MovieBeam is a new $200 set-top box that comes pre-loaded with 100 movies on its internal hard drive, and offers yet another new way of watching movies at home. It's a blend of cable's video-on-demand and pay-per-view services: you pay $4 (or $2 for an older film) to watch the movie of your choice, with access to the movie for 24 hours. The MovieBeam's innovation isn't that it circumvents the DVD-in-the-mail routine of Netflix or cable's monthly bill--it's innovation is that it downloads new movies every week in the background, without a computer or an internet connection. By delivering data over PBS's airwaves, the MovieBeam can function as a standalone movie service, as long as you're located in a major metropolitan area.
The New York Times's David Pogue today published an article detailing the service; in it, he compares the box to other home-viewing options, such as Netflix and pay-per-view, and finds that MovieBeam is very competitive (Walter Mossberg felt the same way, albeit a bit more lukewarm-ly). Unfortunately, in my mind the MovieBeam's greatest innovation--its lack of required broadband--is negated by the fact that you have to set up a small dish in your window in order to receive data from PBS, and hook the box up to your phone line to enable billing. So much for the device's enticing simplicity. Also, the elephant in the room is a rather large one (as opposed to those miniscule elephants): will the service ever be able to achieve anything more than niche status? The answer, I'd bet, lies in the company's ability down the line to align their technology with a major content-delivery partner, such as TiVo or Blockbuster (they already have backing from Disney, Cisco, and Intel). Left to their own devices--and with a much smaller selection of titles than Netflix, and HD picture quality like this--the service will have a rough go of it, because most people already have cable (which they won't give up anytime soon), and Netflix, Apple, and others are going to get into the downloading game as well. It's a crowded market--but I'd still rather be a MovieBeam executive than a theater owner.
