Digital Home Thoughts: Movies on Demand: A Library in Your Living Room

""The consumer wants to own movies," said Adams, who has tracked video distribution methods since 1984. "Spending on movie purchases has gone from $6 billion to $16 billion in eight years. People are voting with their dollars." Selling movies, he added, is more profitable for the studios. "Why ask customers to pull out $5 when they want to pull out $20?" he said. Adams thinks that the services that will gain the most customers are those that have somewhat ulterior motives--Google will sell movies to increase ad revenues; AT&T will sell movies to draw customers from traditional cable and satellite operators; Apple will sell movies to support the sale of iPods and its coming set-top box. Even Kaleidescape is considering Internet-based video sales. "Ordinary DVDs are going to be with us for a long, long time," said Malcolm of Kaleidescape, though he admits he is covering his bases. "We plan to sell movies in the future.""

Here's an interesting article on the various competing strategies to get movies on our TVs without us having to resort to getting up off the couch and selecting a movie or waiting 3 days for Amazon to get it to us. Do consumers want to rent or would they rather own? And how about the equipment? And of course price is always a consideration. At the risk of using this venue to once again state my preference :wink:, my ideal situation would be a subscription service. While I don't go for the subscription model when it comes to music, I could see doing it for TV content. Sort of like Netflix-on-demand (something I'm sure they're working on). I just want to browse for a movie, then play it. I don't want to pay $5 to rent it and I don't want to pay $20 to own it. I want to pay $30 a month for unlimited access to the video library. All in HD of course. How about you? What model would get you to jump on board? I'm sure the studios are dying to hear it...