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So what exactly is a "Qflix drive?" As simple and straightforward as downloading a movie to your PC, burning it to DVD, and watching it on your TV ought to be in the abstract, there was no way the major Hollywood studios were going to support any technology that enabled it without some means of protecting the billions of dollars in intellectual property they have at stake in their movies. That's where Qflix media and drives come in. Qflix DVD media are single-layer DVD-Recordable discs with CSS copy protection built in at the manufacturing level; Qflix drives are writable models equipped to burn content to these discs. Movies downloaded via the Qflix platform and a Qflix partner site like CinemaNow can be burned only to Qflix media using Qflix drives and Sonic’s Qflix-ready recording application, Roxio Venue. The resulting discs will leave the burner with the same copy protection as a replicated Hollywood movie disc, and according to Sonic and Dell, will play in standard DVD players. The Qflix drive released today is an external USB model, manufactured by Philips-LiteOn, that Dell is selling as an aftermarket item through its online store, and as a $120 add-on option on most Inspiron, Studio, and XPS laptops. Dell says the drive will also soon be available as an option on “select consumer desktops.” The Qflix bundle includes the external drive (which also functions as an all-purpose DVD reader/writer/rewriter in addition to its Qflix support), two blank Qflix recordable discs, Roxio Venue and CinemaNow software, and a USB cable. The appeal of Qflix, according to Sonic EVP of strategy Mark Ely, is to add portability to the increasingly popular practice of downloading movies to the PC. “DVD is one of the most flexible formats we have,” Ely says. “Qflix allows us to take a [downloaded] movie that’s locked to the PC and make it portable.” Pricing for Qflix download-and-burn titles, according to Ely, should run around $9 per movie, a price point “consistent with electronic sell-through.” While he says the catalog of currently available Qflix-ready movies numbers only in the 100s, he expects that number to scale into the 1000s by the holiday season, with additional titles coming not just from new releases but also from “older and special interest content,” according to Ely, which will be a “cost benefit for the movie studios,” drawing on the long-tail potential of the download-to-burn model. Ely adds that “major retailers will have Qflix frives by Christmas.” One key difference between the movies available via CinemaNow for Qflix burn-to-DVD and their replicated DVD counterparts is additional (non-movie) content. When consumers download a movie and burn it to a Qflix disc, for the most past they’ll get a movie with chapter points and a basic menu, with none of the extras or special features they’d get on a rented or purchased DVD. One reason for this is the current limitation of Qflix to single-layer media, which means significantly less capacity than the DVD-9s used for most commercially sold DVDs. Ely says we can expect to see DL Qflix media some time “down the line,” but in the meantime one alternative for downloading and burning content that won’t fit on a single DVD will be to use two single-layer Qflix discs. Launch pricing for Qflix media, he says, will be around $1 per disc. Also coming within the next few months, according to Ely, will be announcements from other hardware manufacturers concerning partnerships similar to Dell’s offering; Sonic’s hope, Ely says, is to see Qflix become “a standard feature of all major PC makers.” Stephen Nathans-Kelly (stephen.nathans at infotoday.com) is editor-in-chief of EMedialive and EventDV.
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