Stan Beer
Friday, 08 September 2006 16:14
Opinion and Analysis
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.
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?