States Look to Tax Electronic Downloads

[jpimgt]

States Look to Tax Electronic Downloads

Here are some excerpts:

Just a few months ago Indiana, South Dakota, and Utah all signed digital download taxes into law. Nebraska enacted such a measure in April. June put a digital tax law in Tennessee's books. In all, nine states adopted taxes on digital downloads in 2008 alone.


The numbers are growing -- 17 states, plus the District of Columbia, tax digital downloads now, or just over a third of the nation's states. Among these are Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and Washington. Some states like Washington are considering upping taxes as well.

The music industry now gets 30 percent of its revenues from the 500 legitimate download services in operation.

10 years of music downloads, small file sizes, portability, ability to buy single tracks for cheap, and still only 30% revenue!?!?!?! Downloads are a ways off my friends, and definitely not a threat to blu-ray.

Oh and upcoming taxes are definitely not going to help downloads. I'll still continue to order from amazon/half.com/other online retalier.

[eric89074]

Pfft... downloads. The future is little flash memory that you take to kiosks and download the movie to :P.

[Beta-guy]

can't wait for kiosk based downloads, hand them you flash drive (32 GB or better) and wait 2 - 7 days depending on the demand on the kiosk and the internet connection at the kiosk location. I'm just not sure why people are so excited over downloads...

[RoadLizard]

Originally Posted by Beta-guy

can't wait for kiosk based downloads, hand them you flash drive (32 GB or better) and wait 2 - 7 days depending on the demand on the kiosk and the internet connection at the kiosk location. I'm just not sure why people are so excited over downloads...

Im not sure either. Actually, Im quite tired of downloading everything.... thats all anyone cares about anymore. Next thing ya know you'll be downloading your focking dinner too.

[bfellow]

Originally Posted by jpimgt

States Look to Tax Electronic Downloads

Here are some excerpts:



10 years of music downloads, small file sizes, portability, ability to buy single tracks for cheap, and still only 30% revenue!?!?!?! Downloads are a ways off my friends, and definitely not a threat to blu-ray.

Oh and upcoming taxes are definitely not going to help downloads. I'll still continue to order from amazon/half.com/other online retalier.

Lets see... 10 years ago most people were on dial-up and the P2P groups using Napster, Kazaa, and Gnutella was starting to dominate college campuses everywhere. 30% revenue is not bad considering most people don't download entire albums and taxes are slowly going on Internet purchases such as NY charging a tax on any purchases online.

[hatt]

Originally Posted by bfellow

Lets see... 10 years ago most people were on dial-up and the P2P groups using Napster, Kazaa, and Gnutella was starting to dominate college campuses everywhere. 30% revenue is not bad considering most people don't download entire albums and taxes are slowly going on Internet purchases such as NY charging a tax on any purchases online.

Of course 30% of a big pot is not bad. But it sure isn't anything that can be used to show why movie downloads are going to flourish. If a product with all the advantages of mp3 with the only real disadvantage of lower quality, which many/most people can't notice, can only manage 30% of the market after being viable for so long, movie downloads have a long way to go before doing great things.

[dolphinius_rex]

Originally Posted by Beta-guy

can't wait for kiosk based downloads, hand them you flash drive (32 GB or better) and wait 2 - 7 days depending on the demand on the kiosk and the internet connection at the kiosk location. I'm just not sure why people are so excited over downloads...

Why do you think kiosks would have no internal storage? The whole process would be automated. The Kiosk would download movies as a background task (for however long it took) and then keep them "on file" for the course of their run, and then delete them to make space for upcoming movies later on. Transfer times would take only as long as the make and model of your flash media dictates (if you buy the cheapest stuff it'll be slow). Throwing 5TB (or even more) of storage into a kiosk for holding content would *NOT* be difficult or expensive. Plenty of oppurtunity for heavy DRM too.

As much as I hate it (and I really REALLY hate it), I think that Kiosks and flash media are the future. I certainly would love to be wrong on this one though.

[Fettastic]

Personally, a kiosk system would depend on a lot of factors. I personally wouldn't use it anyway because it's just stupid.

Say Joe Schmoe says "I'm a-gonna try that new-fangled kiosk thing-a-ma-jigger". He grabs his flash drive, heads down to the store, sticks it in and selects a movie.

He takes it home all happy that he's tech-savvy now. He plugs it into his playstation, 360, computer, HDTV or whatever. The screen goes black and says "Data not readable".

This could be caused by a plethora of things, none of which he's going to be able to figure out.

Still think this is ever going to catch on?

[Gorn]

Kiosks? Wow. Have to agree with Fett... that’s a stinker.

I can see it now... midtown Manhattan… just outside the TKTS booth…

“Hey, what are you in line for?”

“Wicked. But if it’s sold out we’re gunning for Lion King. My kids have been waiting for months! What are you in line for?”

“Transformers 3: Return of the Beast Wars. That Michael Bay is awesome, right?!?”

[bfellow]

They basically already have Kiosks in Wal-Mart for reading people's flash/memory sticks for digital cameras. Then people can manipulate each picture on the stick. One thing the digital camera market has is way too many different type of sticks to choose from and they need to stick to 1 unified standard which Sony failed to do with Memory Stick Pro series.


Now we already have numerous people having black screens and data not readable for basically everything from CDs, DVDs, and Blu-Ray so I don't see how thats an unique issue.

[dolphinius_rex]

I have to say I'm really very surprised with how limited people seem to be thinking with regard to flash media and kiosks. The problems being suggested are insignificant issues at best... honestly it feels like people are grasping at straws here.

Not that I'm blaming anyone if that's the case.... the whole idea freaks the crap out of me, it basically means the end of my current livelyhood. Unfortunately, it also means I need to take the issue quite seriously

[Philnerd]

Originally Posted by dolphinius_rex

I have to say I'm really very surprised with how limited people seem to be thinking with regard to flash media and kiosks. The problems being suggested are insignificant issues at best... honestly it feels like people are grasping at straws here.

Well, since kiosks are somehow perceived as being "bad" for Blu-Ray, there's going to be some folks that just poo poo it from front to back with whatever they can come up with. Welcome to the Post Format War War

I'm sure these kiosks would be pretty simple to operate without the troublesome scenarios of doom. Having a device at home that plays back these movies is the problem. This thing - if it happens at all - is going to take years to achieve any appreciable market penetration. Honestly, I fully expect to see these flash readers being a value add on BD players Panasonic is already including SD card readers that play back AVCHD video from HD camcorders, so we're seeing some baby steps in that direction. And all the processing power to play back SD Card based video is already natively in a BD player, so it would be cheap to add the feature (as opposed to a TV which would need dedicated AV components integrated).

So don't worry about your job too much dude, this stuff will co-exist with Blu-Ray at best

[crazzeto]

Originally Posted by dolphinius_rex

I have to say I'm really very surprised with how limited people seem to be thinking with regard to flash media and kiosks. The problems being suggested are insignificant issues at best... honestly it feels like people are grasping at straws here.

Not that I'm blaming anyone if that's the case.... the whole idea freaks the crap out of me, it basically means the end of my current livelyhood. Unfortunately, it also means I need to take the issue quite seriously

As someone who's very interested in the idea of digital downloads and is watching them develop, I have to say kiosks are a very bad idea... It combines all the weaknesses of digital downloads and phyiscal media (limited quality encodes with no SF's, and you still have to go to the damn store). On top of all that you need to supply your own media to transport the video file... I'd say kiosks are a passing fad idea at best.

[jpimgt]

Even lowly and cheap 1 GB of flash memory still costs more to make than a piece of plastic BD disc, so no, complex semiconductors will not replace discs anytime soon.