Fidelity vs. Convenience
A recent article in USA Today (accessible here) introduced me to an interesting concept that, I think, captures the questions regarding the movie downloading model: “fidelity.”
In techspeak, “fidelity” refers to the total experience of something, including the qualitative differences between that experience and its alternatives. The key to understanding and predicting consumer behavior is figuring out the relationship between convenience and fidelity. When the ability to enjoy a form of media reaches a certain level of convenience, consumers are generally willing to sacrifice fidelity. The perfect example of this is the iPod, which doesn’t provide the sound quality of a regular CD but provides such a high level of convenience (in the form of ultimately lower cost, a higher level of portability, etc.) that consumers were all over it. Applying this concept to movie downloading suggests that the key is to make the model so convenient that consumers will ultimately accept the drop off in fidelity from watching honest-to-goodness DVDs on their home entertainment systems. But the other way to look at the issue is that movie downloading services need to raise the fidelity of their offerings, so that they have more to offer than just convenience.
An example of the importance of fidelity is in Google’s new (and free) book downloading service (brought to my attention by this article). Most book publishers aren’t really worried about this service because it isn’t convenient enough to outweigh the fidelity of buying a book (downloading takes forever, reading on a screen is awful, printing is more expensive than you would think and it also takes forever, etc.). Ultimately, I think this model should serve as a good example for the movie downloading biz: don’t even bother with launching it until the fidelity of the experience catches up to the convenience of downloading a film, i.e. until DVD burning is an unlimited reality, etc.