Obstacles to the mainstream success of streaming movie rentals

Streaming movies over the internet is a wonderful thing and it will be the way everyone watches movies at home, just not any time soon. There are obstacles in the way for online movie rentals that I think will be very effective at holding it back.

Broadband ISPs all around the world are beginning to implement monthly download caps. This could be very detrimental to online rentals because a movie, especially an HD movie, is a rather large file. Even with a fairly big download limit an average family could easily bump up against their cap by watching a few movies a month. The kids are watching videos on YouTube, listening to streaming radio and maybe playing games online while mom and dad read the news everyday, do some online shopping and perhaps connect to the office and work remotely now and then. Add to that a couple family movie nights and a few more streamed movies during sleep-overs for the kidsand a cap could be met in a hurry. Once that happens and the internet bill starts to go up, watching movies online will be one of the first activities to get cut out.

The broadband infrastructure in the U.S. is not that impressive compared to other countries and people don't like to put up with buffering. You've been there, a friend sends you a link to a 15 second video of someone getting hit where no one wants to get hit and it plays the first two seconds and then pauses. You wait for it to buffer, and you wait... and you wait.... and pretty soon you'd like to move on with your life and you close the window. Now consider if this happens when you sit down to watch The Dark Knight; most people aren't going to put up with that. Don't get me wrong, I watch content from Netflix on my Xbox 360 all the time, but sometimes my film is interrupted and I get that wonderful message, "Your internet connection has slowed." It's not enough to make me stop using the service, but I wonder how many people out there won't be as patient when there is a simple alternative that they've been doing for years called playing a DVD.

Then there are those huge movie buffs that demand the best picture quality and sound available. You know who they are. They're the friend that has a 60 inch plasma TV, 7.1 surround sound, they bought an HD-DVD player the day it came out, then bought a Blu-Ray player the day HD-DVD was pronounced dead (and you love it when they host movie night). These home-theatre-enthusiast friends of ours simply won't stand for the compression artifiacts the rest of us mortals can't see, until they're pointed out to us, during their movie experience. While the quality of HD content from Netflix via the Xbox or Roku player, from the Apple TV or from the Vudu player is quite good, it doesn't match a movie on Blu-Ray.

While there are plenty of ways to get movie rentals and other content onto your television easily and conveniently, I don't see any of them breaking into a mainstream stature until ISPs give up on download limits, we have faster broadband, and well, maybe those home-theatre friends of ours will keep physical media alive.