Thursday, March 31, 2005

Why Sony's iTunes for Movies is Dumb. A better idea

Sony wants to do "iTunes for Movies" (BBC story):
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4396481.stm
This would be for portables (like the PSP and probably phones).
This only makes marginal sense as a business model (a little better as a technology). A better idea would be to sell TV shows they day after broadcast for $2/pop.
At least Sony partnered with a few other studios so it's not only Sony Pictures content that will be available. But if they partnered with Networks/TV production companies they would have a much better product to sell over an iTunes-like store for the in
There are a lot of reasons why cloning the iTunes model for movies makes so much less sense than selling TV shows:
1) The movie customer really wants to watch the content on his TV, not mobile device, so this is a peripheral market (how often do non-airplane trapped people want to sit down and watch a 2 hour movie on a tiny screen?). Compare to the real iTunes where portable players and computers are becoming the primary playback method for music. So movie content for portables is a much smaller market.
2) Most songs are sold 1 song at a time. Some whole albums are sold. But even a whole album is a much smaller $ unit than a movie. And also a much smaller download.
3) iTunes song quality is equal (as far as most consumers are concerened) to CD quality. Portable distributed movies are VHS quality - not DVD quality, so the customers isn't getting the quality they would want. The quality expectation for series TV is lower than for DVDs.
4) Movies are a much bigger download than TV shows. How long will a customer want to wait for their purchase to be on the portable device?
So I think Sony is blindly mimicking the iTunes strategy without really understanding the market or even the technology issues.
But like I said, if they did the same thing with TV episodes (day-of or day-after broadcast) they could do very well - if they charged $2/episode or something.

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

What would you like to see on this page?

I'm trying to make this site as useful as possible, so if there's something that ought to be here that isn't, tell me! You can click on the link for this post and give me a comment on the Portlandpage blog. You owe it to yourself, the community, and your country. Go USA.

Sunday, March 06, 2005

Welcome to the Portlandpage

Hopefully you will find some of the info I've gathered for you useful. As people suggest things and I get bored with the old stuff, new stuff will slowly take over. It's a mini-malls vs. old growth entropy kind of deal.