 MovieLink, the joint Internet venture by five major studios
(www.movielink.com), last week
added the first of several changes to make renting and downloading movies
online easier and faster. The key change was to allow customers to begin
watching movies before downloads are complete.
The site will detect Internet connection speeds and
let customers begin viewing a movie after calculating that the rest of it
will download before viewers finish watching what's already been
transmitted. That will spare MovieLink users the wait to download entire
movies -- up to three hours, even with the required broadband access. Now
they can start watching witnin 30 minutes.
MovieLink has declined to reveal sales since the Windows-only
service launched last November. Once downloaded, titles stay on a user's
hard drive for 30 days and can be viewed for 24 hours from the time the
purchaser starts watching. Then they are deleted.
MovieLink said it will further revise its renting system in
November to allow downloaded movies to be kept for the full 30 days, so
customers can watch them again after the initial rental period by paying a
"re-rental" fee. That cost will be set by MovieLink's owners -- MGM,
Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros.
MovieLink charges $ 4 or $ 5 for newer releases in its 700-film
library. While it only offers downloading, competitor CinemaNow (www.cinemanow.com) also
sells subscription plans and "streaming" views in addition to downloads
that last 48 hours. CinemaNow, which has a library of nearly 1,000 titles,
is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment.
Hollywood is trying to find ways to sell movies online before
getting hit by the same file-sharing problem as the music business. Movie
file sharing is about three years behind that of music, Forrester Research
said in a report last week. Only 11 percent of young people have
downloaded movies from the Internet, but half of all active file sharers
swap videos, Forrester
said. | 
