There are many problems with this service. The user interface is arranged in a very odd manner, with movies under genre headings, such as romance and action. That is the only method to find movies as well. There is no search button. It can be inferred that most of the five studios that are running MovieLink do not know what they are doing. Also, the movie files are very tedious to download. Movies are almost 1 GB (gigabyte) big, and even with a DSL line or cable line, it still takes an extremely long time to download.
Another problem is that the movies expire very quickly. A customer may only have a movie for a day before it expires. This is very frustrating since it takes around 5 hours to download a movie via DSL. In addition, MovieLink has an awful help service that only worsens the already awful appeal of its confusing user interface. All in all, MovieLink is a very unappealing service that is sure to fail quickly.
At first, MovieLink will seem interesting to many consumers. New technology always grasps the consumers at first and the demand curve and supply curve of MovieLink will increase, moving to the left and to the right, respectively.
In the long run, however, consumers will become discouraged due to the confusing nature of the program. They will turn to more reliable substitute sources, such as In Demand movies on TV, movie rental stores such as Blockbuster, or even the P2P networks.
In a world of piracy, MovieLink, for now, is the best form of combat that movie studios can afford. With easier accessibility and speed, it may stand a slim chance of surviving. Eventually, however, movie studios will have no choice but to accept that piracy will always exist and there is nothing they can do to change that.
Section 2: Business Economics
Word Count: 402
