Download-to-Own Movie Services Open the Door to the Future of Digital Distribution

Yet, the impetus for these download-to-own announcements didn’t come solely from the growing confidence in DRM or the inevitability of it all. Much of it has had to do with the market’s growing hunger for online video content. "We wanted to tap into a developing consumer demand for and awareness of downloading and getting video over the Internet," says Ramo. "We wanted to make a broader set of rights available to capture a higher value product, which also incidentally can get us movies as early as day and date with brick-and-mortar retailing."

What’s Being Offered?
The download-to-own services of both Movielink and CinemaNow mirror each other in that the movies are encoded in Windows Media and require a user to be running Internet Explorer on a PC. The two services differ in terms of the rights they provide to consumers and the breadth of their available libraries.

With CinemaNow, users are only able to play back their movies on the PC that they were originally downloaded to. CinemaNow’s library will initially consist of 85 movies from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, MGM, and Lions Gate.

With Movielink, users have a bit more freedom to move their content around. "The movie is downloaded onto a hard drive, and the consumer is then able to transfer the movie onto both a second and third PC, and they are also allowed to burn a backup DVD in Windows Media format," says Ramo. Movielink has worked out deals to offer over 300 titles at the outset from MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Universal, and Warner Bros.

"What we think we are doing here is opening a brand new option for consumers to what they had before which is a hard good DVD purchased at retail," says Ramo.

Why Should They Buy?
At first blush, convincing consumers to purchase movies via these download-to-own services vs. a traditional DVD seems like a hard sell. Prices on both services are higher than for traditional DVD—Memoirs of a Geisha costs $19.95 to download from CinemaNow and $25.99 from Movielink, for instance, but the DVD is only $16.96 from Amazon.com—and they don’t offer the same content portability nor do they even offer the same amount of content, as neither service includes the extras that are found on so many DVDs. Plus, any download-to-own service will have to deal with the fact that a large segment of the DVD-buying population isn’t necessarily very tech-savvy.

So, what makes these download-to-own services compelling to potential consumers? "It’s really for those people that want to begin to create a digital library," says Ramo. "You can imagine somebody who wants to have 30 movies on their laptop so they don’t have to carry around a bunch of DVDs. What our service does is really allow our customers to begin to manipulate the use of the video file as compared to a physical file that they’ve got to physically have with them. Obviously this is going to be a consumer group that is comfortable dealing with digital files."

For CinemaNow CEO Curt Mavis, the drive to push a download-to-own service to a mainstream audience rests on a handful of factors. "There are really three issues that’ll drive this market to be a mass market. One was the window during which downloads are sold. We’ve always had the rights during the pay-per-view window, but we also wanted it during the home movie window. People always wondered why if a movie was available at Blockbuster, it wouldn’t be available at CinemaNow. That problem will go away over time." And it’s already being minimized as evident by the availability of Brokeback Mountain via Movielink on the same day it was released on DVD.