Legal movie downloads must follow music’s lead

It’s a well-known ““ though not empirically proven
““ fact that today’s college students do a lot of movie
watching during their college careers.

So naturally, when we heard that five major movie studios had
banded together to create a legal way to download flicks straight
to our computers, our first reaction was, “Where do we sign
up?”

But if it sounds that good in Hollywood, it probably
isn’t, and this is no exception. The two download services,
CinemaNow and Movielink, would make movies available to download
over the Internet the same day as their DVD releases, but the price
to download new movies ““ between $20 and $30 ““ would be
roughly twice the cost of a DVD one could find in some stores.

The downloaded movie would also not be playable on a DVD player
and could only exist on two computers. You could burn the movie to
DVD, but it would only play on computers that run Windows.

Given that a successful marriage between Hollywood and the
Internet has potential benefits for any moviegoer, it’s
frustrating to watch the movie industry feel like it has to
reinvent the wheel when it comes to legal downloading.

Basically, this new service would make downloaded films
expensive and difficult ““ if not impossible ““ to view
on more than a couple computers. Sound familiar?

It should. When the music industry was first experimenting with
legal downloading services, this is more or less what they came up
with: music that was expensive and largely inaccessible.

It did nothing to dissuade even those who only casually pirated
music to cease and desist. After all, why would you pay for
inconvenient music when you could download files that were free and
easy to burn onto a CD that could play anywhere? It wasn’t
until more convenient and reasonably priced download services
““ such as iTunes and the reinvented Napster ““ came
along that legal music downloading became widespread, even popular.
(iTunes, for example, had over 1 billion legally downloaded songs
as of Feb. 23, and that’s only after three years.)

It’s surprising that the movie industry would choose to
take a page out of the first half of the music industry’s
playbook, not the second. It’s as if Hollywood is determined
to go through its own trial by fire before it can come up with a
cheaper, more flexible service that will really be pragmatic to
movie watchers.

Of course, Internet piracy is at the heart of Movielink and
CinemaNow. The movie industry lost $5.4 billion to Internet piracy
in 2005, according to a report cited by the San Diego
Union-Tribune. And while illegally sharing movies is not as
prominent as it is with music, it will likely increase as people
gain access to more broadband connections (in college dorm rooms,
for instance).

Addressing Internet piracy requires a two-pronged approach. One
part involves convincing pirates, through lawsuits or other means,
that illegal file sharing has consequences. The other involves
providing a reasonable, legal alternative. The movie industry has
started to swing away with the lawsuits against illegal
downloading, but it has yet to give someone who wants to get a
movie over the Internet any other real options.

Ultimately, of course, market pressures will bear Movielink and
CinemaNow out. But don’t look to these download services to
change our viewing habits: We’ll stick to Netflix and the
trek down to Best Buy to get our DVD fix. And as for the people who
pirate films over the Internet, we’re willing to bet this
won’t change their viewing habits either.