Leading movie rental chain, Blockbuster, confirmed yesterday that it was in talks with mobile phone makers about partnerships aimed to make it easy for consumers to watch movies on the go. Chief Executive James Keyes said, "The challenge is how do I make this convenient for everybody...". Keyes told the Reuters Media Summit he started watching movies on his BlackBerry after some help from a technical expert at Blockbuster and from Jim Balsillie, the co-chief executive of Blackberry maker Research in Motion Ltd.
"We're talking with virtually all of the major manufacturers about the opportunity to provide greater mobility and convenience," Keyes said. He indicated that they were also in talks with software vendors.

If they could do this for a reasonable price, I think it would be a good thing. My fear, however, is that by the time they give the handset maker, the carrier, and some software vendor a cut of the pie, and of course themselves and the maker of the movie, and all the royalties... well, you get the picture. I'm not willing to pay $9.95 to download a movie on my PDAPhone to watch a time or two. Especially, when there are many tools available to convert a DVD to mobile format and then all that is needed is to move it from your PC to your memory card. I think that if they could do it for a couple of bucks and make it relatively painless to download a view that was good for a week or so, then it would be a hot item.

I have a TiVo and they have been working with Amazon to let you download movies on the fly, but the pricing model is a bit off for my liking. I am not going to pay $19.95 to download a soft DVD when I can buy it in a store for the same price and have the media, box, etc. The distribution costs of a soft copy has to be a lot lower than a hard copy, so they need to make it attractive... which would lead to a lot more sales. Then when you consider that a download to a mobile device would most likely only be viewed by one person, rather than a whole family or something, the pricing model needs to be further adjusted. In addition, you are getting a very scaled down version of the movie from a quality and size point of view.

Is this something you would use if the price was right, and it was convenient? What are some factors that would effect your use of it?