By the time you get "DIVX killer" off the ground, people will have cable modems and will be able to record movies to DVD right off the Net. You download the movies you want to blank DVD media and pay per view (or day/week/forever etc) at whatever price the market will bear. There is no expense to the server side for media, printing, or distribution, no middleman or retailer, no need to throw away media.
Because downloading is free (but media is not), yet you can't play it without paying, the only reason to have more than one piece of blank media might be if it takes a long time to download, but you're not sure which movie you want to watch. So maybe you download 3 or 4 titles while at work or asleep and choose which one in the evening. For that matter, the only reason to even use DVD media is storability & portability, ie I download but take it over to a friend's house. To download 3 or 4 movies in a batch, you'd need a large hard drive instead of a DVD recorder anyway. If Net bandwidth was high enough, you could just watch in "realtime" with a 10-minute buffer to smooth out net congestion.
The more efficient the system becomes, the more prices will naturally fall, to the point where poor quality movies may no longer be able to receive funding. HBO etc. offer "batch pricing" now, where you receive (for free taping if you're so inclined) say 200 movies for only $20/month, or $0.10 per movie. At Blockbuster, the bad movies are rented out only when the good movies on the outer wall are all gone. Once people have on-demand control of what to watch, and everything is available all the time, the only way non-blockbuster filmmaking can survive is at a lower usage cost.
Which, to summarize, means: People can decide in realtime what to watch, download it, and pay either per view or to keep it forever. When everything stays available on the server forever, there is no need to buy the "forever" option unless you plan to watch it a really large number of times. The per-view price will fall to pennies, except for the blockbuster hits that can still command dollars per view.
"DIVX killer"?? Watch your back... |
