This post is actually a question for TK and it focuses on my personal experience with BD Live and his contention that there is still a market for purchasing movies.
Purchase vs Rent vs On Demand
As I understand TK’s position, the studios plan to make money by getting you to buy all the movies you bought on VHS and then bought again on DVD by getting you to buy them again on Blu-ray. I am not the ideal consumer for this, I laugh every time I open the drawer of my wife’s mostly unwatched Disney VHS tapes. I have recently taken a business from delivering training videos via DVD-ROM to delivering them over the Internet, so my opinion is that physical media is doomed and revenue from movie sales will trend towards zero, just as it has for newspapers and music. Certainly the embargoes against rental kiosks and other steps the studios are taking are an effort to promote sales over rentals and possibly rentals over downloads to stave off the inevitable price declines inherent with electronic delivery.
BD Live
BD Live is supposed to make Blu-ray Discs more valuable by linking the movies to online content. A main feature BD Live provides is the ability to get information about specific scenes while watching the movie. Consumers with Internet connected players can get up to date information about the actors, directors and possibly locations. This is a familiar function to TiVo users, it has existed for years as TiVo Swivel Search. Another feature of BD Live is chat. I just can’t see wanting to chat during a movie and if I did I wouldn’t want to do it through the TV with a remote.
BD Live Inoperable Out of the Box
But all of that is irrelevant, here’s the rub. In the race to the lowest price, the manufacturer of my player decided not to include a memory card. Available for retail for less than $10, an SD card has been required to access BD Live content for every Blu-ray movie we’ve rented. I really should buy one, but I know I have a few spares lying around somewhere and it seems silly to buy another. Obviously I haven’t gotten curious enough to spend the cost of two lattes or to search the junk drawers. Maybe BD Live is great, but someone forgot to tell me.
What’s really funny is that the same player offered me a five dollar credit for connecting it to Amazon’s Video On Demand service. So the player is actually encouraging me to watch downloaded movies. Furthermore when I purchased the player I also was given a choice of Blu-ray movie for free. It seems incredibly short sighted that the movie studios aren’t chipping in another $5 to ensure you are walking out of the store with a memory card to make BD Live useful. The user experience for BD Live for those who don’t know what an SD Card is or how much one costs is horrible. I think this alone would sour the average consumer towards BD Live especially when all of the other online features including video on demand work.
Honestly that is a pretty easy problem to fix. Even after the fact it would be fairly simple to offer a promotion for consumers with Internet connected players for a free memory card. The real issue here is whether the BD Live content is more of an encouragement to purchase or to rent. The fundamental problem is that the content is delivered over the Internet. There is no guarantee that the content will be available in five years and there is no bonus offered for buying the content. Therefore it probably encourages renting more than purchasing. At some point the studios will want to recover the money they invested in producing any BD Live content and will make it available to consumers who watch movies via video on demand. Some of the features of BD Live, including chat, have already been demonstrated in video on demand prototypes from NetFlix.
A Better Option to Promote Purchase
I better option for the studios would have been something that made the movie sticky. This system would involve features from services like TiVo, IMDb, Amazon and Flixster. Fundamentally the system would provide a way to register the first sale of a Blu-ray Disc in an online catalog. That catalog could be connected and shared in social sites like Flixster does with movies in theaters and Facebook. By connecting it to IMDb it would be easy to create TiVo like recommendations of what movie from already in your library you might enjoy. Amazon like wish lists and allow the studios to offer loyal purchasers promotions and earlier release dates completely bypassing the current retail channels and certainly have more ability to forecast end user sales.
This catalog system could also solve a problem faced my most people who have collected large numbers of movies, specifically it could provide a nice cover-flow type interface, the ability to search for movies by keywords, actors, directors or quotes. It could provide a way for the user to specify the location of the movie to make it easier to find in large collections.
If the studios were really gutsy they would build in a lend/like system. Using the social network features you would borrow a copy of the movie from a friend, perhaps even via a studio authorized digital copy. Upon viewing and returning the movie to the friend you would be asked to rate the movie. If you liked the movie the studio could offer it to you directly.
Conclusion
As content becomes available digitally the price gets forced down. The way to preserve prices is to ensure there remains continued additional value in physical copies. BD Live does not provide this increased value, it actually encourages rental and opens the door to more video on demand. Movie studios should look at the consumer’s entire catalog and their overall viewing experience versus the individual movie and thereby drive features based on encouraging purchases.
