A few years behind the curve, Hollywood’s movie studios are finally moving towards making their product available for online download. We’ve talked before about some of the major studio’s plans to make their back-catalog’s downloadable through various services, and with the arrival of the video IPod there’s a big push to make them even easier to get for use in similar technologies.
But the latest in downloadable movie content is being pushed by a cable company as a subscription service. Our friends at M&C say Starz Entertainment Group is launching a new service that will give users on-demand access to thousands of movies over the internet for a $9.99 monthly fee. Of course you can already order some movies on-demand through most cable services like Comcast, but then you’re paying $9.99 or more per film (and it’s a limited selection at that) instead of $9.99 for all you can watch. The service is being called Vongo, perhaps because you can order movies while sitting at home playing naked bongos.
This is probably something that rental purveyors like Blockbuster and Netflix should already have thought of and be further on their way to implementing. Why drive to a rental store or wait for the mailman when you can push a button on your computer and have the movie zapped into your home? As more and more people move towards integrating their computer into their home entertainment system, perhaps this will become something viable in the future.
For now though, I think what Starz is doing is more of a curiosity than anything. Really, most people (me included) aren’t interested in regularly watching movies on their computer (or on a teeny, tiny IPod screen), and either don’t have the know-how or the money to put together the kind of super-system that allows them to properly integrate their computer with any sort of home entertainment system. But, the push to turn our lives into an integrated technical bonanza continues, so there’s a good chance it’ll happen to all of us someday. Maybe when we’re all too old to understand it. Remember when you laughed at your grandparents for not understanding how to use the VCR? Or maybe you scoffed at your parents confusion over TIVO. Hold skippy, cause that’s going to be me and you.
