Movielink

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

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i heard of movielink was years after it was already dead, in a piece about the early failed studio attempts at digital distribution. the service launched on november 12, 2002 as a joint venture between five major hollywood studios who had decided collectively that someone should make a legal alternative to the bittorrent and kazaa traffic eating their dvd revenue. paramount and sony and mgm and universal and warner bros all signed onto the same product. you went to movielink.com, picked a movie, paid $1.99 to $4.99, and got a windows media file you could watch for 24 hours.

the catalog was real, with major titles and recent releases on offer. the studios were the operators. there was no licensing tug-of-war because the licensors and the operators were the same people. in april 2006 brokeback mountain became the first hollywood film to release on dvd and on movielink the same day, which was supposed to be the moment the service crossed into mainstream relevance.

movielink never reached turkey. the geo-block kept it inside the US, and the windows media drm only ran on windows machines with windows media player nine or later. the price was set in dollars against a US-only credit card system. for a turkish viewer in 2006 with a dsl line and a kazaa-then-utorrent habit, movielink was a thing that existed in tech press headlines but had no actual product surface to use. i never opened it.

~ the dossier ~

~ the cartel ~

the joint-venture structure is the part that made movielink interesting and also doomed it. five studios who normally compete for the same multiplex screens were now co-owners of a single download website. each studio got equal seats on the board. each studio also kept its own incentive to prefer its own catalog. the result was a product that moved at the speed of the slowest committee. ui changes had to be approved across five executive teams, and catalog windowing was negotiated case by case.

the us department of justice antitrust division reviewed movielink in 2004 and decided the joint venture did not pose a monopoly problem, mostly because it was so small relative to the dvd business it was supposed to displace. that ruling was in some sense the wrong question to be asking. movielink was not going to corner the market. movielink was going to be too slow to matter.

~ the unraveling ~

the technical constraints made the product worse than the piracy it was competing with. windows media player nine was a real install, and the drm reauthorized files against a server that occasionally went down. movies took an hour or more to download on a typical 2005 dsl line, and you had 24 hours from first play to finish watching, which was fine for a feature film but a problem for anyone who fell asleep halfway through. mac users could not run it at all.

meanwhile bittorrent was getting faster and kazaa was already free, plus netflix was about to flip from dvd-by-mail to streaming in 2007. movielink was bracketed by an illegal product that worked better and a legal product that was about to work much better. the price point of $1.99 to $4.99 per rental made sense in a 2002 understanding of digital distribution and made no sense at all by 2007 once unlimited subscription streaming entered the conversation.

~ what really happened ~

blockbuster acquired movielink on august 8, 2007 for $6.6 million in cash. that purchase price tells you what the studios thought of the product they had built. blockbuster wanted the catalog deals more than the platform, and the platform had no chance of fitting into blockbuster's existing in-store rental business. the technology got a brief beta tryout on blockbuster.com in early 2009 and was then quietly killed. the actual movielink website was switched off on december 16, 2008.

blockbuster itself filed for bankruptcy in september 2010, less than two years after the movielink shutdown. by 2026 the entire chain of failures looks like one event: studio cartel builds digital distribution badly, then sells it cheap to a dying retail chain that folds shortly after. netflix and amazon took over the rental layer the studios were trying to defend, and the studios eventually had to rebuild everything from scratch as their own streaming services twelve years later.

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