Blockbuster aligns with CinemaNow in an effort to stay relevant
As much fun as it is to bash the top of your DVD player each of the 135 times your Total Access movie skips during playback, Blockbuster has apparently decided to get serious about movie downloads – sort of. Back in November, Blockbuster finally announced its first set top box offering, allowing users to purchase OnDemand movies on a pay-per-view basis. Yay. Blockbuster’s set top offering, shall we say, hasn’t quite been greeted with open arms, nor has the PC-based download service available on blockbuster.com. That won’t stop the stumbling giant from moving forward and exploring new ways to stay relevant of course, and its latest move is just that. CinemaNow, a movie download service that continues to expand, will now be Blockbuster-branded. While this will make movies bearing the Blockbuster logo available on a new range of devices, it does little to advance Blockbuster in the digital realm – instead, the move simply slaps a more recognizable brand on the CinemaNow service. Offerings are still pay-per-view with titles available to rent or buy, and pricing will remain the same. Blockbuster Chairman Jim Keyes claims that the company is currently examining subscription options but stated nothing finite. Netflix, on the other hand, still offers unlimited movie downloads to all subscribers with a monthly DVD-via-mail plan of $8.99 or higher.
These are decisions that need to be made because Netflix is killing them
If I remember correctly, Netflix’s online content is streaming, not downloadable. It’s only a portion of their catalog, although it’s still a pretty big bunch of movies to look through. And the no time limitations is pretty sweet.
Of course if we had REAL broadband speeds here, downloading movies might actually seem viable…
Kind of a catch 22 – Blockbuster need a future, but the Australian Government has almost no interest in making our broadband as fast as most other Western countries!
Of course, add to this the competition from BigPond Movies and presumably the Apple iTunes Store (if us Aussies ever actually get movie downloads that is, with regards to the latter…) and, well it sucks to be in the movie rental business right now…
Did Blockbuster Buy CinemaNow? They bought MovieLink a couple of years ago and rebranded that to Blockbuster; which obviously didn’t help.
Blockbuster is already dead. With Netflix streaming (unlimited and flat-fee) to TiVos now besides Xbox360, and the Roku, it’s the end-game now.
WARNING!!!! Read the fine print about purchasing videos..
4.3.3 ………Once you have downloaded a working copy of a piece of Retained Content we will not refund your purchase price or provide another copy of said piece of Retained Content in the event that your computer crashes, your hard drive fails, the file becomes corrupt or in the event that said piece of Retained Content does not play, for whatever reason.
This means you will be required to maintain your PC forever (unlikely) to have unlimited usage. Better buy a DVD at least when you buy it you can watch it any place you like…..