A new mobile movie rental service is being tested as part of a pilot program that seems unlikely to be popular with anyone who owns a smartphone. 20th Century Fox, Telstra, and Ericsson have teamed up to preload handsets with "premium movie content" for users to then pay to rent or buy.
The trial was announced at Mobile World Congress 2017. The trio of companies involved want to find out if consumers are willing to allow 1080p movies to be downloaded in the background to their mobile devices before offering them for rent or purchase. The idea being that because the movies are instantly available and apparently won't count as part of your data plan allowance as they download (net neutrality?), they will be popular. I suspect they won't for a couple of obvious reasons.
Smartphones have very limited data storage and increasingly ship without a means of expanding that storage. If you want a phone with more storage it costs considerably more, so most of us opt for less and save some cash. With that in mind, having hundreds of megabytes or even gigabytes of movie data downloaded isn't desirable and may even be impossible in a lot of cases.
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There's also the issue of performance. In the press release, Ericsson claims the service won't impact device performance, but that's impossible. Even downloading in the background will eat into download speeds of other apps in use and it will certainly consume battery life. Combine that with the fact users have no idea what movies are being downloaded and you've got a service that's sure to annoy just about everyone.
According to The Verge, the pilot involves shipping out a Galaxy S7 preloaded with movies and the movie-downloading app already installed for testing over the course of a month. The test group will be made up of existing Telstra customers as well as Fox and Ericsson employees. Ericsson is providing the delivery network and TV platform, Telstra is providing the optimized media downloading tech, and Fox delivers the content.
Hopefully the feedback is overwhelmingly negative to remind everyone involved that this isn't how to offer entertainment to consumers.