Wider format, most popular emailed/blogged/searched feature and a new horizontal drill-down navigation added with more prominent multimedia. Also a very smart ‘Today’s Paper’ feature that let’s you find articles as they are organized in the print edition – would like to see more scans of the printed pages there however. Editor in chief’s letter to readers is here. Mytimes.com feature which is supposed to allow users to customize a page with both Times and other web site’s content is touted in the letter, but it has a ‘coming soon’ message when I visited it. Sounds like a custom RSS aggregator to me….
Daily Archives: April 3, 2006
Digital Movies on Demand
Movielink.com and CinemaNow.com both revealed today that they will now offer movies for download (to own or rent) simultaneously with their DVD release to stores. Reuters story here. The price point is a head-scratcher, though: $20-$30 for the ‘own the file’ of current DVD releases. With DVDs themselves selling for less than that, and the fact that with DRM in place users will not be able to burn these downloads to removable media, the value here is seriously undercut, IMHO. Unless you happen to have a spiffy Windows MCE or Viiv setup where you can watch these on your TV screen, $30 for a movie I can only watch on my 20" LCD in the home office (or perhaps on my Powerbook Tablet PC (no Mac support, sigh) is not a great value. I’d much rather get the disc from Netflix or pick it up at BestBuy and watch it with the wife in 50 inches of glorious color. And given the price point of full-length television shows currently selling on the iTunes store ($1.99), I would like to think that given Apple’s history with negotiating their music deals for the ITMS will allow them to cut a better deal on behalf of the consumer – and that their product strategy includes a simpler way of providing hardware that let’s us see these downloadable movies in HD-quality on our living room sets. A guy can hope, right?