Disney\’s MovieBeam experiment apparently hasn\’t gotten traction yet.
The company has spent at least $70 million trying to market this
video-on-demand service to three cities (including Salt Lake City).
Consumers received a set-top box and access to 100 movies stored on a
local hard drive, with up to 10 new movies per week replacing movies
they no longer wanted. Disney may be trying to sell the service.
I thought there were several problems when I heard about Moviebeam: the
cost of getting set-top boxes into homes, for one, the limited
selection of movies (not true video on demand), and competing against
companies who already have millions of PVRs in homes as well as
broadband internet movie providers (there are at least five).
Want to read something eerily prophetic? I just found a brilliant
prediction from Jim Cramer in September 2003. He said Moviebeam would
be a massive Disney failure and lead to a $100 million write-off. If that doesn\’t put him up a notch in your book, I don\’t know what will.
One thought on “Another VOD Trial Bites the Dust”
Hasn’t the industry learned that consumer friendly formats typically win out over one-sided company leveraged formats designed to squeeze as much revenue as possible?
The exception of MS proves the rule in this case.