CinemaNow burns Furious with DVD
Tokyo Drift first download-to-burn available day-and-date
By Paul Sweeting -- Video Business, 9/25/2006
SEPT. 26 | Movie download service CinemaNow is moving fast and furiously to cement its lead in the download-and-burn arena before rivals begin offering similar services.
Beginning Tuesday, CinemaNow users will be able to download and burn a copy of Universal Studios Home Entertainment’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift the same day the DVD version hits retail shelves.
The offer marks the first time any major studio title has been available on a download-and-burn basis day-and-date with the home video release.
To promote the event, Universal is pricing the download at $9.99. CinemaNow also is running an online contest with the grand prize of a competition “drifting” car such as those depicted in the $62 million-grossing box-office movie.
Like all burnable titles from CinemaNow, The Fast and the Furious download includes all DVD bonus material, 5.1 channel sound and printable graphics and cover art.
'First of the first'
“We see this as the first of the first,” CinemaNow CEO Curt Marvis said of the breakthrough deal with Universal. “Our experience with every area of any new distribution format is that it’s hard to get someone to step up and be first. But we’re negotiating with all of our studio content suppliers, and we’re pretty hopeful we’ll have more to announce shortly.”In addition to Universal, CinemaNow has download-and-burn deals in place with Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, MGM Home Entertainment and Lionsgate.
To date, those studios have made only older catalog titles available on a download-and-burn basis.
“CinemaNow’s ‘Burn to DVD’ service offers consumers a fast, convenient way to enjoy Universal films on disc, complete with the full array of bonus features available to purchasers of the packaged DVD,” USHE president Craig Kornblau said in a statement. “Partnering with CinemaNow not only ensures secure online distribution of our content but also underscores Universal’s continual push to leverage emerging technologies as new avenues of entertainment content delivery.”
Burning key to model
Although allowing consumers to burn downloaded movies to a blank DVD is considered key to making online distribution competitive with packaged media, the studios have been wary of provoking the wrath of major DVD retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy.Earlier this month, Apple Computer announced that its iTunes store would begin offering movie downloads for viewing on iPods day-and-date with their DVD release, but so far only Disney has agreed to make its titles available through the service.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs owns more than $4 billion in Disney stock, making him the studio’s largest individual shareholder, and sits on the Disney board of directors.
According to Marvis, titles available for burning on CinemaNow typically outsell the same title on a non-burning, download-to-own basis by about five-to-one.
Technology holdups
Another concern for the studios has been the potential that multiple, incompatible formats and digital rights management systems could emerge in the download-and-burn market, confusing consumers and ultimately hurting sales.In July, negotiators from the studios, electronics makers and software industries reached a preliminary deal to permit downloaded movies to be burned using the same Content Scrambling System DRM used on packaged DVDs.
The goal of the deal was to ensure universal compatibility among burned discs and set-top DVD players.
Shortly after the preliminary agreement was reached, CinemaNow rival Movielink inked a deal with software maker Sonic Solutions to enable consumer burning using CSS, once titles are available.
Since then, however, no final agreement among the three industries has been reached and no CSS-enabled downloads have been released.
For now, CinemaNow’s service uses a proprietary DRM and an anti-ripping system called FluxDVD.
Although using a non-CSS DRM system increases the risk of playback problems for burned discs in set-top players, Marvis said CinemaNow has experience few problems to date.
“We’ve had a very strong level of success in terms of customers using the service,” he said. “There has been a lack of dramatic customer support problems.”
But Marvis also said CinemaNow is not wedded to the Flux system should other options prove better for consumers.
“When and if there’s another solution for burning that we feel is what customers are looking for and is accepted by the studios, we could switch whenever we want to or add it whenever we want to,” he said. “We made a proactive decision that we’re not going to just sit back and wait, because that could be a long time.”
