Movie download market still has room for growth
This eMarketer analysis of the movie download market is great and contains lots of good information, but I think the three key points made in the report are:
- None of the download services have the market penetration of Apple’s iTunes
- Studio wholesale prices are higher than what anyone is charging, leading to speculation that hardware makers will use downloads as loss-leaders for their equipment
- Full-length movies are just three percent of the market.
So put these three together:
- No one sells more videos than Apple
- Very few studios sell their films through iTunes
- Studios may be killing themselves by not pricing competitively
And, just because it’s important to note:
- Studios are upset over Apple’s pricing policies
I will now go bang my head on the desk until someone realizes studios need to change their thinking on movie downloads.
Meanwhile there’s this story about how Amazon’s tentative approach to download sales. Part of that is because they don’t have a bit of hardware (not counting their soon-to-launch e-book reader) and they sort of have to play nicely with other formats because of that.
See Amazon is built on the idea that whatever you want to find you can find there. Once they start restricting where and when you can consume the items you buy from there (as seems to be the case with the TV shows from NBC Universal) they’re pretty much screwed.
It’s also interesting, just as part of this discussion, to note the appearance of apparent evidence of Apple planning a movie rental business that could be a game-changer IF studios are on-board.
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