While this header sounds like one of those teenage girls’ magazine quizes, it is something I have to wonder. After this story on BBC it appears that it has taken the movie industry about a year after the emergence of technology that makes downloading their media viable (namely Bit-torrent (the pre-existing P2P applications realistically were a little average at downloading movie sized files with anything resembling decent video quality)), to them coming out and saying that they were going to start offering means of legally buying and downloading high quality movie content. This is by my reckoning about 4 times faster than the music industry (and in my opinion apart from iTunes they generally still haven’t figured it out).
They also seem to have realised, unlike (or perhaps because of) the music industry, that they should do the retailing themselves, otherwise they will loose revenue and market dominance to some other company (most likely Apple, let’s be honest) who is willing to think outside the box and implement the consumers’ demands in a reasonable framework. I’m all for it, given that if they can sort out a sensible and technically feasible system to buy and download video content then it won’t be long before TV and other video media start to arrive through the same systems. Then we’ll really have a game on our hands.