Back in November 2008, Sonic Solutions, best known for the Roxio line of CD and DVD software products, bought CinemaNow. The goal was to take the CinemaNow technology and use it to help more people digest digital entertainment content however they wanted. It’s a noble goal but CinemaNow has been making some strong moves over the last few weeks.
Their latest announcement sounds good but may be difficult in practice. Instead of putting movies on DVDs, they’ll be putting movies on USB drives. The prices of USB drives have dropped significantly and with so many people on the go and the increased popularity of netbooks it makes sense. I can imagine you getting ready to take a flight with your netbook and instead of paying for wi-fi you can just pop the USB movie and start watching.
Everyone wins. People don’t get sued for stealing movies, CinemaNow makes money, and movie studios are still making money from their releases.
The downside is that trying to sell something like this is prone to theft. When a commodity like a movie is small enough to easily slip into your pocket, stores may see an increase in disappearing movies if something like this were to pick up. These would end up behind a glass case or something which would limit their ability to start pickup and driving sales.
Ultimately, it’s just another option and if you don’t want to download directly onto your device this will be a great way to take and share movies. We have VOD, download, DVD, Blu-ray, Redbox, Netflix, connected HDTVs and now USB movies.
You can learn more at CinemaNow’s website.
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