Downloading Your Movie Rentals With MovieBeam
Posted by John Campeaon 17. 02. 2006in News Chat
Now this is an interesting idea:
MovieBeam customers have purchased a $199 (U.S.) box on which 100 movies are stored at any time. Most titles are offered day and date with the home video version, which Izzard said was a first for high-definition digital distribution, and cost the same as pay-per-view.The service replaces 10 movies each week, using technology called datacasting that piggybacks onto the unused parts of television broadcast signals to deliver 75 gigabytes a week without affecting TV reception.
Sadly for me, I can’t test this new system out because it is only in the US. Even when I tried to go to their website I got a stopper page telling me that since i’m in Canada I can’t even look around. Bastards.
But seriously… I think people like Netflix and Blockbuster should be shaking in their proverbial boots right about now. This sounds like a fantastic system and I’ll be curious to see how MovieBeam does and how the market responds to them.
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The pricing of this thing needs to come way down and the features way up before they have a Netflix/Blockbuster killer. The device costs $199, but you also get to pay a $29.99 activation fee, and the movie rentals are anywhere from $1.99 to $4.99. HD New Releases are $4.99. Additionally, HD movies *require* an HDMI connection which leaves my recently purchased Sharp LCD out of luck. Aside from that, you only have access to the movie for 24 hours.
Nevertheless, it’s a modest start in a better direction.
I agree with hap, I just checked out their site and there is the activation fee as well as rental fees, which I didn’t care for. I think it can compete with Netflix if they adopt the same style of pricing, one rate per month as oppose to per movie.
Too expensive.
Vic