Movies on USB thumb drives get real

I was almost joking when I suggested back in 2007 that movie studios might package motion pictures on flash media like SD cards or USB thumb drives... but still suggested that by 2012 that could become a reality as capacities improved and costs continued to drop.

Boy was I wrong. Movies on flash drives are abruptly here now, in 2009. Like, you can go buy one today.

Literally, it's just one title for the moment, mind you: No, not Home Alone. Rather it's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which Paramount is packaging onto a special Kingston USB drive. Real Tech News has many more details than the press release linked above: The thumb drives are available at OfficeMax stores for $30 (ouch), and the drives are 4GB in capacity. Yes, you can use the leftover space for personal storage or, presumably, erase the movie entirely and reuse the entire drive when you realize how horrible it is.

Real Tech notes that the movie quality is probably somewhere in the realm of DVD or even lower; there simply isn't enough space on the drive for a proper high-definition film, and dual-layer DVDs have more than 8GB of space.

One big question remaining, though, is exactly how the movie can be played by the buyer. Undoubtedly it will be protected via DRM, but will buyers be able only to play the films directly from the thumb drive or will there be a mechanism to copy them to a computer's hard drive? And what software will buyers be able to use to play back the movies? Any movie-playing software or a custom app on the drive that is tied specifically to this one film?

I guess there's only one way to find out: You will have to go buy this thing, watch it, and report back here.