The New York Times has an analysis on the state of video download services. Here's the crux of it: Companies like Vongo, CinemaNow and MovieLink have all found pretty decent ways of making movies available for rental and sale on the internet. What they haven't found is an easy way to make those movies appealing by getting them into your living room.Right now, most consumers don't have their toasters connected to the internet. They don't even have their TVs hooked up to their computers (PVRWire readers are not necessarily representative of "most consumers"). So what good is a service that lets you download high quality videos to your computer and stops there?
My home solution seemed simple enough. Buy a video card with TV-out functionality, purchase a cheap video sender/receiver combo and voila, I can beam movies from my computer to my TV. That's a bit complicated though.
How about a service that lets you download video to your computer and then burn it to a DVD so you can play it in your living room player? CinemaNow is experimenting with this, and it seems to work. But is this what people want? You click download, wait an hour or two, then burn, which takes another hour or two, plus you have to pay for the blank DVD on top of the download price, and all this for a movie you may watch once? Wouldn't it be easier to drive to the bricks and mortar video store?
AOL plans to launch a "10 foot edition" of its video store in September that will include an interface that's navigable from the couch for anyone who has a TV hooked up to their Windows MCE machine. But until someone launches an on-line video store that connects to set-top boxes like TiVos as well as MCE machines, as well as PMPs and whatever else people want to watch their video on, I think these companies will see limited success. So far, I'm just not convinced anything's come along that's more appealing than Netflix or the local video store.
Maybe one day we'll all have our TVs connected to our computers, or with the advent of high definition TVs, maybe we'll become accustomed to using one monitor for our TV and PC needs, which will make it simpler to download and view video in the living room.
