Trickle of Movie Downloads Continues to Drip

Both Apple iTunes and the Xbox Live Marketplace—the 800-pound gorillas in the TV set-top box arena—still seem to be struggling with their movie selections. Witness last night's news that the iTunes movie store has begun selling flicks from a couple of additional studios: MGM and United Artists. Macrumors.com spotted such new arrivals as the original "Mad Max," "Bulletproof Monk," "Rocky," "Dances with Wolves," and "Robocop," as well as the United Artists thriller "Ronin." Not bad, but for movie fanatics like myself, the slow trickle is agony.

OK, it's not news to say that the big movie studios are taking only the tiniest of baby steps into movie downloads, but something about this latest announcement really stuck in my craw. MGM and United Artists are responsible for some of the biggest movies of all time: "Singin' in the Rain," "West Side Story," "2001: A Space Odyssey" for MGM, while UA was (until recently, at least) home to the James Bond franchise. None of those movies are on iTunes yet. (I'd love to think the engineers at Apple are still loading those films onto the store, but I'm not holding my breath.) Paramount jumped onto the iTunes bandwagon months ago, but it's latest releases are nowhere to be found, and even some of the bigger catalog titles—"The Godfather," anyone?—are still missing. Same story over at the Xbox Live Marketplace, where the movie selection is even more grim. Yes, I'm pleased that "The Departed" is now available in HD, and most of the "Star Trek" movies are now on tap (in SD, sigh), but again, Paramount's "Godfather" is a no show—as is, I'd guess, about 99 percent of its catalog. Well, save "The Core." Thank goodness for that. And the vast majority of new releases? Forget about it. (PC-based services like CinemaNow and Movielink fare much better in terms of film selection, but I'd rather watch my flicks on a TV set-top box.)

All my ranting aside, the big-picture outlook for movie downloads is looking up. The major music labels were terrified of legit song downloads, but after just a few years, they got there, and now online music stores beat their brick-and-mortar competitors hands-down. The TV content on iTunes and Xbox Live is growing at a steady pace. The same thing will happen with movies downloads, and the arrival of new movie studios into the mix (no matter how tentative) can only be viewed as good news in the long run.

But for now, the slow trickle is killing me, and if you're a studio like Paramount or Warner Bros. that's already trying out movie downloads, and your films are armed with state-of-the-art DRM, and revenue from those downloads is almost all profit, why not wade in a little further? Say, knee deep?

Related:
MGM and United Artists Join iTunes Store [Macrumors]