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Forty two online movie stores went out of business last year, according to research firm Screen Digest. Online movie stores that have disappeared over the past few years include Movielink, Lycos, Guba, AOL and BitTorrent. So much for that online movie pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow. Here in the UK, iTunes commands a 60% share of the digital movie market. Microsoft, which has been selling movies through Xbox Live since December 2007, is in second place. Apple has an even larger 85% share of the download-to-own TV show market. Xbox is not selling TV through its games console over here yet.
The consultancy estimates that the UK internet-delivered movie market was worth almost £16 million ($21 million) last year — less than 1% of the DVD market. And 63% of that came from download-to-own rather than video streaming. Screen Digest presented its findings this week to industry lobbyist Bsac. The analyst recently slashed its global digital film revenue estimate by one third to $943 million.
Online Movie Stores Go Out of Business
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Bit torrent is a technology and a method for large files (legal and illegal) to make their way across the internet. Any company named BitTorrent, and presumably based on the bit torrent technology, would not make money as this is a free means of transferring data.
Would it matter if I said I didn’t know any of those listed provided movies online?
Movielink – ok I guess I’ve hear of it.
Ign – geek portal for video games right? They are selling movies?
Lycos – Is that like Linux?
Guba – wtf
AOL – People don’t even use AOL for AOL anymore. Movie downloads?
BitTorrent – that’s illegal DL’ing right?
How this encapsulates any reasonable look at this market is laughable.
Makes all the fighting over internet residuals during the strike look foolish doesn’t it?
Um, bittorrent isn’t an online movie place so much as a file transfer method, and uh, it hasn’t went away.. it just doesn’t make the industry a cent as most of it is piracy
This also doesn’t count Sony’s direct to market efforts via PS3, and the concept of “MS doesn’t do TV” is somewhat incorrect; MS has bought rights and owns direct netTV sources, which it integrates in several platforms, from Media Center to XBOX.
I wish $21 million would get me £16 million!
So where is this online pot of gold that everyone struck over?
If you’ve tried to use this sort of service, you can see the problems.
COMPRESSION. Even with bigher bandwidth, it’s a pain. Dropped frames, and so on. Takes a long time to download. Streaming is filled with glitches. The fix is better compression.
Not Itunes dominance. They make it dirt simple to use.
Back in 1999, no one thought that online music sales would dominate CD sales. Physical media was expected to rule, and high margins were thought to be the immutable law. What happened? Ten years on, music sales in dollar volumes dropped to a ten percent of what it had been in 1999. Most music sales were tracks at $1 a pop on Itunes. The killer was Ipods + Itunes. Music everywhere, your way. Radio stations have still not recovered, people preferring their own music to a programmer’s. Artists make most of their money on tour, not recording.
Not surprising. I always thought that downloading movies was a big yawn. It was always the cool buzzword so that the studios can hype their share value up. Blu-ray is the future.
I think that proponents of movie downloads are underestimating the power of collectors, who don’t just want to see a movie, but to own it. An by “own” I mean a physical object. I think they are also ignoring the appeal of dvd extras, which you typically don’t get when you download.
You’re overlooking the powerhouse renter Netflix and their brilliant move to stream movies for free (as a part of the subscription package) through game consoles…
The answer is streaming. Try Netflix streaming. It’s like crack. Sure, there aren’t any DVD extras available at the moment, but it gives you access to humongous library of titles. You end up watching some very interesting stuff that you wouldn’t necessarily go to the trouble of buying or renting, whether it be a movie, a documentary or an entire season of a TV from the 1960s or last year. I have quite a large DVD/blu-ray collection and a big satellite TV package, but I probably spend more time streaming content from Netflix.
I think unless you have internet speeds like South Korea downloading is too much of a pain. And even then most people who turn to the internet for films do it to stream. I’ve never downloaded a movie before, but I’ve streamed many a movie, purely because the movies I see on the net are movies I don’t want to keep but I want to see and they’re not movies I’m willing to pay in the cinema, so I just stream them on the net. Especially TV. I love streaming TV shows, because I’m not someone who likes rewatching shows, so I can watch a whole season on the net, and not worry about where to store gigabytes and DVDs.
Maybe, just maybe, It’s the Films themselves?
I can’t think of more than a dozen in the last ten years that I’d want to watch more than once. Frankly, most didn’t justify being watched the first time.
And I’m deeply suspicious of paying for something I can’t hold in my hands or lend to my Brother or give to a charity shop when I’m finished with it.