Air travel can put movie lovers with laptops in a bind.
The Wi-Fi networks in airports and aboard planes often are too pokey for decent Internet-video streaming or rental-film downloads. Those who don't load enough flicks on their computers before leaving the house are out of luck.
But as of this week, Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport has help for film buffs in the form of new kiosks for renting or buying Hollywood blockbusters. Plug a USB flash drive into the Digiboo kiosk. Pick a flick on the touch screen. Pay for it. Transfer it to the thumb drive. Go.
Once aloft, the air travelers plug the flash drives into their Windows laptops to view "Contagion," "Colombiana" or "Captain America" - no Internet connection
Digiboo kiosks at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport let movie buffs buy or rent Hollywood films, which are transferred to USB flash drives for use with Windows laptops while aloft.
required.Santa Monica, Calif.-based Digiboo is installing about a dozen of the bright-orange movie kiosks throughout the Twin Cities airport's Terminal 1. Minnesota is the first site to get this service, with airports in Oregon and Washington State to follow.
Digiboo is launching with a back catalog of more than 600 titles from Paramount, Lionsgate, Warner Bros. and Sony Pictures and said future releases from those studios are to coincide with DVD availability. Movie rentals are about $3 to $4. Film purchases are about $15.
Rentals are for 30 days and must be finished 48 hours after initial play. Film purchases are watchable on the thumb drive forever, provided the device isn't reformatted.
A video-kiosk service is a bold move
for Digiboo, which is gambling that the flash drive will become the new DVD for road warriors in an era of superthin laptops without optical-disc drives.The thumb drive certainly has become ubiquitous. Nearly 315 million of the storage devices will ship worldwide in 2012, up from about 285 million in 2009, according to the Gartner market-research firm.
Flash-drive prices are plunging, too, with 16-gigabyte models going for as little as $14. Digiboo video files are about 2 gigabytes in size.
What's more, a new and faster form of thumb drive now coming on the scene makes the use of Digiboo terminals all but painless because it cuts down drastically on the movie-transfer times.
Not all market factors are in Digiboo's favor.
Tablets such as Apple's iPad are soaring in popularity and becoming the sweethearts of the mobile set because they are easier to carry in airports and use on planes. Most such devices lack USB ports and are therefore incompatible with thumb drives.
What's more, film fanatics are training themselves to use the top movie-download services such as Apple's iTunes Store, Amazon's Instant Video and Google's Play before they head out on a trip. Movie rental and purchase prices are comparable to Digiboo. The services are built into mobile devices such as the iPad and iPhone, Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet and a wide range of Google Android-based tablets and phones, which makes movie downloads via home Wi-Fi all but effortless.
This means an increasing number of air travelers arriving at the Twin Cities airport will be good to go on the movie front and won't need Digiboo.
Those who sample Digiboo offerings might be turned off by its mediocre video quality (required for expediting transfer to thumb drives) compared with high-definition Apple, Amazon or Google downloads, too.
One other Digiboo hang-up: It is Windows-only at the moment, which leaves out users of Apple laptops such as the MacBook Air even if those folks are packin' flash drives. While support for Android devices is coming, Digiboo said last week, Apple-device compatibility is farther off.
But Digiboo is betting Minnesotans accustomed to ubiquitous Redbox touchscreen DVD-rental kiosks around the metro area will find its airport kiosks hauntingly familiar and impossible to pass up.
"My feeling is that we are at the beginning of something fantastic," said chief executive Richard Cohen.
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