DigitalNow has announced a new digital movie delivery platform. We get wind of this news story thanks to the fabled caves of Yahoo:
Digital entertainment company CinemaNow and Technicolor said on Tuesday they had developed a new digital movie delivery platform to sell to online retailers and hardware companies. Jason Alexander, director of marketing for privately-held CinemaNow, said the company would seek to provide the platform to existing and new partners in the consumer electronics industry.
CinemaNow currently provides an online movie service that is accessible through its own website as well on various devices.
The platform should make it easier for device makers and retailers to provide an online movie service and features functions like content encoding and encryption, digital rights management (DRM), ad management, order fulfillment across various consumer electronics categories. Technicolor, a unit of French media group Thomson SA, and privately-held CinemaNow said they were also working to add high-definition movies to CinemaNow’s library of more than 10,000 titles.
I know many prefer to have a hard copy of a DVD as opposed to data, I can understand their reasons and appreciate them but I fall on the other side of the coin. I would much prefer to have a digital library that I can dial up at any time using my computer and or television. I look forward to the day when I can talk to my TV, tell it to download the Godzilla collection and bill it to my credit card.
Not only do I love the convenience of digital downloads, but I also think this will be a means to get a ton of hard to find films that may not have even made the format jump to DVD. I miss the days of going into a video store and picking random films off the wall based on their cover alone. The modern rental shops focus on the most popular films and are severely lacking in crazy off the wall random delights. It is my hope that all of these films will be converted to digital data from the studios and made available to all of us for paid download.
I also prefer data over hard copies because I hate clutter. I want to minimize the crap I have lying around the house. If I can have all of my movies and music stored on a few hard drives – that suits me just fine.
We are still in the embryonic stage of this technology but I look forward to seeing it develop and am curious to see how it catches on.
