I’m honestly baffled at the amount of press Movielink got earlier this week regarding their licensing & marketing agreement with Sonic. I saw the story early and passed right over it… after all, DVD-burning had already been announced in April and little to no pricing or DRM information was provided. Oh yeah, they didn’t even let us know when this new service might be offered. How did rival CinemaNow respond? They launched their burn-to-DVD service today.
I generally find John Dvorak to be a raving lunatic (does saying that preclude me from writing for PC Mag?), but he makes some good points this week…
The ubiquitous press release now seems to be the number one source of information, according to a disturbing report by a group of researchers studying Web search behavior. Press releases tend to be long-winded, full of ludicrous quotes from the CEO bragging about himself and the company, along with all sorts of pie-in-the-sky proclamations. And thus the public is further buffaloed by malarkey, thanks to media ineptitude.
Lastly, burn-to-DVD doesn’t interest me in the least. If I want to see a movie now, I’ll rent it (whether via Blockbuster, Movielink, Netflix, Moviebeam, etc). If I want to own it, I’ll pay Amazon 50% less than Movielink or CinemaNow for a disc in a case with some nice artwork and understood copy protection.