Life imitates Onion. (One in a continuing series.)
Blockbuster yesterday unveiled a device with which customers can download movies in two minutes …
… onto a portable device they bring into the store.
Cnet offers the ridicule you’d expect here.
Reasoning this out, you have to figure Blockbuster did some research and either found that or is just hoping that there is a market for people without broadband in their homes who wanted, for some reason or other, to enjoy the novel experience of quote-unquote downloading a movie …
… and in theory, if the device catches and became familiar, the company could conceivably have them everywhere—7-Elevens and so forth—with lots and lots of movies available. (The company said it was aiming for a thirty-second download time.)
The troubles with this line of reasoning, however, are legion. For the first, if you don’t have broadband, are you going to be the type of person who feels comfortable toting around a hard drive and repeatedly hooking it up to and dehooking it from your TV?
Second, if you’re already schlepping to the video store, who wants to carry along an electronic device? Isn’t it easier to just, you know, rent a DVD?
And that brings up the real motivation for the service. It’s a way to make it easier for Blockbuster and the studios; no running out of discs (even though they cost pennies to make), and one assumes the devices would be DRM’ed within an inch of their usefullness.
Convenience for corporations versus convenience for customers. In this day and age, what could possibly go wrong?
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Hysterical. If you read this in The Onion. I mean. Just, hard to believe. Your punchline’s worth a giggle, too.
Shit I missed your headline! Ooops. Oh well, great minds and all that…
“Isn’t it easier to just, you know, rent a DVD?”
I don’t know how big this device is that one is expected to ’schlepp’ around, but it would save the hassle (and cut petrol use by half methinks) of having to return the DVD. But that leads me to ask- once downloaded, is it yours to keep forever? In that case, the question shjould be inverted- Isn’t it easier to just, you know, to simply download the film?
If this kind of model were truly useful for media purchasing, you’d think that music retailers would’ve been doing it for years.
And based on the fact that the “pilot program” is only open to Archos users, I doubt most stores will have much demand for the service, anyway.