Blockbuster supporters (and stockholders) who got all excited about yesterday’s announcement that the video chain has purchased movie download site Movielink might want to wait before opening that bottle of champers. In a blog post titled “Video Downloads … Suck,” Om Malik*** points to a study by Parks Associates, which was (apparently coincidentally) released yesterday. Only 16 percent of those surveyed said they were happy with the selection of movies and TV shows available for download online, and only 13 percent agreed that those videos are sold for a reasonable price. “In other words,” says Malik, “The majority think downloads are too expensive and they suck.”
With all the “downloads are gonna save the industry” talk that seems to be going around, this would seem to be a study worth paying attention to, but I do wonder about the demographics of those surveyed. And the terms used in the press release also seem dangerously vague. Parks acknowleges that they’re lumping together products obtained from both legal, paid services like iTunes, and illegal P2P networks, which is already problematic, but it would seem that the term “video downloads” would be subject to even further confusion. Are we talking about studio movies, or “user-generated” videos, or both? What about streaming? What about YouTube? What about porn?
The findings of the Parks study certainly seem to stand in contrast to those expressed by Chuck Tryon, in his recent article in Flow. Tryon describes the experience of using Netflix’s Watch Now streaming service as a positive one, not least because it allows him to escape the “bright red envelope collecting dust” syndrome common to so many Netflix users. As Tryon puts it,
The Watch Now option feeds the desire for immediacy or spontaneity associated with trips to the video store. Audiences are not forced to wait the 2-3 days for that little red envelope to show up in the mail…Instead, as I’ve watched online, I’ve found myself watching movies more frequently than at any time in the recent past, while being more willing to take chances on certain movies, based in part on the perception that I’m making a relatively spontaneous decision, one that won’t result in a movie sitting on my shelf for several weeks at a time.
Tryon notes that one potential downside of the Watch Now system is that you’re stuck watching a movie on a computer, which tends to transform the idea of renting a video from a potentially communal to an almost necessarily solitary experience. But with Netflix rumored to have a set-top box in the works, that problem may be temporary. I’ve long been of the opinion that once we get to a point where there’s a more feasible way to connect files from the computer to the TV, downloading will explode. But then again, that theoretically should have been accomplished by the AppleTV, and in my three months as an AppleTV owner, I’ve yet to find a film for sale on the internet that I both want to watch, and can watch through all the Apple DRM.
If I took part in that survey, I’d have to concur that the current selection of movies available for download is not ideal–but if the Apple Store were to stock the movies I want to see, I’d be downloading left and right.
***Full disclosure: I write a weekly column for Om Malik’s NewTeeVee.
The lineup boasted a wealth of warmed-over Hollywood pics (1408, Planet Terror), but the top prize at the Locarno Film Festival went this weekend to Masahiro Kobayashi’s controversial drama, The Rebirth. The Hollywood Reporter’s Eric J. Lyman called the film “cerebral and weighty … one of the most talked about films of the festival, but it was not without its detractors, who were turned off by the film’s deliberately repetitive construction.”
***David Geffen and Steven Spielberg, apparently unhappy with the role Dreamworks has played within the Viacom empire since Paramount’s late-2005 acquisition of the vanity label, are threatening to walk away from their contracts with the mega studio. According to a fascinating piece on the subject by 
