Business Week’s Ronald Grover has this piece on studio-backed web-based film delivery company Movielink, which shows how stubbornly myopic Hollywood can be. Movielink was founded in 2002 as an attempt by the studios to get ahead of the curve on possible illegitimate film distribution on the web — the studios saw what Napster could do to music and didn’t want to sit back and watch the same thing happen to movies.
But, as Grover’s piece documents, that’s where Hollywood’s forward-looking strategy ended. Movielink, which has been hunting for a buyer for at least a year, has lost some high-profile potential acquirers in Comcast, AT&T and Blockbuster, due mostly to the studios’ intrasigence in prohibiting changes in how films can be distributed.
One big sticking point: no films can be burned to DVDs. This requirement leaves Movielink with little appeal — customers have to watch films on their PCs or via home networked connections on their TVs. Carlo at TechDirt has this item about the Business Week article (with a great title “For Sale: One Crappy Movie Download Site”) in which he skewers Hollywood’s weird insistence on its short-term view of the video marketplace.
What’s amusing about the story is that the buyers recognize what’s apparent to pretty much everybody except the studios: that the sites suck. The sticking point in the potential deals has been buyers’ desire to remove some of the restrictions the studios put on movies, in particular the inability for consumers to burn movies to DVDs so they can watch them in their DVD players. This saga seems so typical of the entertainment industry’s attitude towards digital media — a blind insistence that it knows best and that its approach simply can’t be wrong. These would-be buyers realize that it’s the entertainment business that must adapt to consumers, not the other way around.
Cynthia Brumfield at 7:25 AM|Comments(0)
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