Paramount, Seagate team up to pre-load movies on external drives

I don't see the attraction of this. Why would I pay the purchase price of any of these movies, when I can rent/NetFlix/etc any of them for a lot less?

$10-$15 for a movie file on my hard drive - no nice dvd cover, or anything "real" that buying a movie for that price at the store includes?

I'd like to see the proof that piracy is impacting DVD sales. Making movies I don't feel the need to watch again (or at all) is impacting DVD sales. Things like NetFlix would be impacting DVD sales more. People don't want to clutter up space with a bunch of DVDs and CDs anymore.

Hollywood is not struggling or losing money. They regularly rip off the artists they pretend to defend. This is why the Tolkein estate (a charitable trust) is suing New Line cinema for allegedly cheating it out of at least $150 million from the trilogy.

Hollywood needs no help. Avatar made a lot of money, as one example, and it's something people will buy on DVD. Perhaps Hollywood should focus on quality over quantity before complaining about DVD sales.

While I agree services like NetFlix are cutting in on sales at a reasonable price I will have to give these goobers some credit for trying. If you purchased a 500 gig hard drive an laced it with 20 movies for "only" $9.99 each it is reasonable. $40 for a drive, $9.99 for movie profit and the additional for sales and shipping is a good number but I must say this is a hit and miss proposal. For someone like me who lives in a rural area were high speed internet service is not offered at any reasonable rate this not too bad. If service providers would get off the butts and get broadband access nationwide this would not be considered reasonable at all. I know you can get NetFlix by mail but there are some movies I prefer to have on hand for viewing on a whim.
On another note, while Avatar seems technically excellent, I don't really care for the blue Indians and cowboys story. :)

heh, totally agree regarding Avatar. But they did make a lot of money on it, and will continue to make it in DVD sales.

I think Hollywood is too focussed on this "buy our movie" angle, and complaining because nobody wants to collect every Sandra Bullock movie. Ok, maybe some weirdos do.. :)

Complaining about falling DVD sales in a world where everything is slowly going digital seems a bit mad to me. Surely they, like the music industry, make heaps of money simply from royalties flowing from rentals, legal downloads and TV.

That's on top of the money they make on ticket sales. I mean how much profit do these empire-mad twits expect? At some point they have to recognise that the customer is starting to get cynical and not spending as much on their product.