A brief history of paying for movies (Part II). Well, not so much history, really.

Carrying on the theme of not really reaching any conclusions, I suppose I should wind up my ruminations on how one pays for movies (or videos, or other entertainment). The hypothesis emerging is that there are four main ways:

• Per view (like, by going to a theater, or by ordering PPV)
• By subscription (as with a premium cable channel, Netflix DVD service)
• By short-term rental (for example, at the video store, cable on-demand)
• By purchase (say, buying a DVD)

Do these exist on the web as well? Indeed they do. I haven't directly used PPV over the web, but I'm familiar with Netflix's "watch instantly" service and Amazon's rent/buy^* scheme.

Can we compare the adoption of these models on the web with their adoption online? Not really. Technically, various forms of the various models have been around for a while, but until recently, relatively few people had enough bandwidth to care (as a US citizen/resident I'm well aware that it's been particularly recently here). At which point all four models turned up pretty quickly.

So while the historical comparison doesn't seem particularly instructive, it's interesting that the four existing models seem to have carried over fairly seamlessly.


^*Amazon sells you the right to watch the material for as long as they provide it. Since it's tied to their DRM scheme, there are also restrictions on where you can watch it. Unlike a DVD, you can't pop it into a portable player or watch it in your car (while someone else drives, one would hope), and unlike a DVD, it's not up to you how long you keep it. I'm pretty sure the right is non-transferable, again unlike a DVD. But other than that it's just like buying a DVD.

This seems somehow not completely satisfying, but I've also seen mention of services that would sell you the right to download and (legally) burn a DVD of a movie for your own use. [What's a DVD? --D.H. May 2015]

"Buying" internet movies

Maybe I'm missing something but ...

For a price near what you'd pay for a DVD, Amazon will give you the right to watch a given movie over the internet, subject to some fine print. Or you could just get the DVD for a similar price.

If I have a DVD, I can watch it pretty much anywhere -- on any TV with a DVD player attached, with a portable player, in a car with a player, on a laptop, at a hotel ... wherever. If I have the internet equivalent, I'm restricted to internet enabled devices, and within that, to whatever devices Amazon chooses to allow.

Frankly, I wouldn't know what devices those would be without looking. I know it'll work with my Roku box, and I've never really had cause to try anywhere else. I know Netflix will let me watch their movies on a laptop (at least if it's using IE/Windows), but I haven't been traveling much lately, so that's not really on my radar either.

The point being that, if I'm just watching a particular movie through a subscription service, or renting it short-term to watch it once, I don't care that watching the movie is tied to the box I ordered it on. I'm going to sit down, order the movie, pop some popcorn and watch it. On the other hand, if I'm "buying" it, that is, buying the right to watch it whenever I want, I'd also like the right to watch it wherever I want.

Internet video delivery is not there yet. I'm sure it will get there, and I'm sure it's good enough for some people right now. It's not there for me yet, late adopter that I am.

[What's a "DVD"?  Recently a friend wanted to watch a short clip on a DVD, and had a choice of ... a set-top box in the living room that happened to have a DVD attached.  When your main devices are a phone and a tablet, and there's an app on those for the major providers, it's not so hard to watch internet video everywhere, and a pain to watch a DVD anywhere.  Pretty much the opposite of what I describe above, only six or seven years ago.

I personally prefer not to buy internet movies.  The price tends to be three or four times the rental price, and I generally don't watch movies three or four times.  Maybe the movie won't be available three years from now when I feel like re-watching an old favorite, but maybe it'll be available cheaper on the original site or elsewhere.  I find this surprising, honestly, since I often tend toward a "get ALL the bits and keep them" mentality, but evidently not in this case.  --D.H. Jan 2016]

Amazon on Roku

A while ago, the Roku set-top box quietly upgraded itself, mostly re-arranging menus slightly, but also promising nifty new things to come. A few weeks ago, the other shoe dropped. Amazon is now offering a wide range of movies and TV shows -- much wider, or at least much more recent and popular, than Netflix's "watch instantly" service. As a general rule you can either rent a show for a 24-hour period or "buy" unlimited access (more or less) for about three times the rental cost. Rental costs are comparable to cable pay-per-view rental costs, but the selection is, again, much wider.

It's certainly an interesting development and probably a significant part of the Way of the Future, but there are still some kinks to work out. For example, it's best to check whether the program you can rent from Amazon is also available for free (meaning you've already paid for it) via your regular cable or satellite service or (I recall seeing at least one case) via Netflix on the same box.

Maybe someone could write a plug-in to sort all this out. Except I doubt that a security-conscious, DRM-friendly box like Roku's will be very friendly to plug-ins.

It will also be interesting to see how (or whether) Netflix responds to this. I'd mentioned a possible "premium instant" service before. Thinking it through, another option might be just to emulate the current DVD queue. For $X a month you get access to any N DVDs at one time.

Except, hmm ... that works for physical DVDs because it takes time to send in the old ones and get the new ones in the mail. With the box, you could just "send in" the movie you just finished and pull the next one off the queue. Lather, rinse, repeat and you have access to the whole catalog for the price of one. Maybe it would only let you "return" titles once a day, or whatever?

[Remarkably little has changed since then, except that on-demand from the cable company is much more likely to provide pay-per-view.  If you've "cut the cord", YMMV.  In particular, Netflix's subscription model hasn't changed.  Instead, they've focused on producing their own content, much as HBO did when it was at a similar stage. --D.H. 2015]

Kindle and print

While looking for something else, I ran across the November 26 issue of Newsweek. The cover story was on Amazon's new Kindle e-book. Conveniently enough, the article is available online.

Overall I found the article pretty evenhanded, balancing the "print is inherently inefficient" side with the "books are inherently special" side. As usual, I think both sides have valid points. A few thoughts:

• Yes, print is inherently inefficient. That doesn't mean it will die anytime soon. People still sent hand-delivered messages long after the telephone became widespread. Steam trains ran long after the diesel came along. Western Union only recently shut down its telegraph service.
• On the other hand, it's hard to imagine print not giving way to bits over time and eventually reaching niche status. My completely unfounded guess is that it will end up more like blacksmithing than buggy whips.
• Amazon is right to recognize that it's not enough just to have an electronic device that more or less looks like a book. The Kindle is not just a device but a service. Along with searchability and the potential for hyperlinks, Amazon hopes the killer app will be the "buy and read it right now" feature. Push a button (and pay Amazon a fee generally less than you'd pay for print) and the Kindle will download whatever book you like. Whether this is enough to pull people in remains to be seen, but it at least seems plausible.
• The Kindle relies on copy protection, presumably using some Trusted Computing-like facility. I've argued that it's not unreasonable to expect a special-purpose device to give up programmability in an attempt to lock down copy protection. Again, it will be interesting to see how well this works.
• Conversely, print has a nice, well-understood copy protection model. Copying a book means physically copying pages. In theory this is quite breakable. In practice it works well (so far). Publishers naturally like this. It would be interesting to try to quantify how much this convenience to publishers is extending the lifetime of the book, as opposed to the "nice to curl up with and read" aspect.