Movies available online

[cinemaddict]

HBO announced these recent days that they'll soon have a service available online, a movie library for their customers in order to download... They said they'll even have more movies available there than via cable. Of course, this service won't be available everywhere in the US, but they said they're planning to extend..

My point is... big companies are starting to realise more and more the importance of movies available online for download, movie promotion! Some try to avoid it as much as they can and only want people to go to the cinema or buy dvds in order to see a movie, on the other hand some producers are trying to make it easy for the customers to see a movie: no mattter how they end up seeing one, that it's not important - what's important is more and more people see the movie!

Do you think this is the future of the movie producing industry, focusing on online promotion, and investing less in DVDs and offline promotion?

[cineman]

hmm.. hard to say.
If the movies would be available online the movie fans would be very happy. It's a lot cheaper and a lot more comfortable to just download it at home than pay for it (and they are quite expensive) or go all the way to the cinema and see it..
On the other hand - i think it would be quite a loss for the movie industry.. as you may know, they are already on strike.. so i guess less money means less quality.
The illegal downloads are already flourishing so i don't think it's such a bright idea.

[cinemaddict]

Sorry, I forgot to mention that you still pay for the download, so the movies online ain't for free... it's just that they are more easy to get, rather than on DVDs for example... and also cheaper because of this! You cut the costs that involve the DVDs and all the intermediates.

[aperio]

I am a huge advocate of online movie downloads. They should certainly be considerably cheaper than buying in a store - there would be very little overhead other than the obvious costs for server storage/bandwidth - but i would think that would be a far cry less than the costs to mass produce the packaging, the dvd itself, the security measures (ie EAS tagging), shipping, shelf space etc.

It would be far more convenient than having to drive to the store to hope they have a copy available.

[Flashdrive]

True, they're not likely to run out of stock if the movie is downloadable. However, I'd be much happier if HBO would spend some money and finish the last six seasons of carnivale!

[Bruce]

This is already happening in the music industry with folks like iTunes and others. I see no reason why it shoudn't happen with movies and take the fight to the pirates head-on. Heck, nearly every movie is already available on the Net.

[Rachel]

Originally Posted by cinemaddict

Do you think this is the future of the movie producing industry, focusing on online promotion, and investing less in DVDs and offline promotion?

Probably.

The only thing I think could go wrong here: pay -> download -> computer dies -> -$.

Or is it only my computer that randomly deletes everything every couple of months without much warning... Yeah, nevermind...

[MovieAddict]

You might have a virus that deletes files every now and then.

Back to movies downloaded online, Bruce said exactly what I suppose to say. Books, songs, tutorials, programs, and others could be downloaded through the internet. Why would a movie be any different? As long as the price is right, then people would surely make use of the internet to buy movies.

[moo6]

Dish Network is to have this as well for some channels, but for people like me that have VOIP lines and not a normal phone line in their home it doesnt work, if you want to download anything you need the phone line as they dont have it setup to work with VOIP yet.

[Ricky]

I think that this is wonderful news and I am very happy to see more and more companies embracing rather than suing this technology. People want to download, they want that convenience so fighting it just encourages piratism.

I look forward to it rolling out nation wide.