Sony Pictures is planning to develop a digital movie download service, aiming to make the company’s top 500 films available online within the coming year, senior vice president Michael Arriet told the Digital Hollywood conference.
"We want to set business models, pricing models, distribution models like Jobs did for music, but for the film industry," he said, referring to Apple Computer and its co-founder and now chief executive, Steve Jobs.
Arrieta told the conference that Sony–which has in its film library classics such as Dr. Strangelove and contemporary hits like Hitch–wants to determine how it can exploit the Internet while beating peer-to-peer file swappers at their own game, much the way Apple’s iTunes Music Store has successfully combated music swapping.
The film business has been well behind the music industry in making its own way, however hesitantly, into Internet downloading. But Microsoft warned Hollywood in March that if they didn’t make the accommodation they could end up with the same crisis of litigation leading to bad press and a damaged reputation that finally provoked the music industry to look for another way to answer Internet demand.
For now, only a handful of websites–including Movielink, a partnership among five film studios–even allow pay-to-play movie downloading.
And at least one analyst says the movie industry’s best chance against online piracy is to get onto the Internet like the music business did, and she points out that the music business is learning that online downloading isn’t killing music sales as heavily as the industry believed it would.
“I don’t think [film downloads] are going to replace DVDs,” said analyst Shelley Taylor in her study, Click Here Commerce, “just like music downloading hasn’t replaced CDs. People have a lot more control with a physical item they can carry around.”
But Taylor also advised the film industry to address multiple-device compatibility, unlike Apple’s iTunes. "Where Sony continues to misjudge consumers, and iTunes and others as well, is in the area of format handcuffs," she wrote. “Though there may be short-term advantages to locking customers into particular devices, customers will eventually revolt as they want personal control over their purchases."
