BeerFiles is a sometimes irreverent blog concerning all things to do with IT, technology, people and the media from the point of view of a hard boiled technology journalist and commentator. Stan has been in the IT game for about a quarter of a century. He has seen and written about the rise and fall of more than a few IT players and made many friends, some of whom he has even crossed swords with on occasions. Everything in this blog is purely Stan’s opinion so if you agree, wish to expand upon, correct a post or tell Stan he’s a clueless know nothing, please feel free.

Amazon and Apple it's yawn time not showtime

by Stan Beer

Friday, 08 September 2006

It never ceases to amaze me how brilliant companies such as Amazon and Apple can excel in some areas and get it so wrong in others. This movie downloads thing is just one big yawn. Featured Whitepaper 5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support Maybe when we all have 100 Mbps broadband access and we're allowed to burn our own DVDs, and there's a good downloads rental system available, movie downloads will be a convenient and viable way to source our movies. Maybe that's only a year or two or three in the future. However, right now nobody is interested. Who says so? Not just me. A quick look at the Alexa.com (owned by Amazon) internet rankings site, shows that neither of the two most popular movie downloads sites Guba and CinemaNow have set the world on fire. The more popular of the two, Guba, ranks about 3700 on the website popularity ladder and has slipped in recent months. CinemaNow ranks a lowly 6300. This is in spite of much publicity and backing for both sites. Perhaps Amazon and Apple believe their extra drawing power and traffic will generate the downloads that Guba and CinemaNow are not getting. If they believe that, they will be disappointed. Consumers have already voted with their feet. They don't want movie downloads on today's internet. It doesn't give them any advantages over what they can get elsewhere, it's a painfully slow process and not particularly cheap. Short video clips, music videos, news snippets and movie trailers is an entirely different matter. YouTube ranks a phenomenal 13 on the Alexa.com website rankings and its traffic continues to grow. A quick visit to the site will instantly reveal why. A visitor can point and click on a short two or three minute video and be instantly engaged and entertained for free. They can stay on the site for hours at a time and never run out of interesting material. So there you have it. Short video specialist YouTube is the 13th most popular website in the world, while movie download specialist Guba ranks 3700. Does that not convey anything at all to Amazon and Apple? {moscomment} Tags See All Tags Apple  Powered By Joomla Tags Please enable JavaScript in your browser to post your comment!

 

< Next story in category		Previous story in the category >