Ars Technica is reporting that not only is Movielink for sale, but also that nobody wants to buy it. For those unfamiliar with The Movielink site/philosophy, I'll give you a short explanation. It's a joint venture between five major movie studios that offer a library of around 1,700 of their films for rental or purchase. However, it's not a Netflix type site, where the rental involves receiving a DVD neither do you purchase a copy of the DVD. Instead you "rent" for a 24-hour period, or purchase, a movie file that you download. That you can only play on your laptop or PC.
I don't know about you, but I don't gather family and friends around my PC to watch a movie. I want something that I can play in my DVD player so I can watch it on my TV. There are times that I do watch movies on my laptop or PC, but those instances are few and far between, and the majority of people like myself definitely don't prefer that method. The fact that the movie studios are looking to dump Movielink is proof that their business model is misguided at best and moronic at worst. It seems to be an instance of companies telling the consumer what they want (and of course, the consumers are obviously not interested) instead of determining what they want.
July 18, 2006 at 11:48 am
[...] $70 million could raise some liquidity for Blockbuster and allow them to focus more heavily on building a VOD strategy or on managing their existing stable of stores, but it would also impact their revenue and their diversification in the video store business. If video rentals continue to come under pressure from Netflix, VOD and new alternative entertainment choices, selling of these stores could be a mistake. On the other hand, the success of Microsoft’s Live Arcade demonstrates that video games won’t be immune to VOD pressures either. [...]