There are rumours circulating that Amazon are planning to launch a video download service later this year. It's great news for the movie industry if this is true but we saw late last year that Netflix was having problems licensing content from the movie studios so we'll need to see if Amazon hits the same wall.
The problem the movie industry faces is that technology isn't standing still. A few years back they weren't suffering from illegal downloading like the music industry. Internet connections will still relatively slow so it took way too long to download.
That's changed. It takes a few hours to download a TV show and that's why we saw downloads of illegal video content overtake music downloads last year.
They also need to rethink region encoding as its a key driver for piracy in Europe. With movies released months later in Europe it provides more of a reason for people download. Same with TV shows. Why would people wait for the new series of a TV show when they can download it a couple of hours after it's been shown in the US?
Giving people a legitimate source of music through the download services was a big step in reducing illegal downloads. They've still got a lot of work to do and they're getting a lot wrong but they're on the right track.
Let's hope the movie industry wakes up to the need for similar video download services to kickstart the download market for movies and TV shows.
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