On April 2, 2006, Hollywood decided to follow the lead of Steve Jobs and, for the first time, allow for movies to be downloaded legally online. Tinsel Town's move falls right in line with the most recent movement to end online piracy of digital media by selling songs on the internet for download. The most successful example of this movement is Apple’s iTunes Online Music Store, because of which Apple currently controls over 80% of the digital music market. To date, the “store” has sold hundreds of millions of songs at 99¢ each, in addition to the dozens of TV shows Apple now offers for download. Thus, Apple has been able to crack down on piracy while making a pretty penny for itself at the same time. But can Hollywood achieve the same success?

SoCal’s fattest fat cats are trying to do just that, creating two new services called CinemaNow.com and Movielink.com. The former distributes the films of Lion’s Gate and Sony, while the latter sells the movies of Warner Brothers, Fox, Universal, and Paramount. As it stands now, you can download movies for rental or purchase, but with severe limitations. You have to pay a whopping $10 to $30 per movie, depending on its date of release, and, get this, you cannot

1. Burn it to a DVD.
2. Play it in your own video application. You must use the service’s software.
3. Download the movie with anything other than a Windows OS or Internet Explorer (and that's just dumb. Get Firefox, people!)
4. Play it on a TV, unless you have a Windows Media Center edition machine with a TV card.
5. Watch a rental outside of the 24-hour window after you first watch it.

And those are just a few of the disadvantages. A blogger from Engadget wrote it best: "At $20 to $30 a pop, no copy capability and limitations from hell, this thing is DOA! That's until the hackers find the work around, publish it on the Web and the studios shut it down all together."

To be honest, this move exhibits the intelligence of the movie industry about as well as the script of Armageddon. There are rampant problems with the new program. First of all, if anyone in the computer world seriously expects hackers to be unable to crack any sort of security lock on media files, he is out of touch with reality. Remember that when the almighty DVD came out in 1999, Hollywood claimed that no one would ever be able to break its encryption code. Several days later, two dorks from Europe did it and were quoted saying it was easy. Furthermore, with new DVDs coming out at prices between $15 and $20 on Amazon.com, how can the movie industry seriously expect people to pay more than that for a movie file that doesn't even have any extra features? When iTunes came out, Apple priced CDs at $9.99, far less than the $18 I spent on my last CD. Furthermore, you could burn the online CDs to recordable CDs and take them anywhere. Not so with these new movie-download sites. I would say that, at most, they should charge $10 for new movies, and somewhere closer to $5 for old ones. Lastly, if these companies want to make any serious revenue, they need to tap into devices people already have, not demand that they get new software. Make these movies downloadable and playable with Windows Media Player or RealPlayer—and then let customers upload them to their iPods while you're at it. Nobody wants a movie, which can only be watched on a computer screen.

In a nutshell, my advice to Hollywood is, “Nice effort, but it’s not enough to make this work, and you know it.” But who knows—perhaps the movie moguls may get it right someday in the future. That is, if Apple doesn't beat them to it.