Content, TV Display Key to Online Success

The most-important things online movie download services can do to succeed is offer a broad selection of content and make it possible to view that content on TVs, which is the expectation users now have for movie content. That's because the single most important ingredient for success for any video offering is the content.

That isn't to say content pitched to mobiles or PCs can't find a niche. It is to say that the broad mass market for online-delivered movie viewing won't become a mass phenomenon until user behavior is consistent with what consumers expect today.

"When it comes to movie rentals and purchases, the quality of content matters," say analysts at The Diffusion Group. The second crucial element is that "getting video downloads to the TV is absolutely imperative."

The ability to view movie downloads on any TV in the home is of critical importance, both to those that have used online movie download services and those likely to do so soon, The Diffusion Group says.

The use of mobile phones for video viewing is not considered sufficiently desirable to justify using an online movie download service, Diffusion Group researchers find. "As such, cell phone video viewing will not in-and-of-itself be a compelling attribute for an online movie download service, especially of full-length movies.

And there's a difference between users and proponents. Proponents emphasize the interactive capabilities online content enables. But users don't seem especially enamored of those sorts of features, as fond of them as interactive proponents are.

Adult broadband users don't agree. "Only 28 percent rank this attribute positively and 42.3 percent rank it unimportant," Diffusion Group researchers say.

Wal-Mart Closes Video Download Service

Wal-Mart shuttered its video download service Dec. 21. Videos purchased and downloaded as part of the service still are playable, so long as the original PC the movies were downloaded to remains operational. Due to licensing restrictions, those videos cannot be copied or transfered to a different computer.

That's an obvious measure to protect copyrights, but points to one objection some users may have to buying downloads. Some of us go through a PC a year, so "buying" really means viewing until the hard drive or PC dies.

Having learned the hard way this will happen, some of us now store iTunes collections on external hard drives, so we can lose the CPUs without having to reload all the music again.