Business Channel 2006-09-15&17

It was a quiet beginning. Early cinema was essentially 1 a stage play with no spoken words. But then came the talkies and the movies grew into a major industry. The introduction of color allowed films to stand out from the pack.

I'm Luke Skywalker, I'm here to rescue you.

And special effects make them even bigger. Star Wars picked up a love affair with high-tech 2 movie magic and left fans queuing up outside theaters. In homes, the retail 3 and rental 4 revolution began, first with videocassettes, then with the DVD, now estimated to be a 24-billion-dollar market. But DVD sales are slowing, so Hollywood is keen to try a new tech.

Angel Curt 5 Marvis, CEO of Cinemanow, his company, together with partners like Disney, MGM and Universal, allows you to transfer movies from the Internet to your PC.

Retail is shrinking, digital distribution is growing. So ultimately, will, will digital distribution be the choice of consumers? Absolutely. What's the time frame for that? Five years, ten years from now, I think, ah, receiving content digitally will be as commonplace as going to a video store was in the 80s.

Cinemanow has been up and running for about seven years, allowing film fans in the US and Japan to rent or buy, and then watch movie downloads on the PC. Its latest offering is a burn-to-DVD service, rather than keep the movie file on your drive, you can burn it on a DVD and watch it on any standard player.

Putting it to the test is easy, log in, choose a film, and let the download begin.

Now it took us 2 hours to download the movie, a little bit of a wait, but it is a sizeable 3-Gigabyte file. And now, the movie is mine to watch whenever I want on my computer or better yet, take it to the TV.

Convenient? Sure. Picture quality? Pretty good. But that long download time has got to change.

The challenge is huge. It’s one that we have to work on on a daily basis. But I think that, er, it, we run Cinemanow in Japan, and where you've got 10 megabits up to 100-megabit lines of fiber 6 going into most of the consumers in Japan. They can download a movie now off a Cinemanow in Japan in a matter of 10 or 15 minutes, and as you get more and more storage devices that get into, you know, I think, the home 5 years from now a Terabyte of storage in your average home will not be considered unique at all. So that would allow someone to offer, you know, have the opportunity to be able to, to store literally 7 hundreds, if not thousands, of movie files.

Don't get away, work as a team.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Cinemanow is not the only digital beast out there. 20th Century Fox is making some of its TV shows and movies like X-Men available for online purchase and download. Apple also recently launched its long-awaited iTunes movie service and the British Film Institute is pushing its massive archive online.

Although nothing can ever replace, er, the great experience of watching film in a big screen, nowadays, there are so many other different ways which people expect to be able to get a film.

With online streaming, downloads and burn-to-own DVDs, film-going is retreating deeper into the home. As for that matinee, the theatre, well it may soon go the way of the silent film.

Kristie Lu Stout 8 CNN, Los Angeles.

**************************************************
Vocabulary

Luke Skywalker (born 19 BBY) is a fictional 9 character in the Star Wars universe, portrayed 10 by Mark Hamill.