Reactionary

There’s an article in Variety that ruminates on why the success of digital music online evades downloadable movies. I’m not a so-called expert and I don’t have FACTS and DATA and I clearly have no idea what I’m talking about but here’s why I’ve only bought one movie download (The Incredibles when the service was first launched on iTunes if you must know):

• The Price: $10 for a movie download is simply too much to pay. The rest of the reasons simply illustrate why $10 is insanely too high, considering a lot of DVDs sell for that much at Wal-Mart.
• Boredom: Why should I pay $10 for something I may only watch once? Music, when loved, never goes out of fashion nor do people tire of it. Note The Beatles. Movies, no matter how well done, do not have that kind of staying power. They just don’t… for people over 5 years of age. I haven’t watched my single purchase since I bought it. I have no idea how long it’s been since I bought a movie on DVD.
• Suckability: This one’s much like the previous. Not many movies Hollywood makes are very good, like, in the least. It’s much easier and much cheaper to just rent it from Netflix and then send the thing back in a day or so.
• Download Caps: While broadband is making dialup a thing of the past, even it cannot easily overcome the basic problem that movie files are much, much bigger than any music album and it requires a big time investment in downloading, electrical investment to keep your computer on for hours, and then paying for an extra hard disc that you’ll quickly need if you download enough full-length movies.
• Playability: I’m blessed with a gorgeous iMac with a screen nearly as big as my TV and with speakers just as good. Most people are not. Most people have crappy CRT monitors from Dell or whoever they could get the cheapest piece of crap PC from. People are idiots. I know. They spend money they don’t have to get huge televisions to help them lobotomize themselves but skimp on the most valuable, most useful electrical tool of the modern age. Since movie executives have made it verboten for us to burn the movies we’ve bought as downloads to DVD, the computer or iPod is where most of humanity will need to watch their full-length, meandering “work”.

This is my bottom line. Why am I paying so much to painstakingly download, store, and then play back a file I will easily tire of, perhaps never use again and which I may grow to despise? The TV shows are great, movies are not. Deal with life, movie executives. You won’t get your hands on any more of my money.

As Ben Franklin said via a cartoon, “Join or die.” Or as a columnist writing on music downloads said, “Adapt or be destroyed.” Tower Records has already bitten the dust. Who’s next?

Posted on February 7th, 2007 under News, Tech •  Print •  Email • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback