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NOVEMBER 15, 2002 FLASH PRODUCT REVIEW By Stephen H. Wildstrom Hardly a Boffo Start for MovieLink The pay-to-play movie download service has deals with five big studios. Too bad the quality is a cinematographer's nightmare
For between $2.95 and $4.95 -- specific prices are set by the studio, not MovieLink -- you can get a copy of such films as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Hart's War, and Breakfast at Tiffanys and watch it on any Windows computer equipped with Internet Explorer and either Microsoft MediaPlayer or RealNetworks' RealOne player. However, you don't get to keep it for that price. After downloading, you have 30 days to activate the movie, but once you open it, you can watch it as often as you want within a 24-hour period. Then it disappears from your hard drive. SKIMPY LIBRARY. Attempts by record companies to limit the time customers could listen to legally downloaded music have stirred stiff consumer resistance. But the studios believe movies will be different because customers are long accustomed to short-term rentals of video tapes and DVDs. Were MovieLink a straightforward alternative to a trip to Blockbuster, it would be a runaway success, Alas, things are not that simple. The service has two very big problems, only one of which is easily correctable. The simple-to-fix difficulty is the selection of films. To be truly useful, MovieLink has to offer thousands of titles, not a couple hundred. And to make matters worse, the current selection is heavily skewed to MovieLink's expected young, mostly male, demographic. The studios, not MovieLink, decide what films will be available for download. The plan, in general, is to offer new films in the window between their release on DVD or tape and their release for subscription TV, such as HBO. NOT VIDEO-READY. The much more difficult problem is picture quality. Even when you play a high-quality video source, such as a DVD, on a PC, the image quality on the display is much worse that you would get with a $70 DVD player and a $300 TV set. Computer displays are optimized to show crisp text and graphics, not 30-frame-per-second video. The video quality of CRT monitors is bad, and LCD displays are worse. If your computer has a video-out port, you can get around this, at some price in inconvenience, by showing the movie on a TV. But MovieLink has a bigger handicap. High quality MPEG-2 compression, the format used for DVDs, puts out a data stream of about 5 megabits per second on average, peaking at about 8 megabits for fast-action scenes. Even with an Internet connection capable of transferring 1 megabit per second, it would take around 10 hours to download a two-hour movie at that compression setting. More advanced compression technology, such as MPEG-4, may be able to cut the bandwidth in half while maintaining equal quality, but the download times would still be prohibitive. NO REAL SOLUTION. MovieLink opted to use Windows Medio or RealVideo compression at a data rate of about 750 kilobits per second. This allows a movie to download on even the slowest broadband connection in under an hour. But the result is an image that's fuzzy around the edges, with less-than-convincing high-speed action and special effects. It will do nicely for watching a movie on your laptop in an airplane, where the competition is the even worse in-plane entertainment system. But the blurry, murky pictures will make a director or cinematographer weep. This problem has no real solution until both broadband connections and the Internet itself get a lot faster. For now, MovieLink has a monopoly on Internet-based movies from major studios, at least for legal ones. A streaming-video service called Intertainer recently ceased operations after filing an antitrust suit charging that the studios and MovieLink had colluded to deprive it of content and charge it unreasonable fees for the films the studios were willing to make available. The case is pending. Theoretically, competition is possible, since MovieLink's contract with the studios is nonexclusive. And Fox and Disney, which are not part of the MovieLink consortium, are planning their own service. But the studios are sufficiently skittish about online delivery that they're unlikely to do business with any service they don't control.  Wildstrom is Technology & You columnist for BusinessWeek. Follow his Flash Product Reviews, only on BusinessWeek Online Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | NOVEMBER [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
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