Movies you rent online coming to a PC near you

By Jefferson Graham
USA Today

Hollywood and independent Web sites are bracing to bring more movies to the Web in the belief that people with high-speed Internet connections will get comfortable with watching — and paying for — movies on their PCs.

Movielink (movielink.com), a joint venture with Sony, Warner Bros., Universal, MGM and Paramount studios, is about to launch what's being billed as an extensive library of recent and older titles.

CinemaNow (cinemanow.com), which has been showing independent films since 1999, added major films in September from Warner and Universal including "Ocean's Eleven" and "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" available for "rental" download at $3.99 each.

Users are given a limited amount of time to watch the films, and then the files disappear from their hard drives.

The studios are making their move even as more people are trading pirated first-run movies — usually poor-quality copies filmed by a camcorder in the projection booth or from the audience — across the Internet.

Market research firm Viant Media estimates that up to 500,000 film files a day are being traded on such swap services as KaZaA and Morpheus. A search of recent titles — "Jackass: The Movie," "The Ring" and "The Santa Clause 2" — showed they were available on KaZaA.

"We want to make sure there's a business model that provides movies at a reasonable price, so piracy doesn't become part of the culture the way it potentially has with music," said Movielink CEO Jim Ramo.

Watching movies online, legitimately or otherwise, is a far more cumbersome experience than dealing with music. Movie files are huge — about half a gigabyte — and can take an hour or longer to download at even the highest home speeds. Broadband Net access is a necessity.

Forrester Research analyst Josh Bernoff thinks for all the discussion and hype, studios would be better off focusing their energies elsewhere. "The PC is the wrong device to use to watch a movie," he said. "Listening to music on your PC is fine, but most people aren't going to go through the trouble of downloading a movie just to watch it once."

Ramo argues that during the next few years, TV sets and PC devices will converge. "You'll start to see the TV set as part of a home network. For now, this is a personalized viewing experience as opposed to a social one. But people who do multitasking and like to watch entertainment in between productivity are prospects."