MovieBeam: Who Wants It?

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.hdbeat.com/2006/02/15/moviebeam-who-wants-it/' target='_blank'>http://www.hdbeat.com/2006/02/15/moviebeam-who-wants-it/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"MovieBeam has been out for less than 2 days and at this point I'm going out on a limb and predicting its failure. When I first blogged about this yesterday morning I was pretty excited, but after further investigation I'm convinced it will fail and here is why. The biggest challenge with any new technology is adoption by the consumer. People are creatures of habit and often they don't use the best, but more likely what they know. This explains why so many people still go to the Video store or use the Windows "Classic Menu". Unless they can be convinced that the new technology is noticeably better than the old, they won't try it. There are early adopters that long to try new technology, but MovieBeam is not setting themselves up to please these people either."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/images/MovieBeam1.JPG" /><br /><br />Interesting. He correctly says that people are creatures of habit and often they don't use the best, but more likely what they know. I agree that the upfront cost of almost $200 is going to be quite prohibitive. I just don't see people moving away from a Netflix like model because it requires very little hardware change since almost all of us have DVD players already. Have any of you invested in this already?

[Doug Johnson]

I subscribed to MovieBeam when they were 'testing the waters' so-to-speak in my home market a couple years ago. It seemed to be designed well enough (very nice user interface!), and, surprisingly, the picture quality was actually pretty good. The only problem I had with the service was the selection of movies. You would think that having 100 movies would give you some choices you would like. Sometimes it did, but most of the time they were either movies that didn't fit my particular tastes, or just plain weren't that good (more of the former than the latter).

They pulled the plug on me, though, saying they were going to 'retool' the service. I guess this is the new incarnation of the service. They have apparently added HD as an option, which, while it could potentially be enticing, having only a couple HD movies to choose from in practice may not make it that useful.

EDIT: I just discovered you have to use HDMI to view HD movies. So that's a no-go for me and everyone else I personally know with an HDTV. Darn Hollywood!!!! :evil:

I hope they succeed. I like their service better than most. I'm skeptical, though.