Old link, but I’m still trying to catch up…
Mark hit the nail on the head here… Though I think the blame is shared between the retailers and the content owners, this is more to do with retailers than the latter. But there is a new world emerging… Streaming Video. And I’m not talking about digital downloads – I’m talking about things similar to what NBC does with its shows*.
With more and more (legal and illegal) avenues to get streaming video, retailers will feel more pressure than I think they will from digital downloads. While I don’t think they are mutually exclusive, streaming video is definitely more bandwidth intensive (under current technology).
Ideally here’s what I would want – A one stop shop where I pay a monthly fee (ala Netflicks) where I can stream an entire movie collection from (think of the hit to both Netflix and Blockbuster) – anything I want. For a moderate fee, I get access to thousands of movies without ANY wait. With high def TVs, connecting a laptop/desktop to it makes more and more sense (hell, it could even be an appliance that I was paying for like a cable set-top box). I have the collection of Netflix available 24/7, no waiting, and demand for newer releases now makes no difference. That is the sort of subscription model I would definitely pay for.
Update – Looks like Netflix has this… Or at least a limited version of it. Pretty cool. I need to see if its included in the standard monthly fee.
- Whose player by the way was very broken yesterday. I tried two operating systems and 3 browsers… Grrr.