It always seemed like Movielink and CinemaNow should be the same company and the same product. Both have been hobbled in the past by lack of willingness by the major US studios to innovate, despite owning the two online film services and now both have been sold on, and become overtaken by the huge rush to take internet video content and show it on a TV.
So a deal between CinemaNow owner Sonic Solutions and Movielink owner Blockbuster, has brought them together, under the same service name, aiming to rejuvenate them, update them and make them relevant once more. And it might just work, rejuvenating Blockbuster and its share price in the process.
The two services certainly need updating with Amazon, Netflix and iTunes all leaving them behind in terms of popularity and a wide range of device options.
The services still seem tied down in terms of rights, to just the US market, though that might change, but there is no imminent likelihood of them emerging outside that zone, just as there have been no other services like them launch internationally.
The way the announcement at CES was phrased was to give all the credit for running the service to Blockbuster, and to try to lend it the massive brand that Blockbuster once had in its heyday, as a part and parcel of the American video way of life, before Netflix came along. All of the credit for the technology smarts is given to Sonic, but it looks like Blockbuster will be the electronic online movie brand which will emerge.
The technology though wasn’t really discussed, so we may have to guess at that and try to catch up with Sonic later. The two companies say they are collaborating with consumer electronic manufacturers, including Sonic’s existing CinemaNow providers, to expand the ecosystem of interoperable devices offering this new Blockbuster service.
These ecosystem will include PCs, portable media players, Blu-ray Disc players, personal video recorders (PVRs), set-top boxes, mobile phones and web-connected television sets. That’s pretty immense and given that some Sonic technology was voted into the Blu-ray specification, with think relating to pulling down internet content, then all those claims might be true and not significantly difficult for Sonic. All of this could be done easily by using the electronic sell through software of Sonic, which brought it to this area originally.
Back in November 2007, a year before it acquired CinemaNow, Sonic added download to burn to the CinemaNow offerings for both SD and HD content by licensing its Qflix technology. This meant that as a DVD copy is burned from the file, it turns out to be just like a real DVD, including the placement of encryption keys and how to access them. This was because studios and the DVD Forum and the DVD Copy Control Association agreed on a process for burning to DVDs using its Content Scrambling System and Sonic was swift off the mark to incorporate it into its software and sign up partners.
But we’re not quite sure how the files that it downloads can be moved to handsets, presumably by multiple files being downloaded and some trick of DRM being used to transfer a key to the handset.
Sonic plus Blockbuster might have many of the building blocks already in place and perhaps an upgrade to their respective DRMs might be all that is required. Both Movielink and CinemaNow have always used Windows Media DRM and porting this to handsets, DVRs and set tops is really part and parcel of what’s going on with PlayReady, the imminent re-write of Windows Media DRM for multiple platforms, which relies on the domain concept, where related devices can share content. We hope it is, because download to rent, and then burn a DVD to play on another device, still isn’t enough of a business model ‘ copying the online file to other devices is a better way forwards.
DiVX managed a similar trick when it got its codecs embedded into last generation DVD players back in 2004, on the understanding they could attach and play internet held content, either hosted by DiVX or created using its codecs. That process took around three years of hard work for an under-resourced company and then it was only partially successful in bringing that service to market, partly due to brand issues.
The two companies say they will make their digital libraries of mainstream content all available under the Blockbuster brand resulting in a single VoD and electronic sell-through offering. The idea appears to be to change the old Movielink and CinemaNow business model, from movie rental which can be triggered any time within 30 days and then giving 24 hours to play the film. With electronic sell through that file can then be made into a DVD for a further payment.