Amazon and Apple it's yawn time not showtime
By Stan Beer
Friday, 08 September 2006 16:14
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?
