moneysupermarket.com: Film downloading

Commenting on film downloading, Jason Lloyd head of broadband at moneysupermarket.com said: "The UK film download market is still in its infancy, but some experts predict it will be obsolete before it gets started. Forrester Research predict that the film downloading market will decrease as more and more people move to video on demand services, which download quicker and generate better revenues.

"I think people are still put off by the amount of data required to download a movie, as a low resolution version can take up 500MB. A broadcast quality feature film can be anything up to 2GB of data, which is not only a huge amount of data eating into your download capacity, but if you have a slow broadband connection it could take ages to download.

“If you are on a 2Mb connection it could take 4-8 hours to download a film of 500Mb, whereas if you have an 8Mb connection it will take 30mins – 2 hours to download the same film. I would recommend to anyone who wants to download films to opt for a high-speed connection, (16Mb or faster) with unlimited download capabilities. Providers such as Be Broadband, Virgin Media and Sky Broadband all offer this.

"This is where video on demand services come into their own, not only is downloading from a video on demand service a lot quicker, it’s also cheaper. Tiscali's new TV on demand service has over 2,000 films listed which you can rent from as little as 99p, far easier than going to the video shop or even downloading via a film download website.

"Piracy of film content, via peer to peer networks, is another big problem that could prevent growth. It's not very hard to type in peer-to-peer in Google and find dozens of sites that offer users the ability to download films for free, and in some cases films that haven't even been released yet!”