Yesterday saw the launch of iArthouse, a download-to-burn service offering a large selection of foreign films. According to Scott Kirsner, the site is an outgrowth of an existing service that I’ve never heard of called EZ Takes––Scott calls it “a rebranding of EZTakes.com without some of the schlockier stuff — no ‘Extreme Sports’ category, for instance, and no Troma movies like Toxic Avenger.” Currently promoted on the front page of iArthouse: Roberto Benigni’s much-maligned The Tiger and the Snow. Scott goes on to note that EZTakes’ traffic currently falls far short of iArthouse’s logical competitor, Jaman.com, although metrics for actual downloads on these kinds of sites are hard to come by.
Meanwhile, in news that’s so related as to seem ironic: today comes the news that both Starz!-owned Vongo and Morgan Freeman-owned ClickStar are shutting down.
Vongo had big studio titles, but its profile never matched that of iTunes; Starz! will license its library for download through third parties, with Verizon being the first. Meanwhile, ClickStar’s stated mission of bringing indie-arm-ish releases (Brad Silberling’s 10 Items of Less, the John Travolta/Salma Hayek vehicle Lonely Hearts) to the download realm shortly after their traditional exhibition premiere failed, in large part because theater owners are still hesitant to book anything that’s going to be available in homes within a matter of weeks.
So with EZTakes looking to “indiefy” at the same time that download sites with higher star power are shutting down, is this evidence that highbrow content is in higher demand than “schlockier stuff” when it comes to downloads? Maybe. It does seem clear that while Jaman seems to be doing surprisingly well trafficking in festival films and classics (right now Teeth and the original The Italian Job are being promoted on the front page of site, which is ranked just inside Alexa’s Top 5,000 sites on the web), and iTunes––which of course benefits from being the top name brand in s selling 50,000 downloads a day (mostly of high-profile new releases like 21 and Harold and Kumar), the sites trying to hit the middle of the market are not having much luck.
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SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth