Movielink launched a download-to-own digital movie service this week, complementing its existing rental service. Movielink is a joint venture of five major Hollywood studios (MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal Studios, and Warner Bros.) that distributes films online from a variety of major and independent studios. The new service uses Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 and its associated DRM.
The download-to-own service enables users to watch movies on up to three different PCs. In most cases, users must download the (huge, almost a gigabyte) files within 24 hours of purchase. Prices for permanent downloads are in the US $15-28 range, equal to or just below the retail prices of DVDs. In contrast, Movielink rentals (which enable users to watch movies for 24-hour periods) go for about $1-5 each.
Hollywood has been making a big deal about this announcement, but from a DRM perspective, it's barely worth a mention. A technology like Microsoft Windows Media DRM makes it very easy to support rental, download-to-own, and many other possible licensing models; it becomes simply a business decision about what to implement.
The more salient DRM-related aspect of this Movielink development is that while Movielink's existing rental service supported both Windows Media and RealNetworks Helix DRM, the download-to-own service only supports Windows Media. This is another nail in the coffin of HelixDRM as a platform, though it is consistent with RealNetworks's successful migration to content service provider.
In this case, the actual big deal is that now movies delivered over the Internet to PCs are effectively the same as DVDs and other home video products from a licensing perspective. Movielink now more fully resembles a physical video store that offers recent films for purchase and less-recent ones for both rental and purchase. This will have supply-chain implications for the studios and their manufacturing and distribution partners.
Of course, this all depends on the Internet feature-film distribution scheme actually taking off. Technical hurdles remain: our test run of Movielink's new permanent-download service entailed a call to Movielink tech support to resolve a problem updating Windows Media software, and we are still waiting for our test movie to finish downloading -- over a DSL connection -- after having started the download 8 hours ago.
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