KEY POINTS:
It looks like we'll have a movie download service in New Zealand this year allowing you to legally download movies and TV shows to your computer in the same way you've been able to do with music for years through services such as iTunes and Digirama.
Internet provider Orcon may well be the first out of the gate - it has been working on getting a video download service developed for the past eight months and is collaborating with NZFACT, the anti-piracy body that acts as the representative of the Motion Picture Association here.
That will help Orcon get the support of Hollywood studios, whose movies and TV shows would be hosted on the service.
There are a few other potential players. Australian movie download provider Reeltime, which sells movies to rent and keep, has already created a website for New Zealand though I wasn't able to download anything from it.
Its charges range from A$1 for a download-to-rent TV show through to A$34 for a new-release download-to-keep movie.
Reeltime has a partnership with Yahoo which could come into play here through the YahooXtra venture, though in the wake of the disastrous Bubble email outages of last year, Telecom seems to have let its consumer portal once again go into hibernation.
Telstra has Australia's largest movie download service in Bigpond Movies and it would make sense for TelstraClear to offer the same service to its New Zealand broadband customers as it seeks to revamp its online, consumer-focused offerings.
But it will be tricky making the model work here. While internet connection speeds are increasing, many home broadband subscribers are still connecting at speeds that make downloading a one or two gigabyte file a tediously slow process.
Then there's the impact on broadband caps. The advantage of a telecoms player like Telstra offering movie downloads is that they may be inclined to exclude the data used in downloading a movie from your monthly data cap.
This is what Bigpond currently does in Australia. Independent download websites aren't in such a strong position and the user will have to find room in the data cap to accommodate the download - up to 3GB per movie if we are talking a high-definition download.
So are the download websites likely to have any impact, both on our viewing habits and movie piracy? If experience across the Tasman is anything to go by, the answer is no, not for a while anyway.
Bigpond has been in the game since early 2006 and has 4000 titles in its download section. Like Sky TV's DVDUnlimited business and Fatso.co.nz, Bigpond has a DVD mail out service. This is still far more popular than movie downloads, in no part because over 26,000 titles are available for mailout to subscribers, vastly more than the download service offers.
It's still more efficient to mail a disc to someone rather than have them download the movie via their internet connection. The other factor is the rise of the Blu-ray format.
Having beaten off its rival in the format wars, the HD-DVD system backed by Toshiba and Microsoft, Sony now has the media format market largely to itself and is pushing hard to make it the format of choice for people with Blu-ray players, including the Sony PlayStation 3.
Standard-definition movie and TV downloads are inferior in picture quality to what high-definition discs can deliver and downloading high definition content uses a lot of data.
So what about the piracy problem? Consider the spin Reeltime puts on its service on its website: "Finally, a legal alternative to online piracy - no more need to trawl bit torrent, Limewire or other similar torrent sites for illegal downloads, that often present your system with viruses, are of dubious quality, impact your download limits and in most cases are illegal pirated copies."
Australia and New Zealand are no different in that illegal file-sharing of music and movies across peer-to-peer networks is rife.
But people I speak to who use services like Bittorrent generally do so to get hold of TV shows and movies that have yet to debut here.
Frankly, they're not all that fussed about getting top-notch image quality though HD broadcasts recorded in the US are also appearing on the web.
I'd like to see the acclaimed new American TV series John Adams, about the second American president. It is not available on Reeltime or Bigpond and probably won't screen here for months, but all six parts of it are on the internet available for free download.
The fledgling movie download players are finding the content is out in the wild long before they even have the chance to offer it on their websites.
So movie downloads won't have the impact music downloads have.
Still, I think there's room for a good-quality, well-priced download service that has reasonable content usage policies. Backed up with local content, high-definition options people will pay up for content, even if the illicit freebie route is always going to be easier.
