The dust has barely settled on Blu-Ray’s victory over HDDVD (which sucks either way for us because we still have a giant fuck tube tele that’s all analogue) and already people are talking about the future of delivering movies. Already the internet has answered the call with online rentals and sales. Downloads are only getting faster. And now, according to this article in the Economist that my mother in law passed to me, there’s talk of movie kiosks delivering movies to reusable flash drives.

The idea is pretty simple. Instead of a DVD kiosk that you might find at a grocery store or Target or where ever, you’d have a digital kiosk loaded with thousands of movies. Grab your flash drive, plug the sucker in, pay for a flick or four, copy them over to your flash drive, and take them home to watch on your SexyBook Air. Movies would never go out of stock, publishers don’t have to pay for packaging and pressing as you would with DVD or Blu Ray discs, the kiosks would be a cinch to maintain, and you can use you flash drive over and over. You could even market a simple player that would store and play your movies on your tele (or just plug your Mac Mini into your set).

The flash drive solution makes a completely wireless laptop computer slightly more usable for mobile entertainment. You can play movies on the Air now without whining about the lack of optical drive. Flash drives are more convenient to store than DVD discs and cases. And let’s face it, box art and liner notes are a dying breed. Long gone are the fully painted illustrative record sleeves that informed so much of our early pop culture. Now you can just download music with little jpeg thumbnails of the cover. No one will miss DVD packaging.

It would be the perfect solution, PERFECT I say, if the kiosks stocked cult classics, B movies, and hard to find films (like Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park. I would totally by a flash drive version of that ponderous work of… um… entertainment?). Those lower profile (some would argue quality as well) movies could find a nice home in a digital kiosk.

The future is looking good for digital delivery. Hollywood is finally realizing that there’s money to be made on this here interweb. And for once, I think the rest of us might actually benefit in the long run.

[Via Economist]

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Movies, The Future. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.