Case Study: Cinequest's Maverick Approach to Streaming

But Hussey doesn't want Cinequest's films to be forever relegated to the PC or the PDA. Once Kontiki has worked out the technology side of things, he'd like to make movies available for viewing in users' home theaters. "What’ll be really great is when you can do both, watch them on your PC or in your living room," says Hussey. He doesn't yet know if this will be accomplished via download or streaming. The majority of users who watched movies from Cinequest Online did so via the download option, which allows for a screen size that's three to four times larger than what's available via streaming.

In terms of user experience, the streaming image size Cinequest offers is probably too small for enjoying full-length movies, but works for things like trailers, especially when viewed on PDAs. Downloaded movies are much larger, both in file and image size, and can be downloaded in the background, but those download times can grow tedious. It's easy to envision downloading and streaming coexisting for this application, with streaming providing shorter, lower-resolution clips and instant viewing, and downloading being used for higher resolution, full-length films. Cinequest also included a ten-minute scene from 30 Miles in high definition at 720p or 1080p. It was able to fill an entire screen, but to get it you have to download almost a half of a gigabyte. Talk about delayed gratification.

Cinequest is free for now, but Hussey hasn't ruled out the possibility of instituting a pay-per-view policy, although he says it's too premature now. "You'll chase away your viewers," Hussey says. "When there is a critical mass of PC viewers and/or a combo of PC and home entertainment users, then we'll explore the pay-per-view opportunities."

"I’ve tried Internet movies in the past, but the quality was lousy, they were difficult to use, and they tried to make you pay," says Hussey. "With our system, now it’s fun. Watching entertainment should be enjoyable."

Which really gets to the heart of the matter: Internet-based movie delivery still lacks the right mix of high quality and customer gratification to compete with the pop-it-in-and-play of DVD (not to mention DVD’s proven revenue-generation capabilities). Because of this—and DRM concerns—Hollywood likely will continue to drag its feet in adopting new technology. "What happens, unfortunately, in our business is that it’s so traditional that a lot of standards become accepted by everybody," says Hussey. "It’s this very structured, limited system. It’s important to me to free people’s media choices."

Geoff Daily is a freelance writer, contributor to the Streaming Media Sourcebook, and writes features for EMedia magazine.