It seems fairly certain that Hancock will do decent business when it hits theaters this week, if only because Will Smith rarely stars in a dud these days -- especially when it's his face selling the movie before all else. Whether or not the film has staying power after opening weekend, however, remains to be seen, but Sony Pictures clearly has a lot of faith in its potential: Last week, the studio revealed its intentions of releasing the film online sometime after its theatrical run and before its DVD release, but only to users with Sony Bravia TV sets. It's a bold maneuver, one that assumes its core base of consumers actually have an interest in Hancock -- but the movie will make a profit either way, so it's a reasonable choice for this intriguing experiment.
Left in the dust by Apple's iPod, Sony continues to struggle in its search for a piece of the digital revolution. Company head Howard Stringer recently told the New York Times that the strategy for releasing Hancock "vanishes the memory of the failures of the Sony Walkman." Well, maybe. While on-demand technology has changed the way audiences consume their media, they don't like paying more money than necessary. Asking your audiences to buy a special device in order to access what, at this point, amounts to one movie -- well, that's asking a lot. But it's still a step in the right direction.
What do you think?
1. I think it is an experiment with a forgone conclusion; failure.
The movie's presentation, both in look and sound, is inevitably going to be severally downgraded, to the point of being unappealing for someone to pay for (which is what this whole venture is out to prove, right? That they can somehow make money off of this). Bravia's may have an internet jack (though who connects it is beyond me), but they lack any built in storage capacity, be it harddrive or solid state.
So the film cannot be stored anywhere on the television, which means that it must be streamed from somewhere. Any high definition video, which one should assume this whole experiment is going to be partaking in, considering their HDTV line is the whole hook, for a feature length, action heavy film is going to push several gigs minimum (for real HD). Since there is no storage, there will be no reliable buffer, which means that the whole movie is going to be streaming, so if a viewer's net connection takes a dip (say if some kids load up MySpace) or just isn't slow to begin with, the stream will look like crap.
What Sony is going to have to do to make this work is stream out a visually and audibly handicapped signal, which is going to be noticeably inadequate on their very own TV sets designed and sold for superiority.
I don't know who they're hoping this is for, but between this and Sony's current inability to get any other studios to sign onto their proposed PS3 VOD service, it is clear the giant is getting restless.
Posted at 4:27PM on Jun 30th 2008 by Peter Hall