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Action! MovieLink Bids for Boffo B.O

Three things we know about the Harry Potter phenomenon, in no particular order: 1) An English mum on the dole wrote the books (there are four), which in turn made her veddy veddy rich; 2) the titular character's best mate, Ron Weasley, is played in the films by a youngster with the delightfully improbable name of Rupert Grint; and 3) the second film in the series, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, is available right this very minute on a peer-to-peer network near you.

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Now, before Jack Valenti punches up John Ashcroft's number on the speed dial and has us hauled to Camp X-ray for copyright infringement, let it be known that we downloaded the movie for research purposes only and trashed the file after we'd ascertained that we were able to grab the entire 161-minute epic. That said, it's a sure sign the movie business is in a pickle when the first "event" movie of the holiday season is up for grabs on the Net for the low, low price of free.

But all is not lost in Tinseltown. MovieLink is looking to combat this sort of morally casual swapping and swiping of content via its newly minted online Internet VOD service. Featuring titles from studios (and backers) such as MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Bros., the site allows users to download movies for "rental viewing." If you've got $1.95 and an hour or so to kill, you can choose from up to 170 film files ranging from the Audrey Hepburn classic Breakfast at Tiffany's to newer fare along the lines of that movie in which math drives Russell Crowe nutsy. (That'll cost you a little more, like say $4.95 and two whole hours of your life that you'll never get back. But we digress.)

Once downloaded, each title can be stored on the user's hard drive for up to 30 days, says MovieLink CEO Jim Ramo. Customers have 24 hours to view the film from the moment play is initiated through either a RealPlayer 8.0 or a Windows Media Player interface.

"We know that the broadband footprint is 15 million homes and 10 million dorm rooms," Ramo says. "It's a much more modest footprint than cable, but there is definitely a market there."

That's an important element to consider. Since the process of downloading and viewing movies on a PC is in some ways antithetical to watching a film on TV - it's a solo operation, versus the communal experience fostered by television - consumers can't expect that the MovieLink service is meant as a replacement for cable VOD or bricks and mortar rental.

"This is a new, incremental way to view movies," Ramo says. "We're not so naive as to compare it to the cable VOD model."

A trial run at Cable World HQ yielded mixed results. On a high-speed T1 connection, a copy of the 2000 Julia Roberts hit Erin Brockovich took about an hour and 45 minutes to download completely. That was fine - we had other things to do, ostensibly - but we had to use a Dell laptop to access the service. That's a shame, given that the monitor connected to our speedy Mac G4 is a 24-inch monster, a size much more amenable to watching movies than the 12-inch Dell screen.

So why are Mac users being excluded from MovieLink? Ramo says that the PC platform was specifically chosen because of "market share issues," but concedes that DRM remains a factor.

"The media players that are compatible with the service players come with DRMs, which was a key advantage," Ramo says. "We didn't want to have to worry about being saddled with the additional burden of making our own DRM, which is what we would have had to do on a Mac platform."

Yankee Group analyst Adi Kishore gave MovieLink a whirl in his Boston office. His experience uncovered two key challenges to the service's viability: "It doesn't cater to impulse consumption and you're confined to watching on whatever PC you've downloaded the file to," Kishore says.

Kishore says the ability to control the quality of the picture is the biggest advantage that MovieLink has over streaming services (i.e. CinemaNow). While streaming services deliver content quickly, playback quality can be deleteriously affected by Internet traffic jams.

On the whole, MovieLink looks to be taking a decisive first step in the war against film flimflam. "It does what it's supposed to," Kishore says. "They're testing the waters...because they clearly don't want what happened to music to happen to video."

THE NEXT QUESTION:

*Is there a market ready for the launch of a new Internet movie rental service?

Technology Industry

Action! MovieLink Bids for Boffo B.O

Cable World, Nov 18, 2002

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