I’m not quite sold on this idea but I thought I’d see what everyone else thinks. There’s a company in Ireland called PortoMedia that’s developed movie kiosks.
These kiosks will be found in four unknown US test cities in the near future (please let me know if you see one) and they’ll hold approximately 350 to 5,000 movies, each of which can be downloaded to a memory card in under a minute. You can watch the movies on a $60 TV box that you buy from PortoMedia (it comes with six free movies) or you can watch them on your PC and/or transfer them to a portable device like an iPod.
The whole idea is that, according to the company, movies take too long to download over the internet. This method would also supposedly cut the costs associated with packaging and shipping DVDs. You could also either rent or buy the movies and these kiosks could be seen everywhere from movie rental places (so they can offer thousands and thousands of movies) to convenience stores.
I’m not entirely sold on the system for the following reasons.
1. You still have to go somewhere to get the movies. The time it takes to go to the nearest store could very easily take longer than it would to download an entire movie over the internet, although what Nicholas just posted might prove that there is such a market for this kind of system.
2. You have to buy proprietary equipment that serves no other purpose than to watch these movies. Why not buy AppleTV, SanDisk’s Take TV, or something similar?
3. I could see this working for people who don’t have high-speed internet access at home but are the kinds of people who don’t have high-speed internet the same people who are gonna be savvy enough to rent or buy memory-card movies from a machine? They’ll likely be the same people who still go to the store and rent movies the old fashioned way.
Would any of you guys use this system or can you think of a market where this would work? I guess I’m just wondering who PortoMedia is targeting here.