Aol will offer movie and tv show downloads from Paramount Pictures in their new video portal. Downloads will be sold for prices ranging from $9.99 to $19.99 which suggests that most users will be quite unhappy with the pricing. Amazon Unbox and Apple’s iTunes is offering downloads in the same price category and every other portal will most likely follow their pricing schemes.
The question that arises for me is the following: Why would anyone buy a movie for $19.99 online and face additional restrictions like drm, copy protection and limited use if he could also buy the same movie at the same time in a normal store and receive a case, a DVD and a booklet. You may also take the DVD, visit a friend and watch the movie on his DVD player. You might face troubles with services like Unbox who make it impossible to burn the files on DVD to play in a DVD player.
I have another question: Why are they pricing the items that high ? Is it because of the entertainment companies that produces the movies who want a large share of the earnings or are the portals themselves responsible for this irrational pricing ?
Why would someone pay more than a few dollars for a crippled movie that you probably can’t play in your dvd player ? Isn’t it kinda strange that some people still buy those items even though they face those restrictions ?
I decided to ignore any movie portal for the moment. If one would emerge that would offer movie downloads in dvd quality for half the price of the DVD I would consider it; if they do not cripple the functionality to burn the file on dvd and watch it on my dvd player.
Did you buy a movie from such a service ? What is your experience ?
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I agree, 20 bucks for a drm movie? Why? The only people i could see using this are people who are about to go on a road trip and are taking their laptop and want a movie for the road. I cant see why anyone just would buy the DVD for the smae price and have it, if you want it digitally just copy it to your hard drive (many ways to do this).
Now if there were some cost savings I would buy them too, much like I would buy cd’s if they were priced around 5 bucks online probably I would spend up to 10 bucks for a good new movie.