Tinseltown's going on a hack attack.
In a bid to quash illegal pirating of their movies, five of the major Hollywood studios banded together this week to launch Movielink, a Website that brings flicks to the desktop.
While you can already download many films gratis via Morpheus or KaZaA, the participating studios are touting their better selection and quality in hopes of convincing fans to spend a little money. For between $2 and $5, you get VCR-quality movies instead of the shaky, underlit camcorder footage characteristic of the file-sharing sites and you'll have access to more than 170 titles from the vaults of Sony Pictures, Warner Bros., Paramount, MGM and Universal.
Among Movielink's offerings are such blockbusters as last year's Best Picture Oscar winner A Beautiful Mind, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Ocean's Eleven and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, as well as popular popcorn-crunchers like Air Force One and both older and contemporary classics like Breakfast at Tiffany's and Blue Velvet. In general, films will be available after finishing their theatrical run, at the same time as pay-per-view but before hitting cable and network television.
Cinephiles will be able to download a movie onto their hard drive, where it will remain for a month untouched before being automatically erased. At any point during those 30 days, users have a 24 hour-window to watch the full movie before it's deleted from their PC.
Consumers are required to have a connection speed of at least 128 kbps or higher, Windows 2000 or XP (sorry, Mac fans), Microsoft Explorer and RealPlayer. Movielink includes a VCR-like interface complete with fast forward, rewind, pause and play functions--but, natch, no recording.
There are no subscription charges and viewing movie trailers and other promo clips are free. Disney, DreamWorks and 20th Century Fox, which did not participate in the venture, as well as indie distributors have a standing invitation to make their films available on Movielink as well.
According to Movielink CEO Jim Ramo, the service is intended as a test case to see whether Web-based video-on-demand will have the same mass appeal for the 25 million and growing broadband users that DVD currently has with the home video market (total DVD sales topped $4.6 billion in 2001), or whether downloadable films will stay a niche product or be outright uncommercial.
Movielink also allows the studios to bypass middlemen like Blockbuster and cable operators to reach consumers directly, while avoiding the Napster-fueled nightmare the recording industry has endured in recent years.
There's also very little (legitimate) competition. The service's only rival is CinemaNow, which was started by Blockbuster, Lions Gate Entertainment and Microsoft.
And hopefully, when all is said and done, Movielink just might head off the rapidly-growing Napster War, which has hampered CD sales in the music industry.
But the big question, of course, is whether movie fans are ready to shell out five bucks to screen Harry Potter on their laptop.
"Ultimately people don't want to watch movies on their computers. As long as it feels like a computer interface where people are forced to watch it in anything less than top-notch resolution, it's not going to work for people," says film producer Ira Deutchman, founder of Fine Line Features and associate professor of graduate film division at Columbia University.
Given the technology's still in its infancy, Deutchman says it remains to be seen if the price is attractive enough to make it worth the effort. Even with a fast Internet connection, it still takes an average of three hours to download a feature film onto a hard drive (with a dial-up modem, triple that).
"It's going to be a question of convenience versus price," says Deutchman. "If they price it right and make it convenient enough, it could succeed."
Whether it fends off those pesky digital pirates, though, is another matter.
Stay tuned.