MovieBeam

» see moviebeam.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I missed MovieBeam completely, and so did every country that is not the United States. This was not a matter of taste or timing. The service was welded to American broadcast infrastructure at the physical layer, and the physical layer does not travel.

It launched in the last week of September 2003 in three trial cities, Salt Lake City and Jacksonville among them, run by Buena Vista Datacasting, which was a Walt Disney subsidiary built for exactly this. You bought a set-top box, paid $6.99 a month for the privilege of owning it, and paid $3.99 more whenever you actually watched a new release. The box arrived with a hundred current films already inside it and refreshed about a tenth of them every week.

The delivery is the part worth writing down. There was no internet connection involved. Movies were encoded into the vertical blanking interval of local PBS stations' analog signals, the same unused space that had carried closed captioning for decades, using technology licensed from a company called Dotcast and pushed out to stations by National Datacast. Your antenna picked up a public television channel and a hard drive in your living room silently filled with Hollywood. The box only dialed out over a phone line, and only to say which film you had rented so it could be billed.

Everything wrong with it follows from that. Reception had to be clean, so an antenna nudged a couple of centimeters or a week of bad weather meant films arrived broken or not at all, and what did arrive was compressed hard enough to lose to a DVD you could rent for the same money. Worse, whether the service was any use in a given month depended on whether Disney's programmers had guessed right about a hundred films you might want. Those hundred were all you had.

~ the record ~

~ the second attempt ~

Disney spun the company out in January 2006 and brought in real money to do it properly. Intel, Cisco, Disney itself and a row of venture firms put in $48.5 million, and MovieBeam relaunched nationally in February 2006 with a better box and higher-end connectors than most people's televisions could accept. It had HDMI when HDMI was new. It had Ethernet and USB ports on the back that the final firmware never switched on, which reads today like a fair summary of the whole project.

There was also a deadline nobody could negotiate with. The service rode full-power analog NTSC broadcasts, and analog television in the United States was already scheduled to end in 2009. No public plan existed for moving the system onto digital signals. Whatever else was going to happen, the pipe was going to close.

~ the postmortem ~

Movie Gallery bought MovieBeam on 7 March 2007, trying to get out of the video rental store business by buying its way into a service that delivered films without stores. The company said the purchase plus a year of running it would cost around ten million dollars. Movie Gallery filed for Chapter 11 in October of the same year.

On 5 December 2007 MovieBeam started telephoning its customers to tell them the service would stop on 15 December. It stopped on 15 December. The brand was sold on into India the following year and had a second life there that had nothing to do with the original idea.

~ what got buried with it ~

The instinct behind MovieBeam was correct and the execution was the last gasp of an older world. Disney understood in 2003 that people would want films on demand and would not want to drive anywhere for them. What it could not accept was waiting for the connection that would actually deliver them, so it went looking for spare capacity in the infrastructure that already existed and found it in the gap between the scan lines.

Netflix mailed its first streaming release in January 2007, eleven months before MovieBeam's phone calls went out. The gap between those two things is not a gap in vision. It is the difference between building on the network that was coming and building on the one that was already there.

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