It has been interesting watching Blockbuster video adapt to the broadband age, with the company seemingly not trying very hard out of fear of cannibalizing their brick and mortar revenue and losing control. Early efforts to mirror Netflix's success at broadband video delivery have seemed relatively lackluster, and the company's CEO, when announcing such broadband initiatives, seems to almost expect them to fail.

Blockbuster's latest video effort is a strange one in the face of 50 Mbps fiber and cable connections at home, and increasingly speedy connectivity options while on the go. They're offering movies at kiosks on SD card. Of course the content on the cards is locked down with DRM, and both the cards and readers are proprietary (at least for now: the companies say they'll change this eventually). According to the press release, this idea is "revolutionary":Of course this ignores entirely the organic evolution away from physical devices, annoys consumers by packing the content they want in DRM, and forces people with broadband connections in their homes to go out to a Blockbuster kiosk. As Techdirt astutely notes, you don't compete with piracy by offering an annoying, proprietary and inconvenient product. Even in instances where such an SD-card kiosks might make sense (airports? hospitals?), the idea still relies on physical media, which is just so 1998.

You see, Blockbuster (and more specifically Hollywood executives, since their fear is the driving force behind this latest effort of suck), if you had a website that offered films and TV shows cheaply, inexpensively, and without oodles of DRM -- your users could download them anywhere with any mobile device at any time. That's kind of the whole point of broadband content delivery. If you make the service cheap and easy enough, even people who often pirate content will use your service.