viewed 1429 times.