Movie Rentals Go Digital - Conclusion

Online video rental is an emerging market. I think for a while the mail-based services will flourish, but in the long run, the online and download market will beat them out. The mail services seem to be the "half way" step up. Brick-and-mortar stores are losing ground and will really be hurting in a few years. Right now there are lots of different services out there that offer similar features and goals.

It’s too hard to pick what or who is going to be the “iPod” of video downloads. No one really has a big advantage over anyone else at this point. It's still very much anyone's game; even Netflix, as one of the early players in video rental through the mail and now through downloads, does not seem to have much of a lead over the others.

There are some key points I feel need to be met before anyone can start to claim chunks of the market. First, a device for the TV needs to be cheap. No one is going to want to drop $800 on a device, or even $300 for a device that just does movie rentals. In the past, the range has been $100-$200 before consumers started to buy video players.

I feel that the winning product should be an extension of the PC, such as the Apple TV or Microsoft’s Media Center Extender. People already have their music, pictures, and home videos on their home PCs. Being able to stream those as well will only add to the hype of the product, not to mention the easy controls and management of the PC.